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L [ 1 ] prologue VARIED TEXTURES Madam, language is the instrument of empire. Response of humanist Antonio de Nebrija upon presenting his Spanish grammar book in 1492 to Queen Isabel, who had asked what use she, who spoke Spanish already, could have for such a work; quoted by A. Pagden in Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination ike many of his fellow contemporaries in early seventeenthcentury Seville, Fray Pedro de León believed that sodomy constituted a sin and a crime contra natura, one that had been imported from abroad and then spread like some contagious , pestilential plague—“la lacra,” as he often stated.1 In fact, wrote de León, the Lord Mayor of His Majesty’s Prison in Seville had the “brilliant foresight to imprison the sodomites apart from the other prisoners for fear of their contamination.”2 “Very dangerous,” thought de León, “to allow two boys to lie together in bed.”3 But the pestilential vice respected no boundaries. One day Cristóbal Chabes, another friar who labored in the same prison, witnessed how “an old man named Villarreal inserted a nautical cable in the form of a robust man’s member—measuring at least a third part of a yard in length—inside his arse,” thereby “reproducing the same effect that sodomites do to other men.”4 The prison authorities promptly accused the “filthy and dishonest” Villarreal of having committed the “sin of pollution with himself” and sentenced him to a public flogging. Subsequently, the unfortunate Villarreal died, not because he had indulged himself with the cable but after the authorities flogged him to death as punishment for his depravity. As Villarreal slowly perished, remarked de León, he “vomited his intestines as he lay in the stench of his dregs as an example of the amount of filth present in this wretched and pestilential vice.”5 Fray de León, renowned for his peppery sermons in Seville, forewarned others who rollicked in same-sex play. Sodomites are like butterflies, professed de León. “Butterflies,” tempted by the allure of a burning flame, “fly back and forth, each time getting closer and closer to the open fire.” At first flight, a butterfly “flutters close to the flames and burns only a wing.” But the temptation and the seductive allure of the glowing flames are too great. The butterfly “flutters yet closer and burns another little piece of its wing until eventually it is fully burned.” Sodomites “who did not amend themselves, driven by the sin, just like butterflies eventually will end up in the fire and burn,” assured de León.6 The textualization of sodomy as a sin and a crime against nature, a sort of contagious pestilential plague often imputed to be imported from abroad, and the perceptions and depictions of sodomites as vile, contemptible, even effeminate men—all constituted discourses of Spanish manliness. Early modern theologians, historiographers, and literary writers—otherwise known as los moralistas in the vernacular—fabricated these discourses with the intent of fomenting the politics of empire in Spain–New Spain. In Butterflies Will Burn, I have attempted to interrogate the specific ideas uttered by a particular group of privileged men and women to buttress their discursive depictions of early modern Spanish manliness and, by extension , sodomy. Although a glimpse of sodomitical cultures will be garnered as this work unfolds, the focus of this study remains on those discourses that reflected Spain’s perceptions of manliness and not necessarily on the historical reality of sodomites.7 In fact, sodomy prosecutions in early modern Spain–New Spain reveal more about the “discursive acts of constructing and representing” and rather less about the “constructed or represented.”8 Specifically, I have focused on the descriptions of sodomy that emanated from Andalusia, center of Spain’s colonial undertaking, and New Spain, its first and largest viceroyalty. The archival documents and other literary production consulted for this study—described below in greater detail—cover the period between 1561, the year of the earliest sodomy prosecutions during Spain’s emerging colonialist epoch, and 1699, the year that marked the death of Habsburg rule in Spain–New Spain. A number of questions are central to this study. Why did the Spanish courts prosecute sodomites in Spain–New Spain during the early modern period, and what sort of discourses justi- fied these prosecutions? Can one establish a link between perceptions of sodomy and notions of Spanish manliness? Did perceptions...

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