[In the essay below, Schleiner addresses Burton's treatment of same-sex relationships in The Anatomy of Melancholy, examining how Burton's use of the rhetorical device praeteritio might distinguish his own perspective from among his many sources.]

Discourse of same-sex desire is forbidden discourse in early seventeenth-century England; in some sense it could not and, therefore, does not exist. In another sense this discourse exists, although in highly coded forms that call attention to its illicit status. I am not at present concerned with the language of persons whom we might, possibly anachronistically, call homosexuals but with the language then used to write and publish about them. To make this vast topic manageable, I will focus on Robert Burton's disquisition on same-sex relationships, a passage brief but chock full of the kind of matter that seems to have suggested itself to northern European, that is, Protestant, writers whenever they thought about such relationships. Since the special coding of the passage seems to warrant this, I will first go through it to clarify Burton's tactics of drawing on numerous and varied sources, his ways of highlighting and of omitting or, more specifically, of highlighting by omitting. Then I will tackle the more complex problem whether in a case like this, where the author seems to conform to official discourse, we may use certain elements of his coding to look through it and behind it.

My subject is a passage of about one and a half folio pages in the third edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), a passage to which Burton was subsequently to add only three words.¹ In the 1628 edition, it is clearly circumscribed or set off from the rest of the subsection, for it is written in Latin. Of course, Burton quotes much Latin in the Anatomy, but this passage on the subject of what used to be called “unnatural acts” is one of the longest in which his own sentences are in that language. The sixth edition takes note of this change of language by rendering Burton's sentences in italics, while printing his Latin quotations in Roman type, which is an exact reversal of the usual distribution of typeface elsewhere in the Anatomy. Thus framed by the text in Burton's usual idiom and type practice, the segment represents what in computer language could be called a “window,” although modern readers without Latin might quibble and prefer to call it “hidden text.” At the end of my reading I will suggest some ways in which this window functions.

The passage is introduced by a long sentence linking two topics that for Renaissance Protestant churchmen had more than a merely associative proximity, bestiality and same-sex love, and ends in a quotation from Romans 1:17: Depraved men “will commit folly with beasts, men leaving the natural use of women, as Paul saith, burned in lust one towards another, and man with man wrought filthinesse.” Then Burton switches to Latin and reports cases of bestiality starting with the proverbial ones: “Semiramis had intercourse with a horse, Pasiphae with a bull, Aristo of Ephesus with a female donkey, Fulvius with a mare, others with dogs, goats, etc., of whom sometimes monsters are born, centaurs, satyrs, and creatures for the fright of people.” With Nec cum brutis, sed ipsis hominibus rem habent, quod peccatum Sodomiae vulgo dicitur,² Burton then turns to same-sex relationships and will in the main stay with them until almost the end of the paragraph when he returns to bestiality. Although my sense is that in his comments on sodomy Burton is very close to the center of the Protestant tradition—another way of saying this is to call his paragraph essentially a string of commonplaces—I detect in his presentation some interesting nuances (including his transition nec cum brutis, sed ipsis hominibus), which I will attend to after first elucidating his text and use of sources.

The “vice” is next located chronologically (olim: then; in the past) and geographically with the Orientals, with the Greeks “all too much” (nimirum), and (possibly with a fading of the time reference olim) with Italians, Africans, and Asians. Burton's first example, Hercules' amorous exploits with boys (that he abducted Hylas for love, that he loved Polycletus, Dion, Perithous, Abderus, Phriga, and according to some authors Eurystheus), represents academic learning, far from commonplace, to be found at the source he indicates: Lilius Gregorius Giraldus's Vita Herculis, and it is presented (since Burton omits the abduction mentioned in his source) without apparent bias.³

