The principal subject matter of Cecco Nuccoli and Marino Ceccoli only further places them outside the norm. While love literature dominated the poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, most men wrote about their attractions toward women. The earliest approaches to love, the fin''amor pioneered by the Occitanic Troubadours in the twelfth century and transmitted through Italy by the Sicilian School in the thirteenth century, presented love as a type of aristocratic service in which the lover treated the lady as a feudal superior. Love was treated as something exclusive to the aristocracy, and as such it reflected their values. Indeed, at times devotion to the lord was expressed in terms quite similar to those of love literature, rendering it difficult at times to distinguish between expressions of passion and assertions of fealty. The conventions of fin''amor resulted in a reversal of the social hierarchy that subordinated the male lover to the woman, and many writers depicted their abject conditions relative to the beloved to describe their amorous pains. Yet most writers in the Troubadouric tradition also cast same-sex desire as uncourtly. By the turn of the fourteenth century, the amorous literature tradition in Italy had evolved.

A number of Tuscan poets, often designated as the dolce stil nuovo, began describing passion as distinct from aristocratic birth. The writers of the new style about love, such as Dante Alighieri, Lapo Gianni, Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1250-1300), and Cino da Pistoia (1270-1337), were educated city-dwellers, versed in the teachings of scholastic philosophy, with little in common with to the noblemen of medieval courts. Generally speaking, the poets of the dolce stil nuovo came from wealthy backgrounds but not from the high aristocracy, and therefore they asserted that the lover''s inner nobility was more important than the traditional notion of nobility as derived from blood. In so doing, they started the process separating the discourses of love from those of social rank. There is much debate as to what the dolce stil nuovo was, or even if it constituted an actual movement at all. For instance, Marco Berisso argues that they were poets united primarily by historical developments, as all of them came of age in Tuscany in the aftermath of the Battle of Campaldino in 1289. Still other critics see the poetry of the dolce stil nuovo as depicting the lover''s desire for the lady in terms reminiscent of the soul''s meditation on vice and virtue.

What is beyond debate is that the poets of the dolce stil nuovo exerted a marked influence on the poetry central and northern Italy of the early decades of the Trecento, inspiring a number of imitators. Cecco Nuccoli: Overview It is unclear why Nuccoli and Ceccoli composed poems about homoerotic love and sex, although they seemingly were expressing their personal passions, at least in part. Corroboration of their actual emotions is lacking, however, because almost no biographical information about them is extant. No documentation at all exists about Cecco Nuccoli (d. ca. 1350), so all that is known about him is derived from his poetic corpus, a collection of 28 sonnets, some written in correspondence with other individuals. In them, he complains about the pains of love towards a man he calls "lord" (signore), possibly taking inspiration from Occitanic love poetry in which the poets sometimes referred to their beloved as "my lord" (midons).He states: "Ever since I lost my soul in your sweet face, / and I bound it up in your behaviors, / oh my lord, guide and light of my life, / will I ever see you before I die?" (Nuccoli''s sonnet #1, vv.

1-4). Elsewhere he begs for forgiveness from this man (Nuccoli''s sonnets #2 and #20), and later suggests that the "lord" lives in a cloister: "I''ll have you know this, my dear lord, / that while I live, I will belong to you, / because you gave me such great comfort in the cloister / when your eyes turned toward me" (Nuccoli''s sonnet #25, vv. 1-4). Nor is this the only reminiscence of Troubadouric verse in his lyric production. In other sonnets, Nuccoli decries the cruelty of a specific individual, Trebaldino Manfredino. Nuccoli spells out Trebaldino''s name in an acrostic (Nuccoli''s sonnet #8), and he proclaims that he is in love with the letter "T": "I am so strongly in love with ''T'' / because it''s the beginning of the lovely name" (Nuccoli''s sonnet #24, vv. 1-2). It is not clear if Trebaldino is the same person Nuccoli calls "my lord," or if they are different people altogether.

Whatever the case, Nuccoli writes love poetry for men from the disempowered position of the courtly lover who begs for mercy from his beloved. With no discernable traces of ironic distancing, Nuccoli appropriates the tropes of fin''amor to express his adoration for other men. Through these sonnets, Nuccoli translates his sentiments towards other men into the recognizable style of Troubadouric love poetry. Complicating matters, in other sonnets Nuccoli depicts his passion using a distinctly comic style. He criticizes Trebaldino''s mother, Rabeluccia (or "Luccia"), because she impedes the lover''s advances on her son, portraying her as the stereotyped old woman of medieval misogynistic literatur: "Luccia, that slut, moves above / her son to cause me a new type of torture, / always telling me: ''I won''t make room / for you to speak, thief, with the man who makes you burn''" (Nuccoli''s sonnet #10, vv. 5-8). Significantly, he evokes the medieval ideology of the tavern as a locus of sex, gluttony, gambling, and sin, which is a commonplace of comic literature, writing: "You''re in Perugia, with Ciamprolino and the dice / in the tavern with bursting purses" (Nuccoli''s sonnet #17, vv. 12-13).

Furthermore, Nuccoli writes openly about sexual matters, in one sonnet implying the act of fellatio, a subject matter relatively uncommon in medieval culture: "tell me where to come, and suck on my beak" (Nuccoli''s sonnet #11C, v. 17). While the use of the comic style to depict homoerotic yearning might appear incongruous, Steven Botterill noted that for Nuccoli the comic and the autobiographical were joined together. For Nuccoli, the personal subject matter and its stylized medium were not at odds, but rather, he employed the comic style to give himself the room to discuss sexual attraction toward fellow men. (excerpted from the Introduction).