Visions of Sodom: Religion, Homoerotic Desire, and the End of the World in England, c. 1550-1850

By H. G. Cocks

The book of Genesis records the fiery fate of Sodom and Gomorrah—a storm of fire and brimstone was sent from heaven and, for the wickedness of the people, God destroyed the cities “and all the plains, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” According to many Protestant theologians and commentators, one of the Sodomites’ many crimes was homoerotic excess.

In Visions of Sodom, H. G. Cocks examines the many different ways in which the story of Sodom’s destruction provided a template for understanding homoerotic desire and behaviour in Britain between the Reformation and the nineteenth century. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false—usually Catholic—religion, an exemplar of the iniquitous city, a foreshadowing of the world’s fiery end, an epitome of divine and earthly punishment, and an actual place that could be searched for and discovered. Visions of Sodom investigates each of these ways of reading Sodom’s annihilation in the three hundred years after the Reformation. The centrality of scripture to Protestant faith meant that Sodom’s demise provided a powerful origin myth of homoerotic desire and sexual excess, one that persisted across centuries, and retains an apocalyptic echo in the religious fundamentalism of our own time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226438832

Book preview

VISIONS OF SODOM

VISIONS OF SODOM

Religion, Homoerotic Desire, and the End of the World in England, c. 1550–1850

H. G. COCKS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017.

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43866-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43883-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226438832.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cocks, Harry, 1968– author.

Title: Visions of Sodom : religion, homoerotic desire, and the end of the world in England, c. 1550–1850 / H.G. Cocks.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033875 | ISBN 9780226438665 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226438832 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Sodom (Extinct city)—Religion. | Gay erotic literature—History and criticism. | Christian ethics—England. | End of the world.

Classification: LCC BR115.H6 C635 2017 | DDC 274.2/06—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033875

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  The Roman Sodom

2.  City of Destruction

3.  The End of the World

4.  Laws

5.  Histories

6.  Lust and Morality in the (Long) Eighteenth Century

7.  The Discovery of Sodom, 1851

Conclusion: The End

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The inspiration for this book came partly from Paul Hallam’s Book of Sodom (Verso, 1993), so I hope he takes this as flattery. I am also indebted to the librarians, archivists, and staff of the Hallward and other libraries at the University of Nottingham; the British Library, St Pancras; Bromley House Library, Nottingham; Bodleian Library; the London Metropolitan Archives; John Rylands Library, Deansgate; Northamptonshire Record Office; and the UK National Archives at Kew. Sections of the book were given as papers at the 2008 British Association for Victorian Studies Conference, Cambridge University Historical Geographers and Cultural History seminars, the Leicester University English Department, the 2013 Social History Society conference, the 2013 Transgressions and Taboos conference at Cardiff University, the 2013 Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar, the 2015 Early Modern Studies Conference at the University of Reading, and at the Nottingham University History Department. I am very grateful to the organizers and audiences of those conferences and seminars. Many thanks to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham, who provided matching sabbatical leave that enabled me to write the book. Doug Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press has been a key figure in making the history of sexuality what it is today. He, Kyle Wagner, and Trevor Perri have shepherded the manuscript to completion, offering advice and support, and I thank them and everyone at the Press. Thanks to the two anonymous readers who provided comprehensive and positive critiques of the manuscript and suggested some important revisions that I hope I have addressed. Thanks to James Vernon and the editorial board of Representations for help with the article that became chapter 7. I have benefitted enormously from the expertise and generosity of a number of colleagues and fellow historians. I am very grateful to Anthony Milton and Julia Merritt for their encouragement and advice and to my colleagues and students in the History Department at the University of Nottingham. I have profited from instructive discussions with David Clark, Matthew McCormack, and with my colleagues, especially David Appleby, Ross Balzaretti, Richard Gaunt, Richard Goddard, David Laven, Richard Hornsey, Frances Knight, Rob Lutton, Robbie Rudge, Liudmyla Sharipova, Neil Sinclair, and Claire Taylor. David Gehring lent me his considerable expertise on seventeenth-century religion. Gerry Gunning provided references, and Chloe Turner supplied tea and sympathy. Maroula Perisanidi translated Latin indictments for me. Laura Ramsay read the entire manuscript and offered an invaluable detailed commentary. I am indebted to all of them. Charles Watkins not only read some of the manuscript and gave sage advice but also listened patiently to many a disquisition on biblical geography, the Antichrist, and other matters dealt with in the book, for which I am deeply grateful. Without the support of my family, who also heard quite a bit about those things and listened politely, I wouldn’t have got anywhere, and I thank them for all that they have done for me.

