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

Joan Cadden’s Nothing Natural is Shameful is a fascinating read. It is the product of close examination of over one hundred extant manuscripts of the Problemata – ‘in deference to its medieval readers, its author will be called “Aristotle”’ (p. 8) – a text which deals with over 800 questions surrounding mainly natural phenomena. Cadden focuses her study on Book IV, question 26, which deals with people who commit the sodomiticum peccatum (‘sodomitical sin’). She explores how medieval scholars dealt with justifying the exploration of what was considered a very unpleasant subject: despite its link to the great Aristotle and its (possibly) falling into the category of ‘natural phenomena’, question 26 in the Problemata was typically either glossed superficially or left out entirely by redactors.

Nothing Natural is Shameful consists of an Introduction, five chapters, a short epilogue, an appendix, an extensive bibliography, and index. The layout of the first two chapters loosely follows the tradition of the Problemata, although focusing only on problema 26. Each segment, translated from Messina’s translation of the Greek original, is followed by in-depth discussion. While Cadden has concentrated mainly on Pietro d’Abano’s commentary, as his was the first Latin commentary on the Problemata, she takes other versions into account when they digress or have reader and/or scribal annotations that shed more light on the topic. She makes full use of these digressions and annotations, not only to highlight consistent thought among scholars on the topic of sodomy, but also to show how opinions could diverge quite dramatically. Not everyone was convinced that the topic should be addressed at all: while Walter Burley claimed that ‘Nothing natural is shameful’ (p. 1), one copyist avoided transcribing not only problema 26, but the entirety of Book IV, consisting as it did of the troublesome questions about why sex was pleasurable.

Cadden’s analysis, with its attention to detail – both literal (the palaeographical evidence) and literary (the intellectual context) – is impressive. By paying such close attention to the ‘errors’ and changes in the various manuscripts, Cadden is able to bring to the fore social and cultural undertones that are so easily missed. In one instance, for example, she notes how one scribe changed the word parvos as pravos; she says that ‘in the conventions of Latin palaeography, the abbreviation for the two words are similar but distinguishable, so the copyist was presented with the opportunity but not the imperative to mix them up’ (p. 192). The first term, as in the original text, means ‘small … testicles’, the latter term ‘bad ones’ (i.e., men), a not inconsequential difference. Although Cadden states that the term sodomy is ‘at once too narrow and too vague’ (p. 3), she says that a more definite concept of what the term meant to medieval scholars will develop out of a detailed analysis of the texts. What emerges is not a simple definition but a solid grounding in the complexities of thought that surrounded the topic.

The appendix is particularly noteworthy. While, as Cadden says, to ‘offer a fixed text of Pietro d’Abano’s Problemata commentary is to contravene the very premise’ of her book, she has included ‘a transcription of BNF lat. 6540’, as it would be ‘churlish’ not to do so. The reader is provided with a very interesting text in the original medieval Latin, an important starting point for anyone interested in pursuing the topic of medieval thought on sodomy further.

While fascinating, this is a challenging read of complex discussions and numerous long sentences, and a more liberal deployment of commas would have made for easier reading. The use of endnotes instead of footnotes is perhaps sensible: given the extensive and complex nature of many of the notes, footnotes would have been unwieldy. The well-populated primary and secondary bibliographies will be of use to modern...