With Socrates, who according to several dialogues was attracted to the gymnasium, where he fed his eyes (as Burton puts it) “on the shameful spectacle” (no doubt of adolescents contending naked in their matches), Burton then proceeds to an image of Socrates different from the one presented by the Florentine explicators because it is ambiguous: “However, what Alcibiades says about the same Socrates, I feel free to keep silent about, but I also detest it—such an incitement it is to lust. And Theodoretus touches on that in lib. de curat. graec. affect. cap. ultimo.” The passage refers of course to Alcibiades' attempts to seduce Socrates (which, according to Plato's Symposium, failed) and could be interpreted as indicating Burton's responsiveness to the kind of temptation Alcibiades represents or at least his fear of the reader's being seduced—unless one were to insist that the sentence expressing reticence is merely borrowed from Theodoretus, namely from the passage that Burton adduces seemingly only for confirmation. While reporting Socrates' warnings against lust and against excess in food and drink, Theodoretus had said he was unimpressed because he did not see these warnings supported by facts; that Socrates frequented the gymnasium “and fed his eyes on shameful spectacles” for him is proof of the opposite. And in any case, for Theodoretus, what Alcibiades says about Socrates in the Symposium (that Socrates remained chaste) “is only written by Plato; but I should rather touch only lightly on Socrates and be silent, so much the dialogues bespeak Socrates' folly and wantonness, and so much incitement to sin they offer uncertain people.” Theodoretus adds that Socrates was given to anger and drink and that he had two wives at the same time (Xanthippe and Myrtona).⁴

With his references to Pseudo-Lucian, whom he summarizes in the margin as reserving pederasty as a privilege to philosophers, and to Achilles Tatius, Burton then extensively cites non-Neoplatonic traditions of love, of course only in order to dismiss them, for as they discuss the respective advantages of same-sex versus heterosexual love, both Pseudo-Lucian and Achilles Tatius decide in favor of the former. We may adduce a little more context from both sources to elucidate Burton's minimal reference: In Lucian, Lycinus gives the following verdict (to which Burton refers): “Marriage is a boon and a blessing to men when it meets with good fortune, while the love of boys, that pays court to the hallowed dues of friendship, I consider to be the privilege only of philosophy. Therefore all men should marry, but let only the wise be permitted to love boys, for perfect virtue grows least of all among women. And you must not be angry, Charicles, if Corinth yields to Athens.” Theomnestus, one of the participants in the debate, then confirms this verdict and gives an account of Socrates' relationship with Alcibiades that differs markedly from Plato's account: “For Socrates was as devoted to love as anyone, and Alcibiades, once he had lain down beneath the same mantle with him, did not rise unassailed.” Achilles Tatius's debate on the relative merits of love of women and of boys (the latest possible date for the work is assumed to be 300 A.D.) belongs to the same genre. Very distinctly this is a praise of the love of boys in the ancient tradition and not the love of men, since its central notion is that the fleetingness of the boys' beauty (here compared to the rose and contrasted with the longer lasting beauty of women) is presented as the main stimulus to love. According to Burton, Lucian and Tatius stand at the beginning of an apologetic tradition continued in his time (so he claims, with little evidence, as we shall see) by “volumes written” or voluminous writings (scriptis voluminibus) by Italians. The remaining examples of male-male admiration or infatuation, which conclude Burton's section on the ancients—Plato for Agathon, Xenophon for Clinias, Virgil (that is, the persona speaking the Eclogues) for Alexis, Anacreon for Bathyllus, and Nero for Sporus—are largely commonplace. Burton's transition from the ancients to the moderns is marked by a version of the rhetorical figure praeteritio, a passing over: naming what is being left out and sometimes inversely calling attention to it. “But what is recorded about Nero, Claudius, and the monstrous lust of others, I would rather you seek from Petronius, Suetonius, and others, since it exceeds all credence that you can expect it of me.”⁵

