A Matter of Definition

 source: Libération, July 3, 2022 

author:  Florian Besson, medieval historian, member of the Actuel Moyen Age collective and Catherine Rideau-Kikuchi, medieval historian, member of the Actuel Moyen Age collective

Translation: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

A Brief History of the Sin of Sodomy

OPINION Lgbtq

After abortion, the American conservative and Christian right wants to once again penalize sexual relations between men. What has the Church really said about this topic since the Middle Ages?

Engraving from 1578 depicting the execution of three people accused of sodomy in Bruges. (Bridgeman Pictures)

In an interview, the Attorney General of Texas has just declared that he would be in favor of a law restoring the ban on sodomy. A “medieval” decision, as one is tempted to say at with each setback in fundamental rights? Things may not be so simple.

In fact, from the very beginning of the medieval period, sodomy was officially condemned by Christian theologians. The term "sodomy", derived from the city of Sodom, punished by the god of the Old Testament for the "crimes against nature" of its inhabitants, then has a meaning very different from ours - and it is one difficulties when studying this subject. Medieval authors use it to designate a set of sexual acts considered morally and religiously reprehensible, in particular because they do not directly allow procreation, which for them is the only legitimate goal of sexual intercourse. Throughout the texts and the authors, this word can therefore designate in the Middle Ages masturbation, "bestiality" (the fact of having sexual relations with an animal) or even oral sex. In some cases, it is not even a question of sexuality and the term then refers to any form of deviance vis-à-vis the moral or political order: betraying one's lord, missing mass too often or wearing men's clothes when one is a woman can be enough to be accused of acts of "sodomy". This shifting in the vocabulary, which has been the case  for a long time, should incite us to caution in the study such questions ...