Emotions and Sexuality: Regulation and Homoerotic Transgressions

In this chapter, I analyse the way in which focusing on same-sex attraction can shed new light on how we conceive love and desire in the late medieval and early modern period. Firstly, I re-examine the extensive historiographical debate on the social and cultural history of homoeroticism in late medieval and early modern Europe through the lens of emotions. This perspective allows us to go beyond some of the conundrums in which historians of homosexuality working ʻfrom below’ have sometimes found themselves tangled. I then analyse the diverse and often overlooked emotional lexicon contained in the judicial reports of trials against sodomites. From this vantage point, we can have a glimpse not only into what people felt for each other, but also into the way in which unconventional desires affected their self-perception and their positioning within society. In a diachronic perspective, I examine how social control of sexual behaviours changed through time. The ways in which homoerotic feelings were perceived by common people and religious and civic institutions were indeed related to broader understandings of love and affection within the family. Conversely, I suggest that, by reflecting on transgressive affects, we can also see the history of marital love in the late Middle Ages and early modern period from a different perspective. Finally, I point out how the increasing rigidity of sexual morality in the post-Reformation period stimulated forms of resistance from below. From then on, questioning the narrow-mindedness of Catholic and Protestant ʻemotional regimes’ played a crucial role in the broader political critique of the hypocrisy of institutionalized religions.