GLENN W. Olsen. Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes

This book, which concerns forbidden desires, wrestles with its own temptation, named, with dry wit, as that of “illicit generalization” (p. 42). Glenn W. Olsen's view is that the history of sexuality is best advanced not by grand narratives of transformation but by close, humane, and learned readings of particular texts. The result is a sustained meditation on an eleventh-century tract on clerical sodomy, as remarkable for its breadth as its depth. Olsen's discussion spans fifth-century Greece and twenty-first-century Utah: his book certainly deserves the non-medievalist audience to which it aspires. Whether it defeats the demon of generalization is another question. Great claims have been made for Peter Damian's Book of Gomorrah (now known more soberly as Letter 31). Writing in northern Italy ca. 1049, Damian sought to draw the pope's attention to a “raging cancer” among “priests of this region”: sodomy (sodomia). By this term Damian understood an ascending scale of prohibited acts: masturbation, mutual masturbation, interfemoral intercourse, and anal intercourse. The papal response was downbeat, and no immediate campaign ensued against “sodomy” so defined. Nonetheless, modern scholars, above all Mark D. Jordan, have argued that Damian's text represents a key juncture in the history of sexuality. The premodern world, it has been assumed since Michel Foucault, had known only sexual acts, not sexual persons. Centuries before the trial of Oscar Wilde, however, Damian conjures into being “the sodomite.” His intervention is seen to have directed Western discourse toward the current taxonomy of sexual identity.

Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Sociology · Sodomy · Gender Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History