Introduction

As night falls on Sodom and Gomorrah on the eve of their destruction, and the mountains and plains and forests lie in deep shadow, the beasts of the earth come forth, each from its den, and roam abroad in quest of prey; but the fiercest animal that ever ranged the wild, or broke the stillness of the night with its horrid yells, we would esteem tame and harmless, nay, we could lie down beside it and embrace it as a brother, compared with the men who were now assembled on the street of Sodom. There, in the account of the cities’ last night written in 1844 by the Scottish Presbyterian minister James Aitken Wylie, the inhabitants of that cursed city lay in wait like savage creatures for their quarry, the angels sent by God to check on the condition of the place. A crowd, seeking to know the angelic visitors, gathered outside the house of Lot who was sheltering Sodom’s guests. Here, Wylie said, were the idle, the lewd, the drunken, the man of villainy, and the man of blood, all gathered together, not for any deed of common wickedness, for they were already filled to surfeit with all ordinary sins, they were assembled here for the most unnatural and horrid crimes. For it was only those acts that could stimulate their jaded appetites: and on these they were set with a ferocious greediness, which in seeking its indulgence set at defiance the sense of shame as completely as it did the fear of punishment. The Sodomites assembled, Wylie said, to commit one of the darkest of the deeds of darkness, and yet they avowed it without a blush. All the inhabitants came forth to satisfy their desire, and every quarter of the city furnished its contribution to this mob; every age was present in it. Here was the almost child, who lisped forth the prurient wish; and here were to be seen the white hairs, and the lean and shrivelled face of age, from whom came gabbling forth, in almost inarticulate sounds, the deep oath, and the foul lascivious desire. Their shouts, outcries, and curses shook the very walls of the house, around which they were assembled, while ever and anon, above all these dreadful sounds, rose wild peals of horrid laughter, which, as they fell upon the ears of those within, struck their hearts with affright. This terrible mob was united in the AWFUL purpose they avowed, which was enough to turn into stone every ear on which the sound of that avowal fell. The whole formed a scene which might have made the ground on which their city stood to quake, and the dark heavens over them to grow still darker, and to which it were vain to seek a resemblance any where but in hell.¹

Lot appeared before the crowd to offer his daughters to its ravenous lust in place of the angels, but he was scorned. He would sooner have arrested the rolling waves, or calmed the angry winds, than have led back within the bounds of reason these men whom the fiery winds of their own lusts and passions were driving onwards to the accomplishment of their fearful purpose. Heedless of Lot’s entreaties and warnings, the people of Sodom were struck blind by the angels as a prelude to their greater destruction, which happened the following morning. Lot, warned by the angels, escaped with his daughters to the nearby city of Zoar, after which the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of those cities, and that which grew upon the ground.² Lot’s wife trailed behind and, looking back to her former home, was immediately transformed into a pillar of salt. For the Jacobean clergyman Robert Wilkinson, the fate of Lot’s wife was that of the repentant sinner who stopped to gaze fondly at her sin. To him or her, Sodom calls upon thee and saith, come again, come again to Sodom; she sends out her messengers, Epicures and carnal companions to call upon thee, and every one saith, come again, come again to Sodom; yea she casteth up her lures to tempt and allure thee, come again, come again to Sodom. Amid these siren calls, you must, as Jesus advised, "Remember Lots wife."³ Leaving his wife, punished for her wavering, Lot then lingered in Zoar, before escaping with his daughters to the mountain, where, drunk, he committed incest with them, giving rise to the Canaanite race the Ammonites.⁴ According to the classical writers Josephus and Strabo, Sodom and Gomorrah now lay beneath a cursed asphaltic lake, said by many later travelers to emit foul and noxious vapors hostile to life, its waves uncannily imitating the sound of countless souls groaning for all eternity.

In 1954 Derrick Sherwin Bailey, the Anglican clergyman and campaigner for the repeal of English laws against male homosexuality, surveyed the assumptions that lay behind Wylie’s hair-raising account of Sodom’s sins as well as almost all other readings of that biblical story. Bailey wrote against the background of rising numbers of homosexual offenses, and it was often argued, he noted, that the laws against homosexuality had biblical sanction. It had become a cliché to warn that the vices of Sodom and Gomorrah were rampant in our midst. Ever since the first century, when, Bailey argued, Philo of Alexandria had fixed this meaning onto the cities, the Churches had taught on what was held to be excellent authority, that homosexual practices had brought a terrible Divine vengeance upon the city of Sodom, and that the repetition of such ‘offences against nature’ had from time to time provoked similar visitations in the form of earthquake and famine. Although he argued that the Sodom story had not originally been written with homosexual acts or desires in mind, but was more likely a condemnation of the Sodomites’ inhospitality to the angels, Bailey recognized the power of the tale in structuring Western attitudes not just to homosexuality but to every sexual act deemed contrary to nature. The original Hebrew may not have supported such an interpretation, Bailey argued, but it had nevertheless become attached to the cursed cities through centuries of Christian exegesis. Philo’s condemnation had been taken up by the Fathers of the Church Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, and Saint Augustine, and it had been expressed in the Roman Theodosian and Justinian legal codes. In the medieval church, Thomas Aquinas, Alain of Lille, and Albertus Magnus had adopted a similar reading of the Sodom story, Bailey argued, thereby setting the story in stone for at least the next five hundred years.⁵

