Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Noel Malcolm

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It was a Church Times review which brought this work to my attention,

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/26-april/books-arts/book-reviews/book-review-forbidden-desire-in-early-modern-europe-male-male-sexual-relations-1400-1750-by-noel-malcolm

What Noel Malcolm explores is fascinating and uncomfortable in equal measure.

Uncomfortable in large part because the evidence available about “male-male sexual relations” in the period (1400-1750) is overwhelmingly the records of one court or another – accounts of “queer” lives written by those prosecuting them, those often sending people to their deaths.

Uncomfortable also because Malcolm challenges those who have chosen to fill in the gaps, the massive gaps, in the documentary evidence, with some sort of queer utopia. In the context of the small populations, and the highly class differentiated societies, most of the population of “early modern Europe” were living in the smallest of small towns we know today, and in those places even 21^st Century Queer life can be a struggle.

Malcolm approaches the subject be showing that there seems to have been a consistent pattern male-male sexual relations around the Mediterranean which was dominated by “pederasty”, with all its difficulties. This pattern saw boys up to the age of around 18 being passive partners, young men of 18 – 30 being active partners, and men of 30+ marrying. The explanation offered is marriage for men was defer until around 30, when a man had learnt his trade and was able to support a family.

In Northern Europe there is little or no evidence for this pattern of behaviour – but men married younger and therefore the “need” for this pattern of sexual behaviour was not present. The tiny number of cases of male-male sexual relations documented in Northern Europe are akin to the handful of cases from the Mediterranean that don’t fit the pederasty pattern.

Then suddenly in England after 1700 the Societies for the Reformation of Manners started to take action, against sexual “immorality” in general not just homosexuality, and the absence of evidence is turned on its head. This is not something that can have come from nowhere – as London grew, over decades and centuries, so the number of people with a same-sex interest will have grown – what was the tipping point when there was enough of us for “gay” spaces to emerge, for a queer subculture to exist?

The value of Noel Malcolm’s work is that he is seeking to document not to push an agenda – this allows us to see the reality without pushing it in our desire to have richer queer histories than we have been allowed.

We need to own this long, toxic, history if we are going to stand up to the challenges of today.