Unlawful Entries: Buggery, Sodomy, and the Construction of Sexual Normativity in Early English Dictionaries

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Historians of sexuality have regularly called attention to the construction of same-sex intercourse as an “unnameable crime” in early modern England. When the crime was named, its most common signifiers in English were buggery and sodomy. However, the precise meanings of these words fluctuated from text to text, so that each term came to represent an “utterly confused category,” in Foucault’s (1978, 101) famous phrase. This article considers the problems of inexpressibility and ambiguity posed by buggery and sodomy for the writers of hard-word and general English dictionaries from 1604 to 1754. It explores how definitions of these terms, as well as of such non-normative acts as fornication and incest, explicitly circumscribed the boundaries of lawful sexual behavior and implicitly constructed a prescribed sexual model within those bounds: procreative, marital, monogamous. Yet, unlike deviant opposite-sex acts, same-sex intercourse was rendered not only illegal but incoherent, as the terms used to explain it—copulation, to couple—were in turn defined in ways that precluded the possibility of any intercourse that was not between the sexes. Nevertheless, the silences and paradoxes embedded in these early definitions allow them to be read from perspectives that are more radical than their writers likely intended.