Lesbians in Early Modern Spain

2. Legal, Medical, and Religious Approaches to Lesbians in Early Modern Spain

15 2 Legal, Medical, and Religious Approaches to Lesbians in Early Modern Spain M any medieval theologians had something to say about Saint Paul’s condemnation of women who “exchanged natural relations for unnatural” (Romans 1:26). Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Anselm, and Peter Abelard were only a few of the renowned church fathers to add their own fearful commentaries to Saint Paul’s abhorrence of women’s same-sex inclinations, whether in practice or in the realm of the imagination.1 In Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas places female sodomy firmly under the category of homosexuality when referring to different types of unnatural vice: “Third, with a person of the same sex, male with male and female with female, to which the Apostle refers [Romans 1:26], and this is called sodomy” (245).2 A few decades later, in the early fourteenth century, Cino da Pistoia interpreted the Roman imperial edict of AD 287 (lex foedissimam) as a condemnation that included“when a woman suffers defilement in surrendering to another woman. For there are certain women, inclined to foul wickedness, who exercise their lust on other women and pursue them like men” (translation quoted in Brown, Immodest, 9). In his Lectures of 1400, Bartholomaeus de Saliceto recommends the death penalty for female sodomy (Crompton, “Myth,” 15). Saliceto’s arguments were, in turn, referenced frequently until the eighteenth century. There is ample legal, religious, and medical evidence that sodomy was the sexual behavior, the sin, and the crime that provoked the greatest horror and scandal in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Sodomy laws in Spain during that time reflected an increasing intolerance of unconventional or unorthodox sexual practices (Heise, 363). Before the late fifteenth century, punishment for sodomy in Spain had been castration and suspension. Arguing that these forms of punishment had not been effective enough to eliminate the monstrous practice from their midst, the Catholic monarchs 16 Lesbians in Early Modern Spain Ferdinand and Isabella issued new punishments that they hoped would be more fitting to the crime: And because the penalties previously decreed have not sufficed to eradi­ cate and definitively punish such an abominable crime, . . . and because the laws previously passed have not provided a sufficient remedy, we establish and order that any person of any estate, condition, pre­ eminence, or dignity who commits the wicked crime against nature, being convicted by that manner of proof that according to the law is sufficient for proving the crime of heresy or treason, shall be burned at the stake in the place [town] . . . and similarly shall lose his movable and landed property. (translation quoted in Cowans, 202)3 The monarchy also facilitated Inquisitional involvement by linking the crime of heresy to that of sodomy in the royal decrees of 1497. Furthermore, they agreed to relax the evidence needed for conviction in order to ensure the capture and punishment of all potential guilty parties: “And to better avoid said crime, we order that if it should happen that it is not possible to prove said crime with perfect and complete evidence, but if very close and related acts can be found out and proven . . . the delinquent shall be considered truly guilty of said crime, and shall be judged and sentenced and suffer the same penalty as those convicted by perfect evidence” (translation quoted in Cowans, 202).4 Soon afterward, in a 1524 papal brief, Clement VII gave the Inquisitional courts in Aragón jurisdiction over sodomy investigations , regardless of the presence or absence of heresy in such cases (Kamen, 207–8). While the increased severity toward sodomites seemed concerned primarily with punishing men (evident by the sharp rise in the number of prose­ cutions of male sodomites during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the 1532 edict issued by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V confirmed that women were to be included in legal applications of sodomy laws:“If anyone commits impurity with a beast, or a man with a man, or a woman with a woman, they have forfeited their lives and shall, after the common custom, be sentenced to death by burning” (translation quoted in Crompton,“Myth,” 18). Likewise, Gregorio López’s 1555 gloss on the medieval legal code Las siete partidas specified that women are subject to the sodomy law that prescribed the death penalty for those found guilty of the crime: “The same crime [sodomy] can be committed by women. . . . The women who commit said crime should be thrown into the fire, according to the royal decree...