In spite of the power of this heritage, Alan Bray pointed out in 1982 that it was the early modern period that was something of a golden age for the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. At that time, the use of the cursed cities to describe sexual excess of all kinds, and homoerotic behavior in particular, was ubiquitous. What was striking, Bray said, was the variety and originality shown in its retelling, the way it was borrowed by diverse genres, from theological controversy to satires, humanist writings, and popular ballads. In an age and society that expected divine punishment on a daily basis, Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction stood out. The clergyman Richard Allestree wrote in the 1650s that the most extraordinary and miraculous Judgment that ever befel any place, was "fire and Brimstone from heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrha, punishment for the sin of uncleanness."⁶ The stress on the word of God in European Protestantism meant that the Old Testament stories provided constant reference points in social, political, and sexual terms. As a consequence, the Sodom story appeared in godly sermons warning against an unrepentant England’s fate, in anti-Catholic theology and polemic, in scurrilous satires, in tracts that promised the reformation of manners and described the iniquity of the modern city, in moral theology and pastoral teaching, and in books discussing in detail the mechanisms that would bring about the earth’s destruction at the end of time. This ubiquity, Bray concluded, showed that the story of Sodom closely resembled contemporary notions that depicted homoerotic acts as an overwhelming upheaval in nature.⁷ In this book I aim to consider the ways in which the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and its attendant sexual baggage became enmeshed with certain characteristic beliefs of English Protestantism in the centuries after the Reformation—namely, apocalyptic versions of history, providence, and anti-Catholicism. In addition, I want to show that these religious ideas were key sites for the emergence of homoerotic behavior as a problem in itself in British and Western culture more generally. My third aim is to examine how homoerotic desires and acts developed as a distinct question out of this religious milieu. Whereas in the medieval period sodomy had been a complex of different forms of fornication, by the mid-eighteenth century it was in most cases definitively homoerotic and, it seems, uniquely detested. The German visitor to Britain Johann von Archenholz noted in 1789 that "those islanders . . . hold a certain unnatural crime in the utmost abhorrence and that they speak in no part of the world with so much horror of this infamous passion, as in England."⁸

In order to address this seemingly momentous change, if that is what it was, without recapitulating the entire history of Western modernity at that point, I intend to examine texts that specifically address the question of homoerotic desires. My study concentrates mostly on men, even though the warning provided by Sodom and Gomorrah was universal. As Wylie’s account implies, all the Sodomites—men, women, and children—were held to be in the grip of unnatural lust. Equally, devotional texts and books of moral instruction that dwelled on the story in warnings against uncleanness aimed their advice at both sexes and all humanity. While this indeterminacy continued throughout the period, in general, commentary on the story restricted itself to the ways it affected the moral condition of men, or a universal subject assumed to be male. To examine the different readings of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, I will explore the ways in which the cities’ demise—perhaps the most important context for discussing homoerotic acts and desires—was read between the early modern period and the mid-nineteenth century. This approach will not only concentrate on the story in Genesis 19, as the cities reappear numerous times as motifs and tropes in other biblical chapters. The most important of those for English Protestants was Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of Saint John. In Genesis and Revelation, homoerotic desires and acts were intimately related to the threat of social breakdown, the utter destruction of the state, and the ultimate obliteration of the world at the end of time.