With Asians, Turks, and “Romans,” Burton then moves to the topic of sodomy in his own time, a subsection in which he is comparatively even less original. In locating the phenomenon primarily with religious opponents, he reflects the preoccupations of his time, so evident in relation to the same subject at a more popular level in Thomas Beard's Theatre of Gods Judgements, at the more learned level of the historian writing in Latin in Christian Matthias's Theatrum historicum theoretico-practicum, and at the learned level of the Protestant collector of universal knowledge in Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum humanae vitae. This is to say that Burton's narrowing from Itali to Romani (in the sentence “The Diana of the Romans is sodomy,” a sentence that is one of very few substantive additions to this paragraph after the 1628 edition) is not an innocent pars pro toto but gathers its strength from all that Rome connotes to the Protestant, implying a modern aberration equivalent to the cult and idolatry of Diana, which Paul observed in Ephesus. In a similar vein, the Protestant historian Matthias quotes a saying in somewhat “low” Latin: Romanizare est Sodomizare.⁶ At the same time the cult of Diana (metaphorically invoked and, for a reader of Paul's letters, associated with Ephesus) provides a link with the modern Turks, on whose habits the imperial ambassador Augerius Gislenius Busbequius is Burton's informant.

In letters dating from the 1550s and later that describe the mores of the Turks, Busbequius, the first observer to Turkey after the Turkish expansion into central Europe, had commented several times on the Turks' inclination toward same-sex love (both male and female). To illustrate his point, he reported that for decorum Turkish wives use a special code when they appear before a magistrate to make it known that their husbands had turned to boys.⁷ Burton used some of Busbequius's words when he presented this code, which was one of not saying. As he made explicit the implied cause of the women's appearance, namely that their husbands had turned to sleeping with men, he clarified the sense of his reference that ceases to be an exact quotation. From the modern Turks he then turned to the modern Italians, who, he claimed with little supportive evidence, defend same-sex love at length following such apologists as Pseudo-Lucian and Achilles Tatius scriptis voluminibus. His only example was Giovanni della Casa, bishop of Benevento, who (according to Burton) “called it divine work, a sweet crime, and even brags not to have used any other kind of love.” Burton did not document his statement, perhaps feeling that he did not need to since della Casa in this context was one of the most often rehearsed commonplaces of Protestant propaganda. Thus, John Jewel, one of the most influential apologists of the English church, was able to ask: “Who hath not herde … what Jhon Casus Archbyshop of Benevento the Popes legate of Venice, wrote of that horrible filthinesse whereas even that thing which ought not be heard of, out of any man's mouthe, he dothe commend with most filthy wordes and eloquence?”⁸ Burton's implication was, of course, what other Protestants stated explicitly, namely that della Casa wrote a book De laudibus sodomiae.

To the passages from French, German, and English Protestants that I collected elsewhere, I would like to add just two more: Charles Du Moulin, who in an oration before the senate of the University of Tübingen said in 1554 that della Casa “composed and edited a book in praise of sodomy”; and Melchior Goldast, who wrote that della Casa deserved being burned at the stake for publishing a book whose title he gives as De laudibus sodomiae. But there is no such book. The references are to a poem “Capitolo del Forno” that della Casa published in 1538, long before he became archbishop. I quote the lines from the poem in which the speaker appears to present himself somewhat ironically (if irony implies meiosis, making oneself small) and refers to what is probably anal sex (but not necessarily homosexual) as mestier divino (divine craft or work). The poem is long, and my translation of its indirect and coded language is tentative:

Tennero il forno gia le donne sole:
Hoggi mi par, che certi garzonacci
L'habbin mandato poco men, ch'al sole.
S'pazinlo à posta lor, nessun non vacci.
Dican pur ch'egli è humido e mal netto,
Et sonne ben cagion questi fratacci.
Io per me rade volte altrove il metto
Con tutto che 'l mio pan sia pur piccino,
E'l forno delle donne un po grandetto.
Benche chi fa questo mestier divino
Sa ben trovar dove l'hanno nascosto
Cola dirieto un certo fornellino.(9)

At one time women alone kept the oven. Today it seems to me that some nasty fellows have sent them to little less than to the sun. Let them [the women] sweep it instead of the fellows; no one goes there [to the women's oven]. It should indeed be said that it is humid and less than clean, and the reason is those nasty friars. I for myself only rarely put it elsewhere, even though my bread is a little one and the oven of the ladies a bit large, although he who practices this divine craft knows well how to find where they have hidden it, back down there, a certain little oven.

