Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400–1750

The period between Boswell’s fourteenth century and Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth has been the most consequential gap in the historiography of same-sex desire — consequential because so much of the theoretical argument between essentialists and constructionists depends on what it contains. Did the early modern centuries sustain anything resembling the identities and subcultures Boswell’s medieval sources gesture toward? Or did they constitute a juridical interregnum — sodomy as act and crime, organised by transgression rather than by recognition, waiting for the medical machinery of the 1880s to produce the first genuine category of person? Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe is the most serious attempt yet to answer these questions from the archives rather than from theory, and its arrival after four decades of largely theory-driven debate is an event in the field.

The Core Claim

Malcolm’s argument is empirical before it is theoretical, which is both its distinguishing virtue and the source of its methodological tension with the tradition it enters. Drawing on prosecution records, confessional manuals, theological compendia, literary and medical texts, and diplomatic correspondence across Italy, Iberia, France, the Low Countries, Britain, and the Ottoman borderlands, he assembles a picture of early modern male-male sexual life that is substantially more varied, geographically differentiated, and sociologically complex than either the Foucauldian or the Boswellian framework has prepared readers to expect.

The central finding is neither a vindication of constructionism nor of essentialism, but a complication of the terms. Malcolm demonstrates that recognisable social roles — the adult man consistently attracted to other men, known as such to himself and to his social circle, navigating specific urban subcultures with their own argots and meeting places — are attested well before the nineteenth century and in some cases well before the seventeenth. Venice, Florence, and Seville in particular produced prosecution records that reveal not merely isolated acts but networks, reputations, and something that reads unmistakably as social identity. The strict Foucauldian claim — that the homosexual as a type of person did not exist before 1870 — cannot survive contact with this evidence without significant qualification.

Yet Malcolm is equally resistant to Boswellian essentialism. The social forms he documents are radically heterogeneous across time and place: what a sodomite was in Florence in 1450 was not what a sodomite was in Amsterdam in 1730, and the legal, theological, and experiential categories through which men organised their desires differed enough across these contexts to make any appeal to a transhistorical gay identity strained. The book’s effective argument is that the binary itself — construction or discovery, history or nature — is too crude an instrument for the material it purports to organise.

Where the Argument Is Strongest

The archival depth is the book’s most significant and unambiguous contribution. Malcolm has worked through prosecution records in a dozen European archives that previous scholars either had not examined or had examined only partially, and the quantitative patterns he extracts — conviction rates, sentencing practices, the social profile of defendants and accusers — provide a more systematic picture of how sodomy law actually operated than the theoretical literature has been able to draw on. The Venetian Consiglio dei Dieci records alone generate enough data to sustain genuine historical analysis rather than illustrative anecdote, and the comparison with Florentine and Seville material allows for a European differentiation that is long overdue.

The chapter on the Ottoman frontier is the most original. Malcolm examines how sexual practices and identities circulated across the Christian-Muslim border — through captivity, diplomatic contact, and trade — and what early modern European writers made of what they believed they were observing in Ottoman practice. The construction of a sexually permissive Orient was not merely an orientalist fantasy but a specific ideological operation with traceable institutional functions: it positioned European sodomy as an imported contamination, externalised the problem geographically, and licensed a particular form of prosecutorial anxiety at moments of Ottoman military pressure. This is the kind of argument that requires exactly the archival range Malcolm has assembled, and it has no real precedent in the existing literature.

The treatment of the mollies — the documented subculture of effeminate men who gathered in London’s molly houses in the early eighteenth century — is careful and methodologically sophisticated in a way that earlier accounts have not been. Malcolm neither reads the mollies as prototypical gay men (anachronism) nor treats them as purely an artefact of prosecutorial description (overcorrection). He attends to the specific forms of gender inversion, ritual, and self-presentation the records describe, and he situates them in the context of the broader European evidence in a way that allows for genuine comparison rather than isolated case study. What emerges is something closer to a sociological account of how sexual subcultures form, differentiate, and become legible to outside observers than either the Foucauldian or the Boswellian framework has produced.

Where It Strains

The theoretical engagement is the book’s consistent weakness. Malcolm is a historian of the first rank — his previous work on Hobbes and on Bosnia demonstrated a range across intellectual history and archival research that is unusual among working scholars — but he approaches the constructionism/essentialism debate with a slight impatience, as though the argument’s persistence reflects a failure of empirical nerve that a sufficient quantity of archival evidence will resolve. It will not. The debate is partly a philosophical one about the individuation of social objects: when do variations in how a phenomenon is categorised, experienced, and governed constitute different phenomena, and when do they constitute one phenomenon appearing in different forms? Malcolm’s evidence complicates both positions, but complication is not resolution, and the book would have benefited from a sustained engagement with Halperin’s methodological argument in “Is There a History of Sexuality?” — an engagement that is conspicuously absent despite Halperin’s direct relevance to everything Malcolm is doing.

The question of women is acknowledged as a limitation but handled with less than the sustained attention it deserves. Female same-sex sexuality appears in the prosecution records Malcolm surveys far less frequently than male, partly for the obvious reason that penetration was the legal fulcrum on which sodomy charges turned and acts between women were harder to prosecute under that framework. Malcolm notes the evidential asymmetry without resolving it, and the book’s title — which promises early modern Europe rather than early modern European men — sits in some tension with the material it delivers. The asymmetry is not Malcolm’s fault, but the absence of a sustained methodological reckoning with it is.

The geographical scope that is the book’s greatest empirical strength also generates some unevenness. The Italian material, particularly the Venetian and Florentine records, receives sustained treatment commensurate with the archival richness; the chapters on England and the Low Countries, while solid, feel somewhat compressed by comparison. The Ottoman frontier chapter is the most analytically original piece in the book, but its argument about the ideological function of orientalism in constructing European sodomy as contamination could have been developed further — it opens more questions than it closes, which is to its credit as a finding and to its cost as an argument.

Verdict

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe is the most important work of historical scholarship to enter this field since Boswell, and it arrives in a context — after four decades of largely theoretical argument — where the archival grounding it provides was genuinely needed. Malcolm demonstrates that the period between the medieval sources Boswell illuminates and the medical machinery Krafft-Ebing represents was neither a blank nor a simple confirmation of either the constructionist or the essentialist account: it was a varied, geographically differentiated, institutionally complex landscape that the existing theoretical frameworks are too blunt to describe adequately. That finding is important, even if Malcolm’s own alternative framework remains underdeveloped.

Read it between Boswell and Krafft-Ebing, where it chronologically belongs. The Ottoman frontier chapter should be read alongside Foucault’s orientalist gestures in The Will to Knowledge, where the contrast is instructive. And read it with the awareness that a historian as gifted as Malcolm choosing to remain theoretically agnostic is itself a form of argument — one that will not satisfy Halperin, but that the field’s current state may require.