Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland from the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising

Abstract

to be met with a denial and the authorities were more interested in evidence of anal sex than in any force and violence they might have suffered. However, an accusation of sodomy was one way in which both apprentices and married women might compensate for the judicial weakness of their position to free themselves from an intolerable situation and in some cases they made false accusations for that purpose. Grassi also sets the records of prosecutions for sodomy in the social and religious context of the time. Lucca was one of the cities most affected by the influence of the reform movement, which from the 1540s led a number of prominent citizens to flee to Geneva. The authorities refrained from exploiting any alleged link between heresy and sodomy, though there were cases where they might have done so. The situation was complicated by the desire of the civic authorities to maintain autonomy in moral and religious matters in the face of papal and episcopal efforts to extend their control and by a reluctance to accept the decrees of the Council of Trent, especially those regarding marriage. They were eventually obliged to do so, and this resulted in a greater reticence in all matters of non-marital sex. Although penalties for sodomy became more severe, there were far fewer prosecutions and most of those concerned male-female relationships. Some of the defendants were reported to have made statements that threatened the social order and were perhaps prosecuted on this basis. This is a rich and nuanced book, ranging far beyond a statistical analysis of its main source in the records Office of Decency. It aims both to present a picture of the realities of life, especially for the humbler sections of society, and also to interpret these in the light of recent researches into queer theory and the history of emotions. It reads well, despite a few misprints and errors. It deserves comparison with Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships or Guido Ruggiero’s The Boundaries of Eros and should join them as classic studies of the realities of non-regular sex in Renaissance Italy.