Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

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

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.

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

You May Also Like

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

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.