Seeing Sodomy in theBibles moralisées

Abstract

It has long been remarked by historians of sexuality that sodomy is an incoherent category. Michel Foucault has insisted on the concept's “utterly confused” status; Jonathan Goldberg has mediated between highlighting sodomy's categorical confusions in Renaissance England and deployments of the category in modern contexts (especially in North America) that continue to be precarious; Alan Bray has emphasized how sodomy emerges into visibility only through discursive performance, on the bodies of those who disrupt social and religious stability; and Mark Jordan has traced the category's development in the moral theology of the Church and draws attention to its incoherences and illogicalities, even at the moment of its invention. Yet impossible as it might seem, under the circumstances, to pin it down to particular bodies and pleasures, scholars continue to be drawn to the question of sodomy's relationship to what we now call homosexuality, whether as a distinct identity or as a variety of erotic practice. Th...