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History

Sodomites and catamites

An engaging history of European homosexuality
by •
May 2024, no. 464

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male sexual relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm

Oxford University Press, £25 hb, 608 pp

History

Sodomites and catamites

An engaging history of European homosexuality
by •
May 2024, no. 464

Do gay men have a history – and, if so, what is it? Historians have grappled with such questions ever since Michel Foucault first published his History of Sexuality in the 1970s. The stakes are high because they are political: at root, they contest nature versus nurture. We know that men who have sex with other men have existed in every past society. But were those men the same as modern homosexuals? Many contemporary gays claim them as forerunners – yet several scholars see modern homosexuality as, fundamentally, a creation of contemporary late-stage capitalism and a chronological and cultural anomaly, whose associated rights may prove equally ephemeral.

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Miles Pattenden

Miles Pattenden is Director of Core Events at The Europaeum, Oxford. He was previously a Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU. He specialises in the history of the Catholic Church and his books include Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male sexual relations, 1400-1750

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male sexual relations, 1400-1750

by Noel Malcolm

Oxford University Press, £25 hb, 608 pp

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Comment (1)

  • Miles Pattenden begins his review by asserting that historians have grappled with the concept of gay history since Michel Foucault published his History of Sexuality. In fact by the time Foucault published the first volume in 1976 (translated into English two years later), there was a considerable historical literature in a number of countries, asking exactly this question. I recall a meeting with American gay and lesbian historians in the late 1970s who were discussing how far Foucault's work might lead them to reconsider their own. Foucault was undoubtedly a major philosophical figure, but he was neither as original nor as ground-breaking in his discussion of homosexuality as is sometimes assumed. Ironically, Pattenden implicitly acknowledges this in his second paragraph.
    Posted by Dennis Altman
    27 May 2024

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