The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

Abstract

The chronology of the widespread criminalization of same-sex activity in medieval Europe is generally agreed upon. John Boswell argued that up until the twelfth century, same-sex desire and activity were not a major concern to the church or to lay society (writing in the late 1970s he used the terms "homosexuality" and "gay people"). 1 When Peter Damian wrote his Book of Gomorrah sometime around the middle of the eleventh century, the first major blast against same-sex relations among the clergy, the Pope declined to act on it. 2 Boswell argued that this changed in the thirteenth century, when legal systems began to adopt strict penalties (and sometimes enforce them) and churchmen, following in particular the lead of Thomas Aquinas, used the discourse of "nature" to cast any nonreproductive sex as deeply deviant. Joan Cadden has demonstrated that the discourse of "nature" was far from unitary. "Nature" could be understood in different ways, and medical commentators thought that it was in some men's natures to desire penetration; but while this demonstrates that the concept of "natural" was indeed very complicated, these writers had to work against a backdrop of church doctrine. 3 This article was originally written as the Presidential Address for the meeting of the Medieval Academy of America that was to have taken place at the University of California, Berkeley, in March 2020. The meeting was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the address delivered as part of a scaleddown virtual meeting, while the question-and-answer period had to be canceled because the meeting was Zoom-bombed by abusive trolls. I am therefore very grateful to the people who emailed me after the meeting with suggestions, including Thomas Dale and Keith Ruiter, and to people who commented on an earlier version I delivered at Oxford University, including Alice Raw, as well as to people with whom I discussed the project in progress or who answered specific questions, including