Renaissance same-sex relations in north and south
FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE Male-male sexual relations, 1400–1750
NOEL MALCOLM 608pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $32.99).
WHAT SURVIVES OF US IS ONLY TEXT. An image, if we are lucky. It is the arduous task of the historian to connect such relics to the whole of past human experience. What can we piece together from the few remaining shards of evidence? How do we stretch and broaden such rare survivals to illuminate ordinary lives? How much do plays or poetry reveal about everyday experiences? Judicial records pose the same difficulty in a different way. What do archives of deviancy reveal about those who failed to get noticed by the authorities?
For all that Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe teaches us about what earlymodern men did and did not do with their genitals, it is even more of a masterclass of what historians can and cannot do with evidence. Although its subject is male-male sexual relations, its central methodological preoccupation is with the representativeness – or not – of literary works and legal records. The chosen canvas is as wide as the Mediterranean and stretches as far north as Scandinavia. Malcolm is one of the few preternaturally gifted linguists who could take on such a diverse source base.
His target is nearly as large. Ever since the 1980s and the works of Michel Foucault, every earlymodern male has been gay, or, to phrase it more accurately, habitually engaged in “acts of sodomy”. In 2007 the historian Randolph Trumbach (writing in A Gay History of Britain, edited by Matt Cook) declared that “in the Renaissance, all men desired both women and boys, and a substantial majority of men (if not all) acted at some point in life on their desire for boys”. It was only around the early eighteenth century that a new sexual regime emerged, creating modern homosexual – and indeed heterosexual – identities. In this remarkable study Malcolm sweeps much of this orthodoxy away.
The author came to the subject of male same-sex relationships after uncovering archival evidence of an illicit affair inside the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in the 1580s. Swift action by the resident ambassador prevented a public scandal. The two young male lovers were separated; one was bundled off to Crete before he could convert to Islam. Sodomy was seen as an Islamic vice to which the Christians in the Ottoman capital should not fall prey. We owe this book to these two unlucky youths, Gregorio and Gianesino, and to three “dysfunctional” Past & Present reviewers who were unreasonably sceptical about Malcolm’s initial conclusions in an article he wrote about their case.
This tragic tale of two Romeos leads the author to make two initia
