The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe

by Borris; Kenneth

• ISBN13: 9780415403214
• ISBN10: 0415403219
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-25
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings. This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviors are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons was interpreted as outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such asdistinctive anatomies or physiologies, and embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors. This original book freshly illuminates many of the questions that are current today about the nature of homosexual activity and reveals how the early modern period and its scientific interpretations of same-sex relationships are fundamental to understanding the conceptual development of contemporary sexuality.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. vii
List of contributors	p. viii
Preface and acknowledgments	p. x
Note on ancient sources	p. xi
Introduction: the prehistory of homosexuality in the early modern sciences	p. 1
Medicine	p. 41
Disorder of body, mind or soul: male sexual deviance in Jacques Despars's commentary on Avicenna	p. 43
Giulio Guastavini's commentary on Pseudo-Aristotle's account of male same-sexual coitus, Problemata 4.26	p. 57
Policing the anus: stuprum and sodomy according to Paolo Zacchia's forensic medicine	p. 75
Syphilis and the silencing of sodomy in Juan Calvo's Tratado del morbo galico	p. 92
The strange medical silence on same-sex transmission of the pox, c. 1660-c.1760	p. 115
Divinatory, speculative and other sciences	p. 135
Sodomizing science: Cocles, Patricio Tricasso, and the constitutional morphologies of Renaissance male same-sex lovers	p. 137
Representations of same-sex love in early modern astrology	p. 165
Astrological conditioning of same-sexual relations in Girolamo Cardano's theoretical treatises and celebrity genitures	p. 183
"Bolognan boys are beautiful, tasteful, and mostly fine musicians": Cardano on male same-sex love and music	p. 201
Mercury falling: gender flexibility and eroticism in popular alchemy	p. 221
Science and sapphisms	p. 243
Intrigues of hermaphrodites and the intercourse of science with erotica	p. 245
Erotics versus sexualities: current science and reading early modern female same-sex relations	p. 254
Index	p. 268
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