The relevance of these ideas to the discussion of homoerotic behavior and desires was not confined to the golden age of English Calvinism in the early seventeenth century though. The religious notions that defined sodomy in relation to the biblical city, and that were adapted after the Reformation from long-established late-antique and medieval traditions, were, I suggest, so deep-seated as to require a period of centuries to be overturned (that is, if they have been overturned). I also want to reconcile this long-term outlook with the evident fact that there was a fundamental shift in the treatment and understanding of homoerotic behavior at the very end of the seventeenth century. This has been noted by many historians, who have given it different names. For contemporary commentators it was called the growth of sodomy, and plain reasons had to be found for its occurrence. When, in the late twentieth century, historians also addressed this transformation, they called it the gender revolution, the birth of the queen, the beginnings of modernity, or the rise of modern homosexuality. This development has been explained in various ways as the result of secularization, the scientific revolution, the long-term consequences of the Reformation, individualism, bourgeois values, the development of sexual liberty (for heterosexuality), or simply modernity in general.⁹ The cultural influence of all of these is said to have encouraged the emergence, or discovery, of a distinct homosexual subculture and identity in the major cities of northwestern Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century that later became the model for all other forms of gay identity.

Though there are many different interpretations of what happened at that point, why it happened, and what it means, one thing can be agreed upon: it was the moment when the homoerotic behavior of both men and women could be treated as a distinct problem separate from the broader contexts within which it had been embedded in medieval and most early modern thought. While for several centuries homoerotic desires had been part of much broader categories such as luxuria, uncleanness, or fornication, at the turn of the eighteenth century homoerotic behavior could be considered in itself as a question, problem, or issue.

This change took several forms. Not least of those was the limited, though still unprecedented, application of the criminal law. Henry VIII’s 1533 law against sodomy had been infrequently applied, but in the 1690s a new offense of attempting sodomy became the favored, and more practical, instrument of legal discipline. The operations of the law inevitably discovered actual sodomites outside the pages of theological controversy and satirical print. These men were often, though not always, defined by their transgressions of gender. Men who desired other men were now sometimes described as effeminate mollies or woman-haters and could be known not only by their womanish ways and language but also by apparently new forms of sociability. In the early eighteenth century the mollies were said to meet regularly at favored taverns (molly houses) where they drank, danced, and performed particular rituals symbolic of their reversal of nature: parodic marriages or childbirth in which their issue was a household object. Women who desired women also fitted into this world of gender-crossing, though perhaps in a more complex way. They were most often explained as tribades whose nature was driven by an anatomical hybridity that allowed them to penetrate other women with their hypertrophied genitalia.¹⁰ In either sense, these seemingly new figures contradicted many of the assumptions made about homoerotic acts and desires in Protestant discourse, not least those that associated them primarily with religious dissidence in the form of idolatry, popery, foreignness, and heresy. As Bray, Jonathan Goldberg, and others have pointed out, the sodomite depicted in theology and religious polemic was not so much a person, still less a form of identity, but rather a figure who belonged to the realm of monsters and prodigies, as one moral reformer put it in 1728. The sodomite of the religious imagination, as Paul Hammond has explained, was an ideological category representing a cluster of foreign and disorderly associations, only one of which was homoerotic desire.¹¹

The change in the understanding of homoerotic behavior in the late seventeenth century appears to be a stark break with tradition, and as a result many historians have seen the rise of the molly as a key marker of modernity. For Randolph Trumbach the molly marks the emergence of the modern gender system in which the binary opposition of heterosexual and homosexual becomes ever more firmly entrenched, and which required aggressive displays of heterosexual lust to secure one’s masculine status. Before, then, Trumbach argues, it was possible for homoerotic relations between men to have some kind of legitimacy as long as they were based on classical models of active/insertive or passive/receptive sexual acts—the former being more or less acceptable as long as it corresponded to social hierarchies and the latter frowned upon. After the molly’s emergence, homoeroticism among men was always stigmatized as effeminate, and being womanly in any sense meant you were identified as a sodomite, Trumbach maintains. Similarly, in a classic essay, Mary McIntosh sees the molly as the first homosexual role in Western society. For Rictor Norton, the molly’s world is the first gay subculture of modern times. In a different context, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have seen modern cities, with their floating populations of free laborers and looser family ties, as the natural conditions for producing modern sexual identities.¹² Alan Bray and Cameron McFarlane both see the molly as a quintessentially modern figure. They suggest in different ways that the molly is made possible by changes to the nature of religion, science, and the social order. The sodomite in the religious frame represented a general threat to the moral, religious, and civil order of the period, and what changes at the end of the seventeenth century is not the nature of the sodomite him or herself, but, as McFarlane puts it, the conception of that order against which sodomy was thought to be a threat. These changes, he suggests, were represented by a broad secularization that influenced many different social and cultural spheres. In political terms, McFarlane suggests that this transformation of authority resulted from the decline of divine right and its gradual replacement by contractarian theories of the state epitomized by the liberalism of John Locke. In terms of the social and moral order, criminal courts took over from ecclesiastical ones; and in a scientific context, natural philosophy based on experiment and observation undermined the idea that the world was the theatre of God’s providential judgments. By the mid-eighteenth century the sodomite was still a threat to order, but as order itself was now understood to originate within the social body, so too were the threats to order given a social embodiment and identified as social types.¹³ The molly was only one of many such newly-identified figures.