Although the lines may well have referred, as the embattled churchman later claimed, to a heterosexual act rather than a homosexual one, della Casa's poem is important for a history of homophobia. Readers fought over the poem's elusive meaning for centuries.¹⁰

The context in which Burton refers to the opus divinum indicates that like other Protestants of his time, he takes della Casa to refer unambiguously to same-sex love. The poem, of which Burton, like so many of his Protestant contemporaries, does not seem to have had more than a hearsay knowledge, remains his only example of the volumines scripta of modern Italian defenses of same-sex love (Burton does not even mention Aretino, named in one breath with della Casa by Melchior Goldast). His next example is of a different kind: Angelo Politiano “laying violent hands on himself” for the love of a boy. Incidentally, the contemporary biographer Iovio's report of the famous humanist's end (to which Burton refers in the margin) is considerably more sympathetic and ambiguous. Iovio has Politiano, “stung by the mad love for a noble [or delicate?] adolescent,” first slip into mortal illness and rave in violent fever, suggesting it seems that at his end he was not compos mentis.¹¹

Burton's transition from sodomy in contemporary Italy to his next topic, sexual license (and particularly same-sex relationships) in monasteries during the time of Henry VIII, is conventional in polemical Protestant writings, for both were used as ammunition in English rejection of celibacy and in defense of the dissolution of the monasteries and of the attendant secularization of church property. Burton writes, “And it is truly shameful to say how much with us within memory of our parents this detestable wickedness raged!” Then follows a sentence excerpted from the important and polemical John Bale (in the title of the most recent book about him called Mythmaker of the English Reformation), which praises the “most prudent” Henry VIII for sending a team of doctors of law to monasteries and similar institutions to record the vast numbers of whoremongers and sodomites. Burton expressly imitates Bale's Rabelaisian plethora of words by giving six near synonyms of the word sodomitae (cinaedi, ganeones, paedicones, puerarii, paederastae, ganymedes). By filling his sentences with such strings of words, Bale, the master ideologue of the sixteenth century, had iconically suggested their content: “In each [of these institutions] you might have thought a new Gomorrah”—together with the list of synonyms for sodomitae, Burton also quotes this phrase from Bale. The “catalogues” or lists of sexual transgressors for which Burton sends the reader to Bale had a considerable fortune in the arguments of Renaissance Protestants and are found on the same page of Bale's preface: here Bale cites samples of the visitors' findings in the monasteries, separating sodomitae from other incontinentes and giving name and number of each. Burton's two references to Bale, who played on homophobia as on an instrument, may not tell the extent of Burton's imaginative “debt” to him, for Burton might have taken all his information about della Casa and even the notion that the Diana of the Romans is sodomy from the master ideologue.¹²

Sandwiched between Burton's reference to Bale and Burton's comment (introduced with another praeteritio or figure of passing over: sileo) on masturbating monks are two rhetorical questions of considerable importance because they are on a subject area that is not commonplace. For, after saying with Bale that in those recent times girls could not sleep securely for the activities of necromantic friars, Burton asks: “If this was so with the religious, with holy men or rather manequins, what would you suspect to have been done in the marketplace or at court? Among the nobility or in the houses of prostitution what else but abomination and filthiness?” Because of Burton's cautious imprecision, we do not learn what he knew or thought about King James's court in general or specifically about his favorites. Instead, with an insincere “I pass them over,” he mentions the “mastrupations of monks, masturbators,” a slur belonging to Bale's mode of polemical discourse but misleadingly footnoted. Burton's first reference here is to the medical doctor Mercuriale's discussion of “priapismus,” a pathological condition in which a patient experiences erection without erotic stimulation. Among the causes of priapismus (frequently discussed in Renaissance medicine), Mercuriale mentions “long abstinence from coition, for which reason monks often suffer from this illness,” but also “excessive coitions” and “manstrupatio” without ejection of semen. Contrary to what Burton implies, Mercuriale does not say that monks masturbate, but they tend to suffer from priapism because they abstain—the word manstrupatio belongs to a different clause altogether. (The etymology of masturbor is possibly manus stuprare, to defile one's hands.)¹³ The reference to Roderigo à Castro's medical book on women forms a link for Burton between his discussion of masturbation and that of lesbianism (a link not syntactically obvious). Castro uses the word masturbatores (Mercurialis does not) and in a long scholion discusses medical implications of masturbation; he also serves as Burton's main authority on lesbians (whom Castro calls tribades).¹⁴

