The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe

Kenneth Borris, George S. Rousseau, Kenneth Borris, George S. Rousseau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136015748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

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.

1 Introduction

The prehistory of homosexuality in the early modern sciences

Kenneth Borris

The Western scientific antecedents of homosexuality date from antiquity, and yet much of that sexual archaeology remains unknown. The early modern period has particular interest for the recovery of this occluded history. While the Renaissance¹ furthered the recovery of the ancients’ resources of natural knowledge that had begun c.1100 through Arabic and Byzantine transmissions and Latin translations, Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century enabled hitherto impossible disseminations of texts. Both humanism and print made ancient views of same-sexual relations² that clashed with Christian moral orthodoxy more accessible. The procedures, disciplines, and disciplinary boundaries of natural inquiry were being redefined, and innovations in medical understanding were proceeding apace. This volume enhances knowledge of the genealogies of homosexuality by exploring representations of same-sexual desires and behaviors in the diverse intellectual disciplines that sought to study and interpret natural phenomena and the order of nature, from c.1450 to 1750. As the characteristics of homosexuality’s prehistory before the seventeenth century are currently most controversial, so my introduction will focus on the relevance of those disciplines prior to 1600.

Only in limited senses did “the sciences of homosexuality in early modern Europe” exist. The modern connotations of both “science” and “homosexuality” are precisely what must be placed in question to assess the interaction of their precursors and its historical effects. Thus restricted, the adjective “homosexual,” for example, becomes refocused on its root meaning of “same-sexual,” while marking the difference between that significance and the term’s accumulated connotations in the nineteenth century and beyond. But differences do not necessarily preclude correlations and continuities, and the recent scientific transformation of same-sexual relations into so-called “homosexuality” was not without precedents and a long prehistory. As homosexuality remains to some extent conceptually inhabited by former notions of sex and gender deviance, so it continues to subsume, amongst its instabilities and contradictions,³ some residues of the premodern sciences.

Although “science” acquired its current meaning in the nineteenth century, by historiographical convention it subsumes the congeries of medieval and early modern disciplines that variously sought natural knowledge as formerly conceived. “Science” and scientia broadly meant “knowledge” then, and their specialized applications were not congruent with modern “science” either.⁴ Ideas of nature, and of serious, disciplined study of its order and phenomena, radically differed from ours. Nature ordinarily appeared to reflect God, its presumed Creator and “first cause,” so that creation constituted a divinely informative “book of nature” infused with normative moral standards.⁵ The status and definition of that created nature’s “secondary causes” or operations varied. From Aristotelian natural philosophical viewpoints, for example, nature appeared to have intrinsic developmental principles, processes, flux, and teleology, yet sixteenth-century Lutheran and Calvinist nature passively reflected God’s will, and seventeenth-century mechanist nature followed the immaterial mathematical laws of its Creator.⁶

The former definitions, categorizations, and boundaries of disciplines concerned with natural inquiry now seem strangely incoherent, for they accorded with a perceived world that has been lost.⁷ Our current scientific disciplines were nascent, with some overlappings, in various early modern intellectual and technical domains, including medicine, natural philosophy (scientia naturalis), natural history, and “mixed mathematics” (scientiae mediae). The latter category incorporated disciplines using quantity to study material things, in mathematically “mixed” rather than “pure” considerations, such as astronomy and astrology (terms that were long interchangeable), mechanics, optics, and music theory. Natural philosophy, mathematics, and medicine had higher epistemological status than the others.

Former quests for natural knowledge and hence the origins of modern science were often involved with what now appear to be occult pursuits, for these too sought nature’s secrets. In his early works, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) considered natural magic the consummation of natural philosophy.⁸ Though fundamental to much occult philosophy and divination, astrology was as much one of the scientiae mediae as astronomy, founded on Aristotelian natural philosophical principles, and included in university curricula for centuries, partly for medical training.⁹ Classification of premodern physiognomics and alchemy entails similar complexities. Now widely presumed forefathers of modern science, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) all practiced astrology, and Sir Isaac Newton alchemy (1642–1727). Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) and Giambattista della Porta (1535?–1615), leading proponents of occult philosophy, contributed significantly to mathematics and optics. Learned divinatory and other occult pursuits cannot even be defined as nonacademic early modern modes of scientific inquiry, for many of their enthusiasts held academic appointments, such as Cardano. The development of the presently forceful distinction between those endeavors and science was a long, complex, and contentious process extending beyond the seventeenth century.

The early modern “sciences” as they pertain to the archaeology of homosexuality thus subsume diverse learned approaches to seeking natural and preternatural knowledge. These may be naturally philosophical, addressing the material world as it can be sensed; or may seek to probe and manipulate nature’s hidden (and in that sense “occult”) influences for divinatory or other ends. Both modes of inquiry engaged the varieties of human sexual potential, and did so at some interpretively significant removes from the discursive domain of theology and its preferred explanatory strategies.

