Northern Europe: contexts of sexual life

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers the possible social and institutional contexts for male–male sex in Northern Europe. The Church was one example, furnishing a number of known cases. The evidence from schools and universities is, however, very limited. Seafaring yielded only a small tally of cases in both England and the Netherlands; known cases involving soldiers are also rare. Members of the nobility were seldom prosecuted. In late-17th-century France, the upper nobility were virtually beyond the reach of the law in such matters. Some were notorious sodomites, though the widely repeated story of their forming a secret ‘confraternity’ in the 1680s was probably fictitious. Accusations against monarchs, and especially against their favourites, were politically motivated; there is no clear evidence of sodomy in the case of either Henri III of France or James VI and I of Scotland and England.