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

"Noel Malcolm slaughters so many herds of sacred cows in an unsentimental, granitic, beautifully assembled mosaic of evidence. He is at odds—not deliberately but simply empirically—with, as he states, the whole consensus on the history of sexuality. He regards homosexuality in its modern form not as having emerged in the late 17th, early 18th century—which apparently, to me very surprisingly, is the established view among historians of sexuality—but instead being a much more constant, though perhaps rather subterranean, current. He identifies and explains geographical differences between the Mediterranean and southern areas of Europe on the one hand, and northern Europe on the other. He never comes to conclusions first and then builds the why and how upon them, he simply assembles all the evidence he can find and proceeds with great care upon its basis. And while that evidence is of course extremely patchy and varied, there is a lot of it, if you are as good at searching as he is. He constructs these huge hecatombs of anecdotes, of deductions from absence, of judicial statistics, of inference, of literary sources, of gossip. He’s also extremely skeptical, absolutely refusing to write a whole chapter on the strength of a Marlowe poem or anything like that. For instance—and I love this about having both Lucy’s book and Noel Malcolm’s on the list—he denies the sexual element between James and Buckingham. He says there’s not enough proof to go there. I absolutely love that we have endorsed one wonderful book about their full and loving relationship, and another that all but denies that relationship’s nature. Sir Noel is both a great writer—there’s not a single sentence that falls short of very high standards of beauty—and a very conscientious, ethical, thorough historian. As far as I could gather, he felt that there was some undeniable importance to the relative societal scarcity of women in the south of Europe. Whether you’re in the Muslim world of harems, or, say, in the Spanish world, where even in the days of the Bloomsbury group, Gerald Brenan was describing wooing veiled ladies high up in windows, women were much more cloistered. It was much more of a societal norm for a young man about town to do it with (even younger) men, because women were not very available. Whereas in Northern Europe, where women were much more available, Sir Noel identifies a norm closer to modern homosexuality, with alternate, identifiable kinds of life going on quietly in their own way. However, to boil his book down to such baldly stated conclusions is to do it a disservice. It is a complex book, delicately assembled upon a heroically amassed mountain of evidence. If I have misrepresented it, I hope he’ll forgive me."