Just Good Friends? Same-Sex Intimacy in early modern Britain and Europe

Tom Betteridge (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, Manchester University Press, 2002, x + 173 pp., hbk £45, ISBN 0-7190-6114-8; pbk £14.99. 0-7190-6115-4.

Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, xiv + 206 pp., £45. ISBN 0-333-99743-3.

Alan Bray, The Friend, Chicago University Press, Chicago and London, 2003, xii + 380 pp., £28. ISBN 0-226-07180-4.

Foucault once remarked that 'sex is so boring'. These books span a profound—and welcome—transition in the history of homosexuality away from a focus on sex as either a category or a series of practices, and towards wider issues of affect and the dynamics of and contexts for male intimacy. Bracketing both ends of this spectrum is the work of the late Alan Bray, to whose scholarship this field is so deeply indebted, and to whose memory the O'Donnell and O'Rourke volume is dedicated. In many ways, the collection of essays edited by Tom Betteridge looks back to and builds on Bray's 1982 study, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, despite its inclusion of an epilogue by Bray outlining the very different approaches and concerns that are more fully expounded in The Friend. The O'Donnell and O'Rourke collection (also containing a similar piece by Bray) on the other hand declares a much broader agenda to expand the category of sexuality to include a wider range of 'affective possibilities' (p. 6), indicated not least by the editors' adoption of a very different title to that of the conference from which the volume originated—'Queer Men: Queer Masculinities'. Both edited collections nonetheless engage in different ways with the distinction attributed to Foucault between homosexuality as a (modern) identity and as a (pre-modern) set of practices which inspired Bray's first book.¹ It is only with the posthumous publication of The Friend that a radically new paradigm is posited: eschewing Foucault on sexuality for Derrida on friendship, Bray argues that the conceptual framework for same-sex relations should be one of ethics rather than sexuality. This has profound implications for sexuality as an analytical category, its historicization and periodization, as well as for the sources and contexts with which scholars aim to make sense of it - central concerns to all three volumes under review.

The two edited collections, while professing quite different objectives, become less distinct from each other when their contents are examined more closely. Each volume features a variety of sources and approaches. Legal records of the criminal prosecution of sodomy feature prominently in the Betteridge collection, with an 'in-depth socio-legal analysis' (p. 28) of two cases from Frankfurt by Maria R. Boes; a survey of cases from Venice by N. S. Davidson; an examination of prosecutions in Scotland by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart; and an essay by William Naphy on the categorization of sexual crimes in Geneva. It is clear that multiple definitions of and attitudes towards sodomy existed in these different legal contexts, often in tension with what can be gleaned of popular opinion. Sodomy in the Venice tribunal, for example, referred to behaviour that did not lead to procreation rather than to the gender of the participants, whereas in Scotland trials for sodomy exclusively involved bestiality. Naphy's examination of the Genevan evidence suggests that sodomy not only labelled a variety of acts, but also that the courts clearly distinguished between them, treating offenders in cases of child abuse, sexual assault and consensual sex very differently. Davidson's work on Venice similarly reveals more lenient responses to voluntary relationships. Unlike Michael Rocke's findings for Florence, the Venetian evidence includes cases involving women as well as men, and also featured married men as well as long-term exclusive relationships.² It is clear that in many instances witnesses had extensive prior...