The main problem with all these accounts is that they draw too clear a line between the world of religion, in which the monstrous but vaguely-defined sodomite lived, and that of a modern eighteenth century typified by secular figures of sexuality. It is as though religion ceased abruptly to operate as a means for organizing the world of morals. Rather, the rise of the molly was, as McFarlane implies, a change of emphasis rather than a pure invention. He did not represent an entirely new form of sociality or way of being developed in response to the repressive tactics of moral reformers, as has been suggested. As David Halperin has argued, homoerotic behavior in the Western tradition has had different facets, some of which are emphasized in any culture at the expense of others. Each of the aspects of homoeroticism identified by Halperin—gender-crossing behavior and relationships divided by age and status or the nature of sexual acts (active/insertive or passive/receptive)—can be in play at various times. Homosexuality is the term we use now, or have used, to define a broad collection of different acts, desires, and identities. The modern idea of homosexuality that aligns desire with individual psychology and personal identity as a whole is, Halperin argues, merely a sort of umbrella concept, the barely coherent accumulation of all its earlier historical forms. In that sense, our conception of homosexuality is like a palimpsest through which earlier iterations of what is described can be read and viewed.¹⁴

What happened in northern Europe—mainly in England and the Netherlands—at the turn of the eighteenth century was a recomposition of these existing stories, and not simply the secularization of the world or the overthrow once and for all of a religious world view.¹⁵ In that sense, any change in the understanding of homoerotic desires and acts at this time should be seen as essentially cultural and ideological. Neither can the early eighteenth century any longer be seen as the origin of the modern gender system in which homo and hetero are defined with obvious clarity. As the work of George Chauncey and Matt Houlbrook on urban cultures of the mid-twentieth century has shown, it was still possible at that time and in certain circumstances for men to have sex with other men without necessarily being labelled effeminate or assuming an identity defined by that effeminacy. Men in gay New York or the queer London of the early twentieth century could retain their self-perceived masculinity if they remained the insertive/active partner in any sex and projected an image of toughness. They were trade, the name used being reflective of the assumption (though often not the reality) that such men thought themselves engaged only in some form of transaction. Moreover, it is not unreasonable to assume that the culture described by Chauncey and Houlbrook of young, working class men participating in queer encounters as part of the life-course, and without assuming any kind of sexual identity, was a long-standing feature of the city and not specific to interwar New York or London. Such cultures are mentioned in fifteenth-century Florence and early seventeenth-century London, and they also seem to have existed in late eighteenth-century Manchester, to give one example that we know about. There, from the 1770s at the latest, men met for sex at the Exchange in the center of the city in a casual fashion, and without any of the elaborate rituals that belonged to the mollies. One such man, an artisan named Thomas Rix, said that he had discovered this homoerotic dimension when he was making water on the way home from a pub. At that point, a friend of his with whom he had been drinking that night came up to him and took hold of his yard. Then, they had used friction with each other till nature spent. Rix’s friend reassured him that there were many other persons who did what they had been doing, and later, hundreds were said to have been involved.¹⁶ Just as in the queer world of interwar London, such men participated in these encounters without necessarily seeing them as part of a world or subculture separate from the everyday, and neither did those who participated necessarily assume the identity of a molly or effeminate type. These long-term continuities undermine the idea that the molly’s emergence represents the sudden transformation of a Western gender system into ossified binaries of hetero and homo.

Moreover, the reason the effeminate sodomite emerged as a cultural figure was that he had in some senses been there all along. As Eve Sedgwick argued in the Epistemology of the Closet, Western culture has always lived with at least two contradictory notions about homoeroticism. It is either confined to a particular group who are really gay (a minoritising notion) or it is thought to be something that can be the province of anyone in the right circumstances (a universalizing idea).¹⁷ Ideas about sodomites, who were always gender transgressive figures in some degree, reflected this contradiction. Kenneth Borris has shown that constitutional theories of homoeroticism, which implied an inherent tendency toward such desires resulting from astrological alignment or humoral makeup, had existed in the late antique and medieval periods (though mainly at the margins of science and belief).¹⁸ Such constitutional theories of sexual behavior also had a classical heritage. The Aristotelian worldview that dominated late-medieval thought conceived of everything in the natural world as having a distinct essence that would be expressed by its own nature or development. As Joan Cadden has explained, sexual behavior in that scheme expressed the essential reproductive drive of humanity and had the purpose of removing superfluous humors from the body and encouraging reproduction. A man who seemed to have a preference for passive/receptive sex with other men was therefore a paradox in that his behavior had no function in the Aristotelian scheme and was explicable only by suggesting that he had a physical or constitutional tendency toward such behavior that originated in the imbalance of his humors. Other, more ambiguous records of gender transgressions exist from fourteenth-century London of a man cross-dressing for reasons of prostitution.¹⁹ Equally, in seventeenth-century religious commentary and moral diatribe, effeminacy was always one aspect of the sodomite’s wickedness. The original Sodomites themselves had, according to Ezekiel 16:49, been prone to unnatural lust because of their appetite for enervating luxury (pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness), so there was ample precedent for condemning their contemporary descendants in the same terms. Similarly, Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (6:9) had castigated the effeminate, who were grouped together with fornicators, idolaters, and abusers of themselves with mankind.

