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BOOK REVIEW:
Sex Crimes: From Renaissance to Enlightenment. By William Naphy. Stround, Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus, 2004. 224 pp. ISBN 0752429779.
This book might be subtitled: “Constructing Illegal and Perverse Sexuality in the Past.” The subject is the control of illicit sexual acts between 1450 to 1800, and the criminal records of Geneva are its most plentiful primary source. The author believes that premodern societies fared no better than present-day ones in eradicating socially threatening sexual behavior from human nature. The past differed significantly from the present, however, in its recognition of the irrepressible nature of pervasive alternative sexual lifestyles. This was especially true with regard to sexual relations between adult men and adolescents, which is the ax Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment especially wants to grind. Because socially threatening sexual desires were deemed irradicable in human nature, society had to be vigilant and remorselessly punitive in their restraint. Otherwise, a very great many people would act on such deeply rooted sexual feelings.
Beyond his special interest in premodern society’s tolerance of bisexuality, Naphy In the last half of the fifteenth century, premodern courts especially targeted fornication. Largely as a result of the medieval church’s recognition of the binding nature of consensual vows without the involvement of parents, church, and state, a plague of contested clandestine marriages afflicted society. Like adultery, such unions threatened family harmony and honor. In both cases, sentences were meted out with scholastic attention to detail, the outcome always “ad hoc and situational.” In the matter of adultery, sex between a married man and a single woman was deemed a lesser crime (jail, fines, or banishment) than sex between a married man and a married woman (death). By keeping sex-crazed young men from gang-raping respectable young women, brothels served the public interest. Rape was a capital crime, yet prosecutions were few and convictions fewer still due to the absence of hard evidence. When, however, a case was clear-cut, the result, as in the Genevan cases, was beheading or drowning. Following Randolph Trumbach, Naphy believes that a “practical bisexuality” among males was recognized in the past and even the norm. Not until the late eighteenth century, it is argued, did premodern societies construe such behavior as abnormal homosexuality in distinction from normal heterosexual behavior. Then, for the first time, sodomy became sexual relations between men, absent any sexual interest in women. Previously, it had included sex with animals, oral and anal sex between men and women, and masturbation. Premodern law and theology held minor children blameless for their behavior in child abuse and pederasty, while acquitting, or executing, adolescents strictly on the basis of theirs. Still, the most common adolescent crime, sex with an older male, was not punished in every instance. A major factor in encouraging such tolerance, Naphy believes, was the Renaissance’s reintroduction of pagan antiquity’s acceptance of youth-love. Before the eighteenth century, cases of lesbianism were comparatively rare—although Geneva had three trials in the sixteenth, one of which ended in the drowning of a fifteen-year-old servant for abuse of her employer’s minor children. Although more familiar to the courts during the Enlightenment, the thought of genital sex between women of social standing was disgusting to the middle and upper classes, who preferred to avert their eyes by treating intimate female relationships as romantic friendships. Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment tells, randomly, only one side of the story of human sexuality in the past. An uninformed reader would not know from its reading that marriage triumphed over the single life in late medieval and early modern Europe, and united, functional, and sentimental families were more the rule than the exception in these centuries. Although Naphy provides no footnotes, he does append a bibliography, from which critical readers may begin to test the truth of his assertions. Steven Ozment PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, FALL 2004, VOL. 4, #2
covers the full spectrum of criminal sexuality. At the base of premodern laws, he finds a male need to control women, whose alluring sexuality posed a mortal challenge to patriarchy. Keeping women in their place, and sex within marriage, became major goals of church and state, especially in Protestant lands, to which end they allied with and empowered the patriarchal family. The result was a society in which any and all sexual contact had to be carefully scrutinized and regulated.
McLean Professor of Ancient & Modern History
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
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Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education, Richmond, Virginia
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