Helmut Puff

Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600

In the 14th century, a considerable number of men in Germany and Switzerland were executed for committing sodomy. In the 17th century, simply speaking of the act was cause for censorship. Here, in the first ever history of sodomy in these countries, Helmut Puff argues that accusations of sodomy in this era were actually crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on both literary and historical evidence, Puff shows that speakers of German associated sodomy with Italy and, increasingly, the Catholic Church. As the Reformation gained momentum, the formerly unspeakable crime of sodomy gained a voice, as Martin Luther and others deployed accusations of sodomy to discredit the upper ranks of the Church and to create a sense of community among Protestant believers. During the 16th century, official reactions to this defamatory rhetoric, and fear that mere mention of sodomy would incite sinful acts, resulted in the suppression of court cases from public scrutiny. This eye-opening study should interest historians of gender, sexuality and religion, as well as scholars of mediaeval and early modern history and culture.

Toward a Philology of the Premodern Lesbian

The recent rise of the term “premodern” has profoundly altered the study of societies, cultures, and literatures in the distant past. It has regrouped academic disciplines once thought to exist in splendid self-sufficiency; it has reshaped scholarly conversations across geographical divides; it has unsettled long-standing period designations. At the same time, the term has rarely shed the binarism it transports. Since its coinage at the threshold between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, modernus has circumscribed oppositional structures of thought. Whether explicitly or implicitly, we are modern only in relation to those described as antiqui. Conversely, premodernity has the potential of invigorating our awareness of what is shared by ancients and moderns. Philology may benefit from such a terminological alignment. As a practice with a deep history, it straddles the many divides associated with the advent of the modern. In this chapter, I deploy a notion of philology that foregrounds questions of exchange and communication. The analysis of two sixteenth-century texts, the so-called Zimmern Chronicle and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Colloquies, will illustrate how texts both reflect and redirect communicative processes on which our own knowledge about the premodern lesbian relies.

Self-Portrait with Ruins: Maerten van Heemskerck, 1553

This article revisits a turning point in the history of Western Europes engagement with ancient ruins, the sixteenth-century Renaissance. The author puts pressure on the notion that modernitys fascination with ruins rests on an interest in the historical past exclusively. A close look at the oeuvre of the Haarlem-based artist Maerten van Heemskerck and his Self-Portrait with the Colosseum of 1553 reveals ruins’ appeal as multivalent. For Heemskerck and other sixteenth-century artists, ruins engendered encounters and confrontations between the material and the immaterial, the self and history, life and death. What is more, the temporality of ruins is more polymorphous than now classic essays on the ruin by Georg Simmel and others have us imagine. In Heemskercks Renaissance, the depiction of ancient ruins also resonated with the violence-induced ruination of recent events such as the Sack of Rome.

A State of Sin: Switzerland and the Early Modern Imaginary

In late medieval and early modern Europe, the Swiss were frequently caricatured along sexual lines. The injurious term ‘cow-Swiss’ carried with it the allegation of bestiality.1 In De Nobilitate et Rusticitate (Of Nobility and Peasantry’), written in 1451, Felix Hemmerli presented sexual intercourse between Swiss men and their cattle as a virtually ubiquitous phenomenon. According to this canonist, Swiss men avoided ‘the company of their wives.’ Instead, they populated barely habitable mountain areas, sharing their lives with cows. Shockingly, according to Hemmerli, the Swiss had resigned ‘themselves to these dogged rumors. They [did] not suffer anymore from the accusations and even [did] not feel obliged to apologize or bring charges against their defamers.’ Hemmerli’s overt specification of bestiality amongst the Swiss peasantry deployed a rhetoric congruous with descriptions of same-sex relations common in the same period. His description of sexual acts ‘against nature’ centered around the explicit mention of that which, according to the same author, should be left unspoken: ‘It would be better if we fell silent, put the finger on our mouth, and rejected these aspersions entirely. Then, this well-known talk would really be silenced.’2

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 , ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell, London and New York, Verso, 2004, pp. xxvi, 374, 25.00 (hardback 1-85984-539-8).