Effeminate, according to Benjamin Newton’s New English Dictionary (1735), meant not only womanish, tender, delicate, nice but also to make womanish, or lascivious, to soften by Ease and Pleasure.²⁰ Womanish behavior was not necessarily thought to be a symptom of some inner psychological or physiological inversion, as it was later in the lens of science and medicine. Rather, it was a condition that could be attained with some ease. Sexual excess of all kinds could be the ultimate result of luxury, enervation, and consequent effeminate behavior. The Elizabethan writer Thomas Beard followed Ezekiel in concluding that it was the plenty of riches which instilleth pride and haughtiness of mind into some, maketh others dissolute and effeminate, and besotteth others with carnal & unhonest pleasures. His chief example was the Assyrian King Sardanapalus, who was so lascivious and effeminate, that to the end to set forth his beauty, he shamed not to paint his face with ointments, and to attire his body with the habits and Ornaments of women. However, effeminacy in this common meaning denoted an excessive interest in women, and the crime of Sardanapalus was to sit and lie continually among whores, and with them to commit all manner of filthiness and villany.²¹ Equally, Richard Brathwaite suggested in 1652 that it was delicacy in fare, and sumptuousness in attire that effeminate men the most. Similar assumptions were reflected in tirades against the stage, where dressing in women’s clothes was held to be an inlet for adultery and unnatural desires. William Prynne’s famous assault on stage plays, Histrio-Mastix (1637), lamented that as the custom of men playing women’s roles was itself unnatural and effeminate, it could encourage adultery and unnatural acts.²² Later commentaries laid the blame for sodomy on the follies of fashion.²³

Moreover, as Mark Jordan and Robert Mills have pointed out, sexual excess of all kinds was consistently linked with luxury, softness ("mollities"), and effeminacy in classical and medieval thought. Such associations found expression in medieval texts such as Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah (c. 1051), which is credited with popularizing the Latin word sodomia, first coined by the theologian Hincmar of Reims two hundred years previously in a treatise on divorce.²⁴ Drawing on this tradition, Michael Young has argued that "sodomy was always understood in gendered terms. However, as in the case of Sardanapalus, effeminacy in the context of sexual disorder did not always mean homoerotic desire but more often the reduction of masculinity to a feminine passivity through enfeebling pleasures. The relationship of sexual excess and womanliness was more complex than Young admits and cannot be recycled into some essentialist reading of homosexual identity as he seems to want to do.²⁵ As various historians have shown, even after the molly’s emergence, effeminacy did not always mean sodomy or vice versa. In the tradition of civic humanism that descended to England from the political theory of the Italian Renaissance, effeminacy had an essentially political significance. In that idiom, it signified a populace weakened by luxury and consequently lacking the ability or will to muster sufficient martial vigor to defend the state.²⁶ As Philip Carter and others have shown, in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, when this civic tradition reached its zenith, you could be an effeminate fop or man of fashion without raising the suspicion that you were a sodomite.²⁷ As a result of these conclusions, Barry Reay and Kim Phillips have made a justifiable complaint about the centrality of the mollies in histories of sexuality. In their view, the idea of the mollies, which we know about mainly from scurrilous satires and moral complaint, is insufficiently coherent to bear the weight of the historical interpretations put upon it. The men involved were not all effeminate, and they adopted interchangeable sexual roles. Being a molly could, they say, hardly be called an identity in the modern sense.²⁸ While I agree with that sentiment, it is not my intention to rehash all these arguments in the rest of the book but simply to point out what historians have already established: that there were several different frames for understanding homoerotic acts and desires of which the minoritising" notions attached to the mollies (and others) was only one.

