Filth, Faith, and Forbidden Desire: Noel Malcolm’s Tour of Early Modern Sodomy

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400–1750
By Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 594 pp. £32.99 (hardback). ISBN 9780198870705.

If you have ever wondered how men across early modern Europe managed to give and take it up the bum while covered in fleas and a thin film of contagion, Noel Malcolm has written your book. Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400–1750 is not salacious, nor especially erotic, but it is certainly exhaustive. Over nearly six hundred pages, Malcolm charts the shifting geography of what polite scholarship still insists on calling “sodomy,” comparing legal records, moral tracts, travel diaries, and occasional acts of lyrical confession.

Malcolm’s central claim, set out with the kind of pedantic calm only a lifelong historian can manage, is that early modern Europe was not a uniform moral bloc. Instead, there were at least two sexual cultures operating side by side. In the Mediterranean, male-male relations were structured by hierarchy: older men penetrated younger boys, who later grew up, married women, and occasionally found a new boy to penetrate. This, Malcolm argues, was not understood as a matter of identity, but of social role. One used and was later used. When the beard came in, the first move in the the game was over. By contrast, in north-western Europe, the picture was more adult and generally more furtive. Men there engaged with one another as equals, indulging in a mixture of mutual masturbation, drinking, and guilt.

The Mediterranean “model,” as Malcolm calls it, had already been mapped by Michael Rocke in Forbidden Friendships and by Cristian Berco in Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status. What makes Malcolm’s contribution interesting is his attempt to stretch the pattern across borders and creeds, even into the Ottoman and Arab worlds. He argues that the same hierarchy between active and passive, older and younger, appears consistently from Florence to Istanbul, though expressed through different moral vocabularies. The Islamic jurists who denounced liwat were no more shocked by it than Christian priests denouncing sodomy; both treated it as an inevitable temptation rather than an unthinkable crime.

To Malcolm’s credit, he writes as a genuine historian, not as an activist looking for ancestors. He is sceptical of the more breathless claims made by postmodern literary theorists who find homosexual subcultures in every tavern and tailor’s shop from London to Lübeck. Alan Bray’s assertion that sodomy was “everywhere” in early modern England—because prosecutions were rare—is taken apart with careful precision. As Malcolm notes, absence of evidence is not evidence of universal indulgence. People did it, but they did it with care, and the consequences were often fatal.

One of the pleasures of this book is its geographical range. The chapter on the Iberian world is especially vivid. Spain and its colonies, he argues, combined a Mediterranean sense of sexual hierarchy with an inquisitorial machinery that made even the suspicion of sodomy lethal. The colonial archives of Mexico and Peru, full of lurid interrogations and confessions, reveal a pattern of occasional panic rather than casual tolerance. Malcolm’s treatment of the Ottoman Empire is cooler but equally fascinating. He shows how European travellers’ accounts, usually dripping with orientalist fantasy, were sometimes more accurate than modern historians have allowed. “Why,” he asks, “should we dismiss every early modern Christian observer as a bigot when contemporary Muslim chroniclers describe much the same thing?” It is a fair question, and one that cuts through decades of reflexive moral posturing.

The book’s later chapters tackle the alleged emergence, around 1700, of a new kind of homosexual identity—the cross-dressing, effeminate “molly” of London and Paris. Malcolm is unconvinced. He sees no sudden evolutionary leap, only a gradual shift in how sin was policed and performed. In this, he challenges Randolph Trumbach and Michel Rey, who built their reputations on claiming just such a “tectonic change.” For Malcolm, the eighteenth-century molly house is not a rupture but a continuation of much older scripts of indulgence and shame.

None of this, of course, is particularly erotic. Reading about sodomy in an age before the universal use of soap leaves one with more anthropological than sensual interest. But it is illuminating. Malcolm’s argument that patterns of same-sex desire were bound by social expectation rather than sexual identity is persuasive. His prose is measured, his evidence plentiful, his bibliography terrifying. If the subject matter occasionally prompts an involuntary tightening of the legs, that is only because he reminds us how often these pleasures ended on the scaffold or under the branding iron.

On this point, let me quote the following:

How do we explain this apparent contradiction between public vilification and everyday tolerance? The simplest thing to say— so simple that it would surely be hard to disprove—is that each of these societies contained a range of opinions and attitudes where male–male sex was concerned. While people with very hostile views would happily flock to public punishments in order to spit and jeer at convicted sodomites, others might stay at home…. From which it would seem to follow that the severity of the actual treatment of sodomites would have varied in accordance with the amount of social and institutional power held by those who had the more negative views. [p.171]

This is a simple but also profound statement. It illuminates discussion of social tolerance both in our own age and in those ages for which we have more limited evidence than Early Modern Europe. I think in particular of Greece, where a whole industry has grown up to argue that the Athenians at least were uniquely open to sexual diversity. The truth is that every society contains blocs of puritans and libertarians. When the puritans are able to take power on the back of a legitimising ideology to which most people pay lip-service, there will be persecution. Keep the puritans away from power, and there will be tolerance. There are Islamic injunctions against bum fun almost as explicit as you’ll find in The Bible. Until recently, however, the Islamic world was rather good at paying lip-service to their prophet while keeping the puritans at the margin. Early Modern Europe was less fortunate in this regard. Therefore all those castrations and burnings. You can apply this to our own age. Puritanism is not fundamentally about sex, but about control. Our own puritans would probably applaud if we all began sodomising each other in public lavatories. Their legitimising ideology lets them persecute on other grounds. I could quote much else from the book, but these sentences jumped out, and I draw attention to them.

There are weaknesses. The author’s claim to novelty is overstated; much of what he presents was anticipated by Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization (2003) and Helmut Puff’s Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland (2003). His “pan-Mediterranean” model owes more to recent comparative work such as Queering the Medieval Mediterranean than he acknowledges. And his focus on England when discussing “northern Europe” sometimes borders on the insular. Still, the book’s range and clarity make it indispensable.

One can read Forbidden Desire as a study in how societies manage pleasure through control. The legal codes, the sermons, the whispered jokes—all are mechanisms for defining who may enjoy what, and how. Malcolm’s historians are men who want to know what other men did when they thought nobody was looking, and his answer is that they did rather a lot.

Whether this book tells us much about modern sexuality is another question. The early modern man who slipped into a bathhouse or a stable for an hour of illicit congress was not a “gay man” in any recognisable sense. He was simply human, and usually unwashed. What Malcolm shows, better than most, is that moral codes shift, but appetite does not.

For the student of history, Forbidden Desire is a masterclass in comparative research. For the student of human nature, it is a reminder that lust survives everything—plague, persecution, piety, and the occasional execution. Reading it will not make you want to live in the seventeenth century, but it might make you appreciate the modern world’s running water and antibiotics.

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