The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe » (New Edition)

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 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.

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