“THE past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, frequently quoted and often reduced to a commonplace. Yet, it is perhaps something that historians — especially those of human sexuality — do well to remember; for what is a history of human sexuality, and can it, indeed, be written without inevitably applying assumptions of our own time and context? Or without — inadvertently or by design — making a case for one’s own understanding of the present?

This is where the voice of an outsider, someone whose primary research interests lie elsewhere, can be welcome indeed. Noel Malcolm has extensively written on the history of the Balkans and on early modern intellectual history, and attributes the origins of this book to a chance discovery when researching a book on the relations between the Ottoman and Venetian worlds in the 16th century. But many an important discovery has come about “by accident”, and once a discovery has been made, it cannot be unmade.

“As I worked my way through the scholarly literature on early modern sodomy, it became clear to me that there were new things to be said on at least three major issues: the existence of a pan-Mediterranean pattern of sexual behaviour; the difference (notwithstanding that underlying identity) between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the visibility of that behaviour, a difference which broadly validated the reports by Western observers; and the fact that the pan-Mediterranean pattern was not pan-European, as it was not replicated in Northern European societies.”

And so Malcolm presents for the first time a European history of male-male sexual relations which takes into account different European societies and explores and contrasts his findings from court records and literary sources, as well as theological writings and church law. He describes with erudite expertise evidence for sexual encounters between adult males and “beardless” young men in the Ottoman Empire, and what evidence can be found for such encounters in Northern European societies and to a lesser extent in the Slavic world.

It is, I think, important to note that what Malcolm discusses here are patterns of sexual behaviour rather than identities and relationships. From a modern and contemporary perspective, we may indeed judge many of them differently, even as abusive, and the sources do not offer us reflections on the experience of individuals, but, rather, an insight into what may have been accepted as part of life in a given society and yet it was sought to control and sanction.

Malcolm carefully delineates what he seeks to describe and discuss; the male-male sexual encounters that he describes were not necessarily exclusive and often co-existed alongside male-female sexuality in the context of marriage and reproduction. Likewise he does not write about female-female sexuality, as that would, indeed, be a different study altogether; and he rejects the assumption that parallels can automatically be drawn.

In doing so, he is able to engage critically with scholarship on the history of sexuality up to this point and thus brings this ground-breaking study to a masterly conclusion in which he discusses the work of scholars such as Foucault and John Boswell and shows the significance of their work, but also their assumptions and the way in which they have shaped how modern scholars approach this subject.

This is historical scholarship at its best, presented in an eminently readable fashion and supported by an extensive bibliography and detailed notes. What Malcolm is offering here is a major contribution to the study of human sexuality and its history, a challenge to take into account a much broader perspective, not least that of one versed in the history and the cultures of different European societies, and also what it is we are actually studying when we consider the history of human sexuality.

Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian, editor, and writer, living in Peterborough.

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male sexual relations, 1400-1750
Noel Malcolm
OUP £25
(978-0-19-888633-4)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50