Burton lumps together in one sentence sado-masochists using whips for erotic stimulation, male prostitutes (sp[h]intricae, possibly one of the most distasteful terms), female prostitutes (Ambubeiae, deriving from a Syrian word and denoting Syrian dancing girls in Rome), lesbians exciting one another, and women using eunuchs and artificial private parts. “It is even more strange,” he adds, “that one woman some time ago ruined another in Constantinople,” and then summarizes the story of a woman of high birth (mulier magno natu in the source, Busbequius's account) who cross-dressed so that she could marry the girl she had fallen in love with at the public bath. Burton, following his source, would hardly have called the woman's daring behavior “clearly incredible” had he known the very similar case of a sixteenth-century French woman from the Touraine, which H. Estienne recounts.¹⁵

With another omitto (“I am passing over”), Burton's characteristic transition to a further aspect of his tabooed subject and, of course, another instance of the rhetorical figure praeteritio, he touches on the topic of necrophilia (drawing on Aegyptian uses and abuses told by Herodotus) and then moves to cases of making love with pictures and statues, for which he relies on Ovid, Hegesippus, and Pliny. But the light touch suggested by the praeteritio is only rhetorical effect, for if one combines his sentence about certain lascivious Aegyptian embalmers' habits of sleeping with the dead bodies of beautiful women with his detailed summary in the margin, very little is in fact omitted of Herodotus's brief paragraph about the origin of the custom of a delay in turning bodies over for embalming (presumably the stench was to discourage abuse).¹⁶

The story of Pygmalion's falling in love with a statue of his own making (Ovid Metam. 10.243) is proverbial. It and almost all of Burton's additional examples of men loving pictures and statues are contained in Zwinger's collection (2300-2301), which Burton does not mention as his source. The one exception is Burton's reference to Hegesippus's story of Mundus and Paulina (Paulini is an error in all early editions of the Anatomy), and indeed this account of Mundus falling in love with a chaste married woman (Paulina) and of tricking her (with the connivance of priests of the temple) into believing that the god Anubis desired to have intercourse with her does not fit perfectly into Burton's context, since it has little to do with the preceding case of loving a statue or the following (from Pliny) of loving a picture.¹⁷ Just as curiously, Burton then does not refer to Pliny's cases of statues inciting males to lust (a statue of Venus and one of Cupid, each left with a macula or amoris vestigium), but he chooses to highlight Pliny's story of a man falling so madly in love with the pictures of Atalanta and Helen that he wanted to steal them. Burton does so possibly because he is intrigued by his identification of the libidinous thief with an almost archetypal religious opponent, Pontius Pilate, who had Christ crucified. The version Zwinger quotes in his handbook calls the would-be thief indeed “P. Pilatus, legatus Caii principis,” and the 1599 edition of Pliny by Jacobus Dalecampius reads “Pontius Legatus Caii principis.” Unfortunately for Burton's identification, modern editions of Pliny have a different wording.¹⁸