Religion, I argue, was one of the more important of the lenses available for examining lust of all kinds, and one of the most enduring. Religious and related moral notions form the persistent, taken-for-granted background to any study of homoerotic desire in this period because they were the ruling form of moral discourse on the subject. By their very ubiquity and everyday common sense application, these were the most pervasive ways of explaining vice and lust. Equally, the authority of scripture sanctioned the discussion of matters in the context of biblical episodes that were otherwise not to be named. Because historians of sexuality have often been in search of a secularizing modernity, they have frequently tended to overlook religious pronouncements as merely conventional. I argue instead that these notions only gained power by virtue of being continually repeated. John Brewer points out that the sermon was the single most important literary form of the eighteenth century, printed at a rate of around three a week, and contemporary sources agreed. That the Doctrine which the Clergy preach to the People, and the Examples they give them, have an extraordinary Influence upon their Thoughts and Actions, is evident from Experience, declared the Whig printer John Dunton in 1715. Indeed, it was the very Reason of the Institution of the Order.²⁹

A Confused Category?

After Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, we became used to seeing early modern sodomy as an utterly confused category, but this was not necessarily how it appeared to contemporaries.³⁰ Although the sodomite was, as Bray says, a figure of vague dread associated primarily with religious dissidence and heretical (or popish) belief, that did not mean that the religious idea of sodomy had no content or was necessarily incoherent. In fact, scriptural sources and interpretations provided a satisfying and complete web of explanations for the existence of sodomy and categorized it accordingly. The most important of those identified it as a subset of adultery. In 1591 the great puritan theologian William Perkins defined infractions of the seventh commandment against adultery as inward lusts of the heart and certain outward acts. The latter included strange pleasures about generation, prohibited in the word of God: the which are many. These were sexual acts done with beasts, with devils, with members of the same sex, with close relations, the unmarried (fornication), with those married people who were not your own wife or husband, and those involving the excessive enjoyment of the marriage bed.³¹ The Jacobean bishop George Downame’s Abstract of the Duties Commanded, and Sinnes Forbidden in the Law of God (1620), followed Perkins’s scheme and clarified the categories of sin involved, which he helpfully represented in a diagram (see figs. 1 and 2).

Figure 1. The Acts of Uncleanness, from George Downame, An Abstract of the Duties Commanded . . . in the Law of God (1620). 8º B 303 Linc., Title Page. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. www.proquest.com

Figure 2. Uncleanness Against Naturall Use (detail).

For Downame, as for Perkins, there were two main forms of uncleanness, inward and outward. The former was the concupiscence of the flesh (i.e., lust, voluntary or involuntary), while the latter was pursuing the objects of lust. Within those broad categories, acts of uncleanness committed against honesty could be distinguished in two further ways: in the manner committed (i.e., with or without consent) and in the much broader sense of the person with whom it was done. The latter was further divided into two more categories: according to natural use (i.e, male with female) or against natural use. Unnatural acts took two forms: those committed incestuously with others of the same blood and those done with the same sex. The latter Downame labeled buggery or sodomy, by which he meant the homoerotic acts banned in Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans 1. These were separated from acts committed with divers kinds (i.e., with beasts or unclean spirits such as incubi and succubi). In Downame’s terms, sodomy took its appropriate—and subordinate—place in the list of sexual sins.³²

In addition, there were early modern theories based on Protestant readings of scripture (which I deal with in chapter 5) that explained the presence of sodomy in the world as one among many legacies of the Fall. These overlapping explanations were broadly threefold. The first stated that sodomy entered the world with the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and then descended through the posterity of Noah’s wicked son Ham, the Canaanites, and their kinsmen the Sodomites to the Roman Empire and then on to the Roman Church and into the present. The latter manifestation of sin expressed the fulfillment of prophecy laid out in Revelation and other scriptural passages that predicted the reign of Antichrist. The second theory was that sodomy was closely linked to idolatry, and hence only or mainly happened in places outside the reformed religion where heathenism and heresy held sway—though that of course included Catholicism. Finally, the view prevailed that sodomy was a form of eternal wickedness outside time—a fact attested to by providential histories that testified to the eternal quality of sin and its punishment.

