The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality

I begin with an account of child abuse. 1 Voltaire is around thirty-two, and living in exile in England. As he supped one night with Mr. Pope at Twickenham, he fell into a fit of swearing and of blasphemy about his constitution. Old Mrs. Pope asked him how his constitution came to be so bad at his age. 'Oh' (says he) 'those d-d Jesuits, when I was a boy, b(u)g-g(a)r'd me to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live.' According to later reports Mrs Pope, a Catholic, was driven from the room by Voltaire's fit. In the eighteenth century the fact that the servants were present seemed significant. 2 This story ought to make Voltaire scholars more uncomfortable than it does. Theodore Besterman carefully avoids all mention of it, but we catch an echo of it when he writes: 'At Louis-le-grand [the 'Jesuit Eton' at which Voltaire was educated] Voltaire probably learned as much and came to as little harm as could reasonably be expected'. 3 Rene" Pomeau asks:

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Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe

Malcolm

2023

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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.

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The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality

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From sodomy to homosexuality: the role of criminal law in Filippo Maria Renazzi’s Rome between the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Era

From sodomy to homosexuality: the role of criminal law in Filippo Maria Renazzi’s Rome between the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Era

Unhappy Voltaire, or `I Shall Never Get Over it as Long as I Live'

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe

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