The Sciences Of Homosexuality In Early Modern Europe

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 behaviours 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 seemed outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive 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.

Sodomy in Early Modern Europe is a collection of essays that reflect closely the main areas of debate within gay historiography. In particular, for the last twenty years scholars have questioned the nature of early modern sodomy. The contributors have responded to these questions in a number of different and often apparently contradictory ways, and the essays which make up this collection reflect this diversity of approach. The volume includes essays on sodomy in English Protestant history writing, and sodomy in Calvin’s Geneva and early modern Venice.

Forbidden Desire is a pioneering study of the history of male-male sex in the whole of Early Modern Europe, including the European colonies and the Ottoman world.

Through close analysis of texts, cultural and civic communities, and intellectual history, the papers in this collection, for the first time, propose a dynamic relationship between rhetoric and medicine as discourses and disciplines of cure in early modern Europe. Although the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies represented here is diverse, the essays collectively explore the theories and practices, innovations and interventions, that underwrite the shared concerns of medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric: care and consolation, reading, policy, and rectitude, signinference, selfhood, and autonomy-all developed and refined at the intersection of areas of inquiry usually thought distinct. From Italy to England, from the sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth century, early modern moral philosophers and essayists, rhetoricians and physicians investigated the passions and persuasion, vulnerability and volubility, theoretical intervention and practical therapy in the dramas, narratives, and disciplines of public and private cure. The essays are relevant to a wide range of readers, including cultural, literary, and intellectual historians, historians of medicine and philosophy, and scholars of rhetoric.

A new edition of a seminal work—one that explores crucial changes within Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century The early modern period was one of profound change in Europe. It was witness to the development of science, religious reformation, and the birth of the nation state. As Europeans explored the world—looking to Asia and the Americas for new peoples and lands—their societies grew and adapted. Eminent historian Henry Kamen explores in depth the issues that most affected those living in early modern Europe—from leisure, work, and migration to religion, gender, and discipline—and the way in which population change impacted the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the poor. The third edition of this pioneering study includes new and updated material on gender, religion, and population movement. Richly illustrated, this is essential reading for all those interested in early modern European society.

In his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.

Did the Bible transition from the medieval Vulgate to the vernacular forms of the Protestant Reformation? What about from Erasmus’s Greek text? Were there significant differences in the various vernacular Bibles of the Protestant Reformation? How did this or didn’t this come to be? Utilizing the unique Greek text of 1 Corinthians 6:9, this book explores the relationships between culture, location, theology, and the art of biblical translation within the Protestant Reformation. Far from a simplistic transition from their previous forms, this work details the differences even one singular text of translation might find within the various locales of the early modern period. Ultimately, the text details that, in addition to faithful thought, location, culture, and community necessities drove the art of biblical translation in the Protestant Reformation and early modern period.

The first book of its kind, Forensic Medicine in Western Society: A History draws on the most recent developments in the historiography, to provide an overview of the history of forensic medicine in the West from the medieval period to the present day. Taking an international, comparative perspective on the changing nature of the relationship between medicine, law and society, it examines the growth of medico-legal ideas, institutions and practices in Britain, Europe (principally France, Italy and Germany) and the United States. Following a thematic structure within a broad chronological framework, the book focuses on practitioners, the development of notions of ‘expertise’ and the rise of the expert, the main areas of the criminal law to which forensic medicine contributed, medical attitudes towards the victims and perpetrators of crime, and the wider influences such attitudes had. It thus develops an understanding of how medicine has played an active part in shaping legal, political and social change. Including case studies which provide a narrative context to tie forensic medicine to the societies in which it was practiced, and a further reading section at the end of each chapter, Katherine D. Watson creates a vivid portrait of a topic of relevance to social historians and students of the history of medicine, law and crime.