Sodomy could not only be categorized and explained in these ways; it was also part of the broader structure of dualistic early modern thought that has been described by Stuart Clark, John Bossy, and others.³³ While Bossy noted a new emphasis in post-Reformation thought on the stark morality of the Ten Commandments in place of the Seven Sins, Clark has pointed out that large areas of European culture at this time were characterized by a pervasive habit of inversion, contrariety, and reversal. In many forms of writing and commentary, an idealized state of religion, politics, society, or virtue was customarily contrasted with its direct opposite in the starkest terms. Christ was opposed to Antichrist, true church to false church, holy city to earthly city, moderation to excess, and a stable social order to one in which distinctions of status, wealth, morals, and power were irrevocably blurred. Unclean or unnatural acts were presented in contrast to marriage, continence, and chastity. Clark suggests that this tendency was influenced heavily by the requirement of Christianity to explain the origin of evil without attributing it to God or the original creation. In that sense, good and evil had to be interdependent in some way, the latter being the result of the former’s absence, privation, or perversion. In the writing of Saint Augustine, Clark points out, good and evil are interdependent, and one cannot speak of good without speaking of its dependent category, evil. This Augustinian inheritance took several cultural forms. Contrariety was seen as a feature found in nature and reflected in language and culture, while rhetorical forms of either praise (encomium) or blame (vituperatio) also expressed this view. Equally, in politics disorder was epitomized by inversion, the direct opposite of what was regarded as good. Clark explains the European witch craze of the seventeenth century in terms of this dualism; for the good to exist and be known, evils such as witchcraft—a close relation of sodomy, heresy, and magic—had to be delineated, explained, and punished. Similarly, the religious oppositions of Christ and Antichrist (the latter most often found by Protestants in the Church of Rome), of true and false churches, city of God and earthly city all emerged from this mode of thought. Sodom, as well as its close relative Babylon, epitomized the earthly city and fitted squarely into this pattern of inversion. For many English Protestants, it represented not only the reversal of nature in sexual terms but also the church corrupted by Antichrist. As Cameron McFarlane has pointed out, Genesis also juxtaposes Sodom’s barrenness with the subsequent episode dealing with Abraham and Sarah’s fecundity.³⁴ In addition, Sodom’s annihilation was the very antithesis of God’s creation, its hellish flames the opposite of divine reward.

Sodomy could be explained and understood in these terms, as a subset of more active and obvious forms of evil. Hence, it is artificial to say that most early modern religious discourse of this type is particularly concerned with homoerotic desires or acts. In fact, as David Clark has shown, even in most scriptural commentaries on the Sodom story from the patristic period onwards, the sins of the Sodomites are those of the flesh in a much broader sense. Most condemnations of sodomy from late antiquity or early medieval Europe, Clark suggests, were contained within wider assaults on humanity’s sinful nature.³⁵ Moreover, although sodomy appears to fit neatly into the dualisms Stuart Clark describes, there is also a sense in which medieval and early modern cultures regarded intense homosocial bonds and even homoerotic relations in particular circumstances as unproblematic and even normative. Bray and others have suggested that the relative absence of criminal prosecution for homoerotic acts in England before the 1690s is testament to the fact that they were widely regarded as relatively unimportant. Isabel Hull has argued that in early modern society, because sexuality was not a distinct domain of knowledge in the modern sense, or a way of organizing personal identity, sexual acts only gained meaning from the social relations they created. Further, she argues that marriage . . . exercised a conceptual monopoly over sexual expression mainly because it was so central to the transfer of property and to the household as an economic unit. Marriage occupied the terrain of intimacy so completely that illicit sex tended to be judged by its relation to marriage. Sexual acts mattered mainly in the sense of who or what they linked, and not by virtue of what was being done. This meant that any acts outside this sexual economy that were not productive of any social relationships tended to disappear from view as insignificant.³⁶ Those homoerotic encounters of the seventeenth century that we know about shared this lack of visibility and commonly took place in shared beds or domestic and work spaces. In that sense, for much of the seventeenth century most homoerotic behavior had an everyday or domestic character and was not set apart from ordinary patterns of life or confined to a particular urban subculture.³⁷

Similarly, Bruce Smith, Mario DiGangi, Valerie Traub, Kenneth Borris, and Paul Hammond have emphasized the different early modern forms that discussed but did not condemn homoerotic relations: literary genres such as the pastoral romance, the Arcadian fantasy, and the verse satire.³⁸ These forms imagined idealized friendships and erotic relations between men in a context influenced by classical Greek and Roman models of virtue and amity. Texts like these shared many assumptions about masculine intimacy with primers on friendship and sworn brotherhood, some of which recommended similar physical and emotional closeness.³⁹ As Bray pointed out, same-sex desire between men only became problematic when it transgressed more important forms of hierarchy and status or originated outside religious norms. As long as homoerotic desire accorded with those hierarchies and the same disparity of power and status between the partners was maintained in all their relations, then sodomy, with all its cosmic implications of disruption, was kept at a distance. In that model of desire, a master could have sex with his servant or a patron with his client, for instance, as long as he retained the insertive/active role and maintained his authority over his