Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This book describes and analyses the nature of male-male sexual relations in Europe, the Ottoman Empire and the European colonies in the Americas and Asia during the period 1400-1750. It discusses the sexual behaviour itself, its social and institutional contexts, the treatment of it in religious doctrine and law (both Christian and Muslim) and the representation of it in literature (both Western and Ottoman). While synthesising, and adding to, a mass of evidence accumulated by historians since the 1980s, it also challenges the fundamental assumptions that have dominated the modern historiography. Previous writers have taken evidence from Southern European countries such as Italy and Spain, where a distinctive pattern of age-differentiated sex predominated, and treated it as universal in Europe before 1700. They have then struggled to explain the existence, well documented soon after that date, of a very different pattern in Northern Europe, concluding that the early 18th century saw the sudden and inexplicable emergence of something resembling modern homosexuality. This book presents an original solution to the problem, both by distinguishing between typical and untypical sexual behaviour in Southern Europe, and by demonstrating that the standard pattern in the South was not replicated in the North. This makes it possible, for the first time, to give a coherent account of the long-term development in Europe of what we now call homosexuality.