Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe by Joan Cadden (review)

Joan Cadden’s latest monograph explores the conflicting constructions of “sodomy” in late medieval (13th–15th centuries) scientific thought, building on the methodology and conclusions laid out in earlier work that carefully and systematically explores an archive of texts in order to reject a reductionist view of late medieval conceptions of human sexuality. Cadden, a historian of premodern science, deliberately adopts the medieval term sodomy both for and despite its limitations to avoid conflation with modern concepts of homosexuality, asserting that sodomy is “a recognizable, if imperfect, stand-in for a cluster of overlapping subjects that the medieval works treat” (3). Thus, she examines the complexities and nuances that subtend medieval natural philosophy’s commentary on male same-sex desire. (As Cadden explains, in the late medieval period the Latin scientia described all academic disciplines; she argues that natural philosophy, which attempted to explain the order of nature, is the precursor to modern science.) She argues that late medieval texts were not concerned with partner preference per se, but rather with the mechanics of the body and of desire; commentators grappled with sodomy to explain the presence of unnatural behavior and desire within a teleological approach to natural order. Cadden dismisses the confines of the “acts versus identity” debate as insufficient to her project, asserting that while the authors concerned themselves with specific acts and body parts, rather than the person as a whole, they simultaneously identified sodomites as a fixed category. However, Cadden does position herself within modern debates in queer studies, in particular the recent debates regarding queer temporality and historicism, asserting an intersection between her study and recent work by Valerie Traub that “offers a way of avoiding both the nihilism of declaring all modern categories inadmissible, and the unwieldiness of declaring everything to be potentially queer” by proposing a list of recurrent queer themes that may appear across time and culture, some of which intersect with Cadden’s study (28). She conducts her analysis through the lens of Problemata IV.26, one of a set of 800 questions that made up Aristotle’s Problemata, taking a diachronic approach that examines an extensive archive of translations, commentary and marginalia from the more than 100 extant manuscripts to reveal the complexity of late medieval responses to Aristotle’s dilemma, “why do some people with whom intercourse is had experience enjoyment. And indeed some also acting, some not?” (32, Cadden translation). Cadden asserts that the commentators, scribes and readers who were “willing to ‘contemplate base things’ never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained” (2). Her work seeks to map out the different explanations that arose in order to understand both “what can be learned about the history of male homosexual desires and pleasures from their appearance in medieval natural philosophy, and, conversely, what can be learned about the history of medieval science from its treatment of those desires and pleasures” (30). While the second of these points is examined in great detail, the first is only vaguely sketched. However, this is due mainly to the nature of the archive under analysis, and she does reach some tentative conclusions in the final pages.

Chapters 1 and 2 investigate how medieval thinkers struggled with the apparent paradox of explaining how the unnatural fit into the natural order. Commentators grappled with two competing definitions of nature as the broader natural world and as the innate disposition of the individual. Likewise, they sought to explain the causes of sexual desire through humoral theory. Cadden asserts that medieval critics accepted that natural occurrences can disturb and deviate from natural order, but proposed different causal explanations and lacked consensus regarding whether the study of sexually receptive males was in fact a licit field of natural philosophy. In the second chapter, Cadden asserts that both Aristotle and his medieval commentators tended to divide passive men into two basic groups: those who engaged...