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Reviewed by:
  • Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age
  • Lu Ann Homza
Cristian Berco. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. x + 201 pp. index. tbls. bibl. $55. ISBN: 978–0–8020–9139–0.

In this monograph, Cristian Berco explores prosecutions for sodomy conducted by the Spanish Inquisition in the Crown of Aragón, in the hopes of illuminating connections between sexual behavior and social and ethnic relations in early modern Spain. He is much less interested in questions of identity, much more so in behavior: while he occasionally offers comments on the possibility of a homosexual subculture in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his focus is on male sex within the larger social environment. To that end, he first examines the structural features of male-on-male sex, the geographical spaces in which such couplings occurred, and the potential for sexual misalliance that these encounters could involve. In the second half of the book, he addresses the processes by which men were denounced, tried, and sentenced; he then attempts to measure the populace’s and the inquisitors’ reactions to sodomy, and questions the effectiveness of the trials as social control.

Professor Berco concludes that homosexual activity evinced a dialectic of dominance in which older men anally penetrated adolescent boys, most often in semi-public places. The dominant and submissive roles acted out during sex very often matched the social status of the two individuals involved: thus employers sodomized employees, and the wealthy sodomized the poor; in fact, sodomy sent such strong messages about domination and submission that it became a metaphor for political and social interactions. Still, though sodomy could reinforce social hierarchies, it also might upset them in dramatic ways, because any male could decide to act as the penetrator instead of the penetrated. In turn, the social instability that sodomy might involve — as when black slaves had sex with Christian youths — was tremendously worrying to inquisitors and the people at large, though the two groups acted on that anxiety in different ways. The populace obsessed about slaves as rapists and pinpointed clergy and foreigners as particularly suspicious; inquisitors exacted more severe punishments upon slaves as well as moriscos and North Africans, but were more lenient with ecclesiastics, Frenchmen, and Italians. This “gap” between denunciations and sentences meant that the social control of sodomy was fractured.

Our understanding of early modern Spain can be enhanced tremendously by research into the sexual desires, fears, and practices of our historical subjects. Unfortunately, the work under review is hampered in its objectives by some difficulties. Proof of assertions is too often too meager, and rests on single literary works; there also is not enough attention to the relationship between statistics and the real numbers from which they are derived. There are missteps with the interpretation of sources: while Professor Berco would like to extract attitudes and emotions from inquisition materials, he does not address the ways in which the law mediates between the act and the record of it; moreover, he is working primarily with relaciones de causas, or trial summaries. If the procedural abnormalities of [End Page 539] sodomy trials — which are crucial but barely explained here — led to a more spontaneous mode of confession or deposition, we are not told so. If the author wished to capture inquisitors’ impressions of their sodomy cases, he might have used the 1642 text described by E. William Monter in Frontiers of Heresy (1990).

There is also a contradiction in a key argument. Professor Berco argues that men had sex in semi-public places because they never feared denunciations, for homosexual encounters were relatively normal; indeed, “same-sex eroticism among males permeated Spanish society” (48). But if Spanish masculinity in general turned on the “penetrative act” (24), irrespective of object, why was there any repression of sodomy at all? As for same-sex eroticism, the inquisition sources used here mostly seem to document male rape that was called sodomy, for male sexual partners of equal age were infrequently recorded; if the texts reveal longterm or affectionate relationships, Professor Berco has not taken advantage of...

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