The word lust or libido serves Burton as a transition: first to the proverbially debauched emperor Heliogabalus who, as Burton says, “experienced lust through all orifices of his body,”¹⁹ then to Seneca's memorable exemplum of depravity, to finally, in a long quotation from Plutarch, the two subjects with which he started—bestiality and same-sex love—except now in reverse order so that he gives the impression of coming full circle. From Heliogabalus, who for Lampridius represented the non plus ultra of perversion by his diet (the choice of food and the location of the elaborate feasts described), by his government (creating a senate for women and making his cook his minister) and, of course, by his sexual habits, it is an easy step for Burton to Hostius Quadra, Seneca's ultimate in the sophistication of sexual debauchery, elements of which Burton summarizes: “Hostius had mirrors made and placed them so that he would see all motions as he submitted to his male partner. He also delighted in false magnification of his friend's member while acting man and woman at the same time, a most shameful thing to say.”²⁰ His moral indignation leads Burton to agree with the satirical speaker Gryllus (whose name suggests that he is a pig) in Plutarch's dialogue Bruta animalia ratione uti. At Ulysses' question whether there are any Greeks on her island, Circe had referred him to Gryllus who, to Ulysses' surprise, rebuffs him, opting to remain beast rather than be liberated. Burton quotes (with some omissions) from the Latin version of Wilhelm Xylander. The Loeb translation of the equivalent sentences is this:

Whence it comes about that to this very day the desires of beasts have encompassed no homosexual mating. But you have a fair amount of such traficking among your high and mighty nobility, to say nothing of the baser sort. … Just so Heracles pursuing a beardless lad, lagged behind the other heroes and deserted the expedition. … Not even Nature, with law for her ally, can keep within bounds the unchastened vice of your hearts; but as though swept by the current of their lusts beyond the barrier at many points, men do such deeds as wantonly outrage Nature, upset her order, and confuse her distinctions. For men have, in fact, attempted to consort with goats and sows and mares, and women have gone mad with lust for male beasts. From such unions your Minotaurs and Aegipans [“goat Pans”], and, I suppose, Sphinxes and Centaurs have arisen.²¹

As I mentioned above, the words of the sober beast Gryllus (who was so well known in the Renaissance that Spenser could refer to him in the Faerie Queene with little explanation (“Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish minde” [2.12.87]) allows Burton to retrace his survey of acts “against nature” in reverse order, ending where he started, with bestiality, and thus give the impression of closure or completeness.

Burton's last sentence fulfills paratextual functions (in Gérard Genette's sense), since in it Burton names his addressees and attempts to clarify his intentions by saying what he does not want to achieve: “But that I do not teach by confuting, or that I make public what is not fitting for all to know (for not unlike Roderigo à Castro, I would like to have written this only for the learned) so that I would not give ideas about abominable crimes to light and depraved minds, I do not want to defile myself with these filthy matters any longer.” The sentence frames Burton's window, and he returns to English.

Rhetorically the sentence functions as another and ultimate figure of praeteritio—after it, Burton falls silent on the subject. Indeed, we have seen that praeteritio is the dominant rhetorical figure of this passage (expressed by conticesco, sileo, omitto). It should be noted that figures of “passing over” do not actually leave out—in one instance we found in fact that after saying omitto, Burton gives about as much information as he found in his source (Herodotus). From another point of view instances of praeteritio, characteristic of the discourse of and about same-sex desire, are signals marking and calling attention to the special status of what is foreshortened and seemingly omitted.

The switch from English to Latin makes a similar statement. It may be questionable whether actually, even from Burton's perspective, anyone who had progressed through the Anatomy of Melancholy to the third partition would or should be excluded from reading this passage. Would not a twelve-year-old grammar school student in the early seventeenth century have enough Latin to read this page? Perhaps. But my rhetorical question is deliberately gendered. Indeed, few women of the period would have had the Latin to read it—if we believe Retha M. Warnicke; even fewer would have been able to do so in the previous century.²² When, in the third edition of the Anatomy, Burton fleshed out slightly this paragraph on what he calls “brutish passion” by adding references to Roderigo à Castro's work De universa mulierum morborum medicina (the reference to Castro's account of masturbation and the middle clauses of the final sentence with the reference to Castro are among the few substantial additions he ever made to the entire passage), he used Castro's example to clarify the addresses he had in mind for his paragraph: the learned (docti)—perhaps it is an accident of Latin grammar that the dative he uses (doctis) obliterates gender. In the third edition, he expressly stated that it does not behoove just anyone to know the subject of his disquisition. Perhaps it should be noted that Castro, as he writes on women, has views about their faculties that are not only easily recognized as sexist now, but were attacked as such by another physician in the seventeenth century.²³

