A Singular Example of the Wrath of God: The Use of Sodom in Sixteenth-Century Exegesis

Abstract

What did the Reformation do for sodomy? The more or less established view, developed by social and cultural historians and contributors to the history of sexuality, is that it did relatively little. The evidence of the normative discourses of theology and law suggests that definitions and understandings of sodomy after the Reformation movements of the early and middle sixteenth century differed little from what had been proffered in the legal and moral writings of the medieval period. According to these defi nitions, which varied in their particulars, sodomy was a sin of unnatural lust which included, but was often not limited to, sexual contact between persons of the same sex. It was a sin whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants' penchant for unnatural sex led directly to their destruction in a hail of sulfur and fire—a dramatic event that was to stand as a warning both to those tempted to indulge in this vice and to those innocent of that particular sin who would nonetheless tolerate it in their neighbors. This view is found reflected in a wide range of writings from homiletic, exegetical, and penitential productions of late antiquity and the early, high, and late Middle Ages. And, indeed, while Protestant reforming ideas and practices changed many things in Europe of the sixteenth century, they seem to have left untouched this conception of the sin of the Sodomites. Confessions divided on many theological issues appear to have had no quarrel over what sodomy was, where it had come from, and what ought to be done about it. Definitions, then, remained more or less the same through the course of the Reformations; what changed was the capacity of local and regional jurisdictions to enforce legal proscriptions. And so, if the Reformation movements had any impact on the public discourse on sodomy, that impact was limited to the contribution the reforms made to the development of instruments of moral discipline and their facilitation (in some instances) of harsher responses to persons accused and convicted of the crime of sodomy.