Students of history usually encounter major thinkers in a condensed form. They may associate the name of Michel Foucault with the term medicalization or remember having learnt that sexual discourses are sites of power. The book under review here is to be recommended as an antidote to such summaries of Foucaults oeuvre. Instead, the volume allows us to observe Foucault in the laboratory, at the threshold of a major re-orientation in his thinking. Abnormal features transcripts of a course Foucault taught at the College de France in Paris between January and March 1975. Wedged between the writing of two groundbreaking books, his Discipline and punish (Surveiller et punir, 1975) and The history of sexuality (La volonte de savoir, 1976), these eleven lectures show the author once again grappling with the nature of power, the theme of Discipline and punish, while moving towards understanding sexuality epistemologically, namely as the effect of a particular form of knowledge. Between 1970 and 1984, Foucaults public courses evolved in a series of interconnected themes: in 1972–73, he presented lectures on “the punitive society”; he explored “psychiatric power” in 1973–74, a course from which the theme of the “abnormal” emerged; he then moved on to topics such as bio-power, governmentality, and self-fashioning. Course by course, tapes of Foucaults lectures are currently being edited and translated into English, complete with markers of oral delivery. As do other volumes in this series, the book contains Foucaults own course synthesis, an expert introduction by Arnold Davidson, a competent afterword by the editors, and an excellent index. A critical apparatus provides relevant bibliographical citations and cross-references to Foucaults other writings. The volume is eminently readable. Occasionally, its readability comes at the expense of philological rigour. Its title is somewhat emblematic in that regard. What designates a group of people in French, les anormeaux, has been translated as “abnormal”, with its accent on the conceptual. To be sure, this solution is much in tune with Foucaults theoretical vision. Such a rendering de-emphasizes, however, the projects contradictions. It may even misrepresent its academic and political impetus. After all, “les anormeaux” signals a focus different from normalization as a subject of philosophical inquiry in the work of Foucaults teacher Georges Canguilhem (see Foucaults discussion of his thought on pp. 49–50). Abnormal explores a clearly delineated problem, how psychiatry “came to function as a medical science responsible for public hygiene” (p. 119). Covering the vast terrain between roughly the Middle Ages and the emergence of psychoanalysis in fin-de-siecle Europe, the core of the argument wrestles with forensic psychiatry as a modern “technique of power”. The motiveless crime served, so Foucault argues, as a motor for the development of early criminal psychiatry. The case of a mother eating her own child, for example, required the expert to explain how an individual could have behaved so inexplicably; he alone came to command the expertise to detect in a person what remained hidden to non-experts. Intriguingly, as Foucault points out, such a gaze shifts attention away from the deed itself or the question of a persons culpability at the time of the crime to aspects of an existence that were not themselves criminal, a persons body and biography. Foucault thus unearths a somewhat circulatory logic within the judiciary in which since the early nineteenth century psychiatry posed as the legal systems “double”. By authoring what Foucault aptly calls “administrative grotesque” (p. 12), many psychiatrists in fact helped to legitimize the enforcement of societal norms in the courtroom. Yet psychiatrys development did not stop here. It proceeded to morph into a discipline concerned not only with the abnormal but with all humans. Slippery concepts such as “instinct” (pp. 129–34, 138–9, 282–7), “condition” (pp. 311–13), and “heredity” (pp. 167–8, 313–16) were stepping stones on the path of this transformation. Yet if psychiatry came to wield a position of scientific, social, and cultural prominence, this emergence was in large part due to its profound entanglement with the theme of human sexuality, especially the ever-present dangers of abnormal sexual behaviour: “Sexuality enables everything that is otherwise inexplicable to be explained” (p. 241). The eighteenth-century anti-masturbation campaign served as both a precursor and a model for nineteenth-century psychiatry. It set a fundamental anxiety into motion that revolved around the sexuality of children, a danger so persistent and elusive that it has stayed with us ever since. The strengths of the genealogical approach to the writing of history are clearly in evidence on almost every page of this volume: historical time appears as remarkably multi-layered. Foucault, the “historian of the present” (J G Merquior), moves imaginatively between different periods, ever mining the past in order to probe its later sediments, incrustations, and erosions. Thereby, historical practice a la Foucault differs markedly from historicism with its focus on historical origins and its obfuscation of the researchers own subject position. By sidestepping conventional understandings of historical agency and narrative sequence, Foucault the genealogist carves out historically situated, interconnected configurations. In fact, genealogy is at its best in capturing the internal logics of certain constellations or “domains”, to use Foucaults own terminology, such as the confessional (lecture seven), possession (lecture eight), or psychoanalysis (pp. 266–8). It is fair to say that Foucaults own expertise varies greatly within the expansive reach of this argument. While his command of nineteenth-century forensic literature is impressive, his familiarity with medieval predecessors to the early modern phenomena he describes at some length is spotty. Surprisingly, eighteenth-century physiognomy makes no appearance, to pick only one of many omissions. Even so, reading these thought experiments and historical sketches remains tremendously inspiring, not least because Foucaults musings continue to spur critical engagement and dissent. From the vantage point of this volume, some of Foucaults grand formulations in his better known book publications qualify as condensations of arguments he developed more extensively in lectures like the ones published in Abnormal. This is why this text is indispensable reading for anybody interested in the history of medicine, psychiatry, sexuality, or the fluctuations of Foucaults thinking. If only we knew more about the original audiences responses, their mumbling or their laughter.

The Sodomite’s Clothes

Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1530. Hans Fritschi of Pfungen stands before the court. He is accused of having committed “unchristian and heretical [= sodomitical] acts” together with Hans Ras.1 After the trial, the accused was executed. Due to his youth, the court commuted the originally imposed sentence of death at the stake into a milder punishment, execution by sword—Fritschi had asked for this mercy. In contrast, his sexual partner, Hans Ras, may have escaped without punishment. His name appears neither in Schaffhausen nor in files from neighboring cantons in the Swiss Confederacy.