Thus, while there is no question that the paragraph excludes some readers, its language and style keep telling those who are able to read it that this is unusual material. But to claim that by changing certain formal features Burton wanted to add a special spice for his learned readers (in addition to giving them the satisfaction of recognizing themselves as cognoscenti) would probably be anachronistic. If one were to write a speech act theory of the seventeenth century, one would have to recognize (as Austin and Searle do in modern English for the speech acts of swearing, promising, proclaiming a couple man and wife, etc.) that language relating to sex (including so-called unnatural acts) has a special status: it not only denotes but suggests, conjures up, calls to mind, or in Burton's terms, calls to the imagination. To counteract this suggestiveness, authors writing on such matters will, as Burton does here, weave into their discourse a string of morally loaded terms, such as monstrous, abhorrent, and abominable. Because of this implicit assumption of how language works, I am tempted to take Burton's comment on Heliogabalus's amorous habits literally rather than idiomatically: quod dictu foedum et abominandum. In other words, if the supinum is given full force, not only Heliogabalus's practice, but to say it, is shameful and abominable. Since language thus is taken to infect the speaker Burton, it is possible that Burton may mean what he says when he finally refuses “to defile” himself with these matters any longer.²⁴

If some of the topics strung together in Burton's paragraph (necrophilia and the lust stimulated by statues and paintings) seem arcane, a glance into Renaissance compendia of learning will show the imaginative interest of these phenomena for minds of that period. The difference between such handbooks of loci communes and later alphabetical encyclopedias is crucial, since only the onomasiological principle of organization of the older reference works can prove my point, namely that the topics here pulled together by Burton were conventionally so conjoined—irrespective of the question whether Burton used such handbooks. Thus, for instance, in Zwinger's Theatrum humanae vitae, a section on necrophilia (entitled libido cum mortuis) is followed by a section on love of statues and images (aptly called libido mechanica, cum statuis et simulacris)—the latter with eight entries, which include all of Burton's exempla. These sections are followed by a very detailed collection of examples under the heading libido mascula (more than three folio pages), followed in turn by exempla under the title tribades (lesbians). The overarching title of the section, which also includes entries on libido bruta, is impudicia venerea.²⁵

With his remarks about Turks, Italians, and sworn celibates, and his association of same-sex love with them, Burton is at the center of the preoccupations and prejudices of Protestant churchmen of his time. Perhaps one might expect a scholar and librarian, who had access to some of the best repositories of learning, not to assume lightly and without proof the existence of a broad Italian apologetic tradition of pederasty in the wake of Tatius and Pseudo-Lucian. But as I have shown elsewhere, the condemnation of the Archbishop della Casa by his Protestant opponents on the basis of what may be called hearsay evidence was so general, before and after Burton, that it may be called a mainstay and commonplace of Protestant accounts of this topic; thus, it perhaps never even occurred to Burton to check on it. Since he is familiar with the polemical antipapal tradition in which John Bale was notable and notorious, it is perhaps worth noting that Burton does not include popes among his noted sodomitae, a fact all the more remarkable considering that even the usually measured Richard Hooker had presented the popes as giving themselves “unto acts diabolical.”²⁶ But, as we noted, if his reference to the physician Mercuriale to support his comment on the “masturbations of monks” is an error and not deliberate deception, the error is not accidental or random: it is a result of what he wanted to see and prove, the result of prejudice.

