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Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Edited by JEFFREY MERRICK and BRYANT T. RAGAN JR. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 256. $29.95 (paper).
This volume was assembled "to illustrate the variety of materials that exists ... and to enable scholars, students, and lay readers to evaluate samples of such materials for themselves" (p. ix). For each of these audiences, this volume has much to recommend it. Four sections, entitled "Traditions," "Repression," "Representation," and "Revolution," include a range of documents organized chronologically within subtopics designed for each of the potential audiences. The main sections include a brief historiography, but the editors have chosen to leave many of the controversies largely unspoken, allowing the documents to tell the proverbial story. In part a pragmatic choice (more documents can be included if less attention is devoted to explication and historical apparatus), this is also a daring and generally successful pedagogical strategy. The organization favors encouraging engagement with the texts over textbook-style illustrative documents of a narrative, and the pedagogical advantage seems worth the risk. For scholars, Merrick and Ragan have selected a number of more obscure texts that invite reassessment of questions about notions of sexuality and comparisons with other national traditions. Scholars may be slightly frustrated by the absence of a bibliography, no doubt a result of the economics of academic book publishing; however, Merrick and Ragan have ameliorated the problem by providing a Web link address with an up-to-date bibliography. As for lay readers, while at some points an inattentive or unsympathetic reader might have difficulty situating the texts, the underlying assumption is that most readers come to the material willing to explore notions of homosexuality and homosexual practices in the past, and accommodating seems not to be a part of the agenda.
Merrick and Ragan begin with "Traditions," a collection of theological, legal, and medical texts about "sodomy" that collectively reveal how and why anxiety about sodomy grafted primarily onto men. While the term referred to a variety of nonprocreative sexual acts, male homosexual sodomy was seen as disruptive of unspoken social and cultural norms about male privilege in a patriarchal society. Even to those familiar with the centrality of religion in early modern legal and social structures, the...