<i>Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400–1750</i> by Noel Malcolm

Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe is somewhat misleadingly titled, since it persuasively demonstrates that male-male sex in early modern Europe was quite commonplace and often went unpunished. Across early modern Europe, masters generally expected male servants to be sexually submissive, and the pervasive practice of bed-sharing provided opportunities for sexual intimacy (67, 71). Sex with boys was “a feature of normal life” for Ottoman soldiers; males in Portugal, Spain, and Italy made contact on city streets and regularly had sex in gardens, stables, taverns, and shops (37, 49, 100). Particularly in western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, male-male sex seems to have been “common knowledge,” and was more or less accepted, tolerated, or ignored as “unfortunately just part of ordinary life” (170).Nevertheless, male-male desire was certainly “forbidden” in that “official norms” about sodomy—usually defined as anal sex—were “severely hostile” (170). Drawing upon an impressive array of archival evidence and historical scholarship in multiple languages and from multiple locales, Malcolm shows that, despite some crucial exceptions such as Florence, most western and northern European polities typically sentenced sodomites to flogging, banishment, imprisonment, galley service, or execution.Malcolm’s compelling arguments and formidable archival scholarship should spark further research and debate. His main thesis is that the patterns of male-male sexual behavior generally differed between Mediterranean and northern Europe—in the former, the norm was adults penetrating boys or teenagers; in the latter, adults more frequently had sex with each other and were more willing to be penetrated. Northern Europe also yields more evidence of group sex and mutual masturbation. Perhaps most controversially, Malcolm concludes that “sodomy was more frequent in the South” than in the North (231). Hence the contemporary refrain that sodomy originated or flourished in Italy was not just a product of nationalist prejudice but a description of social reality.A useful heuristic is Malcolm’s distinction between culturally “typical” forms of male-male sex (for example, adults penetrating younger men) and “untypical” forms such as long-term or sexually exclusive relationships between men (70). Productively taking up the perennial post-Foucauldian debate about sexual acts vs. identities, Malcolm observes that a “purely act-based idea of sodomy” would not accurately describe early modern theologians’ accounts of the nature of homoerotic desire (123). In a spur to further research, he advocates that “we should open our minds to the more limited and particular identities” revolving around the notion of “a specific kind of sodomitical person” (388).Malcolm’s salutary open-mindedness in interpreting evidence of early modern same-sex relations seems to falter, however, when it comes to literature. Although he devotes two chapters to assessing the literary evidence for male-male sexual behavior, Malcolm does not engage in a sustained, meaningful way with the methods or arguments of literary scholars; instead, he is content to demonstrate how frequently they read “anachronistic sexual significances into early modern texts” (416). Malcolm’s diagnosis of anachronism, however, is facilitated by a failure to acknowledge that historicist literary scholars generally use different methods (such as detailed rhetorical/verbal analysis) and have different aims than historians—we usually read texts for evidence not of what actually happened, but of what it was possible to imagine.Admittedly, Malcolm’s often dismissive approach to literary scholarship was particularly disappointing when applied to my own work. Malcolm cites my reading of Thomas Middleton’s play Michaelmas Term, in which a greedy master employs his servant in a plot to ruin a wealthy gentleman. The master commands, “Train him to every wasteful sin … / Drink drunk with him, creep into bed with him, / Kiss him and undo him, my sweet spirit” (302). Objecting to my elucidation of the homoerotic connotations in these lines, Malcolm avers that kissing and bed-sharing were “normal signs of close trust and personal affection” with no “sexual significance” (303). In fact, Malcolm and I agree on this point, as a closer reading of my study would have shown.1 In Middleton’s play, however, the language of entrapment, sensual excess, and sinful temptation—“train him,” “wasteful sin,” “drink drunk,” “creep into bed,” “kiss him,” “undo him”—justifies the conclusion that this servant plans sexually to manipulate the conventions of kissing and bed-sharing to earn and then to betray another man’s trust and affection.My concern is not to defend my own scholarship but to suggest that Malcolm’s impressive study could have benefitted from genuine engagement with literary scholars’ insights into the language, epistemology, and phenomenology of early modern sex. Literary scholars’ expertise at grappling with what Traub describes (in an important book that Malcolm does not cite) as the epistemological challenges of interpreting early modern sexual language can yield historical knowledge about sexual meaning that a more empiricist, archival approach cannot.2 Lacking this epistemological skepticism, Malcolm believes that sexual meaning is self-evident.It is hard to imagine a reading practice less attuned to the linguistic multivalence of Shakespeare’s notoriously opaque Sonnet 20 than one that flatly declares what the poem’s perennially debated final line “says.” According to Malcolm, the poet “explicitly eschews” the “desire to perform sexual acts” with the youth (294). Malcolm specifically objects to Stephen Orgel’s reading of the phrase “pricked thee out for women’s pleasure” as sexual penetration (being “pricked” or sodomized), because the “obvious” meaning of pricked is having a prick/penis (504 n. 53). But with no evidence or argumentation offered, why should we accept Malcolm’s assertion that pricked has a singular meaning and that he, and not Orgel, knows what it is?Degrading the rigorous work of gay literary scholars as biased “gay activism” or capricious “wishful thinking” does not produce better history (416). Rather, it squanders the chance to learn from and to enter into productive conversation with work that has significantly contributed to the history of early modern sexuality over the past thirty years.