Besides natural philosophy and medicine (with such subdisciplines now familiar as anatomy, physiology, embryology, gynecology, and venereology), the relevant former sciences thus include astrology, alchemy, and physiognomics (with its main subdisciplines of physiognomy, evaluation of the human body’s range of parts, aspects, and mannerisms; chiromancy, study of the hands; and metoposcopy, assessment of the forehead). The disciplinary divisions between them and medicine were porous. Though medicine’s interactions with astrology and alchemy are now well known, physiognomics partook of so much medical and natural philosophical knowledge that many of its leading authorities were medical practitioners. While astrology, physiognomics, and alchemy were not universally accepted or beyond criticism, neither were any of the antecedents of modern science; nor do many former medical orthodoxies now appear any less strange than the most fabulous pronouncements of occult philosophy. Insofar as broad swathes of early modern European society in all strata took astrology, physiognomics, and alchemy seriously, so must historians of that culture, as meaningful reflections of its mentalities, assumptions, attitudes, desires, and preoccupations.

So defined, the medieval and early modern sciences afford much altogether new evidence about same-sexual history. Such research will most affect understandings of the former cultural circumstances and possibilities of sexual relations between males, because prior explorations of that subject have rarely addressed the sciences of those times.¹⁰ Yet medical accounts of tribades have been fundamental for recent study of lesbianism’s precursors.¹¹ Nevertheless, premodern complexional physiology, embryology, astrology, and physiognomy, for example, still have much to reveal about the relation of apparent viragos to lesbian prehistory. Also, accounts of early modern sapphism (a term warranted by Sappho’s Renaissance resurgence¹²) and its prospects for female same-sexual identities have been to some extent mapped onto the putative coordinates of its male counterpart.¹³ Any significant shift in prevalent conceptions of the latter according to study of the former sciences would also require some reformulation of sapphic sexual history, to define its parallels and contrasts to the changed masculine model.

Although the premodern sciences have manifold implications for the study of the prehistory and history of homosexuality, they have particular relevance to the ongoing “intense debate”¹⁴ about whether perceived same-sexual identities existed before so-called homosexuality’s late nineteenth-century advent, and if so, what configurations they assumed. In sexual historiographies, much depends upon the possibilities of same-sexual identification, self-awareness, and agency assigned to any given period and cultural situation. Those assumptions or conclusions determine not only the extent to which individuals who engaged in same-sexual behaviors could formerly appear to have corresponding dispositions, but also their potential capacities of resistance and dissent, options of sexual contacts and relationships, and access to like-minded sexual undergrounds, fellowships, and subcultures.

According to the “acts paradigm” of much prior historiography of homosexuality, the useful distinction between same-sexual acts and identities further defines an absolute chronological dichotomy in Western sexual history. “Before the modern era,” in that view, “sexual deviance could be predicated only of acts, not of persons or identities,” and this “bogus theoretical doctrine” is often erroneously advanced on Michel Foucault’s authority.¹⁵ Exponents of the acts paradigm typically assume that same-sexual acts begat corresponding sexual identities and subcultures at some point such as (depending on the hypothesis) 1650, 1700, or 1875, thereupon inaugurating the modern sexual regime.¹⁶ Before that point, in effect, same-sexual relations could only be experienced and understood as random disconnected acts somehow undertaken without any consciousness of particular, corresponding, and personally distinctive desires, tastes, and dispositions. As Eve Sedgwick indicates, this paradigm entails “narratives of supersession” that obscure the genealogical accretions of disparate and conflicting notions within concepts of homosexuality.¹⁷ It also requires us to believe that same-sexual and social history are utterly simple, as if there can be just two significant phases, without meaningful variations or fluctuations in the first according to time, place, personalities, upbringing, innate factors, individual experience, education, or class.

The acts paradigm further assumes that, prior to the modern sexual regime’s advent in 1650 or later, same-sexual relations were in principle simply universalized.¹⁸ If they were only conceivable as acts, then everyone had a notionally equivalent potential to commit them. That is an essential premise for the acts paradigm, because any allowance for former recognition of individualized same-sexual inclinations entails some correlative acknowledgment of distinctive sexual natures and hence identities. Universalizing perspectives were indeed current, but only in contradictory cultural interplay with minoritizing perspectives most obviously evinced in former “othering” terminology such as “sodomite,” “cinaedus,” “tribade,” and so forth.¹⁹ That ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The prehistory of homosexuality in the early modern sciences
• Part I Medicine
• Part II Divinatory, speculative and other sciences
• Part III Science and sapphisms
• Index