Therefore, while Burton's account is very much “middle of the road” in terms of Protestant discourse on this subject, it is not altogether commonplace. It is my impression that the references to Busbequius's observations on Turkish habits, and particularly those of Turkish women, were not yet part of the handbooks available: they would have had to come from Burton's own reading.²⁷ Although he seems to have used the learned compendium by Richerius or Rhodeginus (Caelius), to whom Burton refers on the topics of masturbation and lesbianism, he curiously does not seem to refer to the same author's detailed discussion of venus mascula.²⁸ Of course, Burton may have taken his phrase qui saxa mandant semina (who send their seed onto stones), which he applies to the Turks, from lib. 20, c. 10. The agricultural metaphor with which Burton continues (arare, also in Rhodeginus) makes this quite possible but not certain, since the phrase he uses is almost proverbial in this context.²⁹ The fact remains that he did not refer to the same author's physical account of what used to be called coitus praeposterus in the same chapter (lib. 20, c. 10 [col. 680]). Probably his sense of decorum forbade him to do so, for even in the language of the docti, some matters are not sayable, except in metaphor.

Finally, in spite of Burton's touching on so many commonplaces of Protestant homophobia, I sense what may be an important nuance, although here I am moving toward the realm of imponderables where proof is difficult if not impossible. As we saw, Burton switches from the topic of bestiality to that of sodomia with the sentence Nec cum brutis, sed ipsis hominibus rem habent, quod peccatum Sodomiae vulgo dicitur. If I am not overreading the logical link in nec cum brutis, sed ipsis hominibus, Burton is suggesting that on his scale of shame or abomination acts of sodomia are worse than acts of bestiality. Now it is true that all his examples of intercourse with (female) brute beasts implied a difference of sex, thus at least mechanical compatibility of organs, and the ipsis—“even” with men—refers to this change of topic. But if I sense a shrillness to Burton's voice at this point, this is so because I do not find his hierarchy credible: I suspect that such a ranking is not shared in the period even by the loudest Protestant railers against presumably “Roman” sodomia, and, more importantly, it seems to be refuted by Burton's own survey of “unnatural acts.”

When the arch-Protestant Henri Estienne writes a book to defend Herodotus against the charge of wild exaggeration, he collects some of the most outrageous deeds of modern times to suggest that the ancient historian deserves trust. In the course of demonstrating how the moderns outdo the ancients in monstrosities, he surveys the range of “acts against nature” in chapter 13 that touches on some of the topics we have been discussing. Toward the end of the chapter, Estienne recounts the case of a woman “who prostituted herself to a dog” and then of a woman from the Touraine who pretended to be a man in order to marry another woman—a case very similar, we noted, to the Turkish story Burton summarizes out of Busbequius and calls res plane incredibilis. This is how Estienne ranks the two cases on his own hierarchy of shame: “I have just told an extraordinarily strange misdeed: but I am going to cite another one that is even more so (although not so shameful) which also happened in our time some thirty years ago.”³⁰

Of course this would only be one man's personal scale against another's (and a Frenchman's against an Englishman's), if we did not have the evidence of Burton's own paragraph. When he claims that della Casa calls same-sex love “divine work” (divinum opus), he paraphrases this as “sweet crime” (suave scelus), and I cannot find della Casa nor any of the Protestants who chastised him using these terms. Encoding contradictory feelings of attraction and moral stricture, the oxymoron perhaps does not so much describe della Casa's attitude to his subject as Burton's own. As we have seen, his most insistent and expressive praeteritio in the entire paragraph is: “However, what Alcibiades says about the same Socrates, I feel free to keep silent about, but I also detest it—such an incitement it is to lust. And Theodoretus touches on that in, etc.” Burton presents the praeteritio as his own and not as Socrates' as Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith make it appear in their translation.³¹ Considering Burton's way of working with sources, of speaking with them and through them, the fact that his wording about the strength of the lure is borrowed from The odoretus does not take away from his seriousness. The opposite is true: Burton expresses his opinion using Theodoretus's words without indicating this specific dependence and then refers to Theodoretus as having touched on that subject. This is as clearly as this bookish man, with thousands of views and opinions of others at his fingertips, ever expresses his own opinion on this subject. If, then, Alcibiades' words to Socrates as he slips under the teacher's mantle are such a seductive incitement, how can same-sex love outrank bestiality in shamefulness? To all instances of praeteritio in this section we may apply the ancient adage cum tacent clamant.³² The figures of “passing over,” and particularly this one about Alcibiades' seductive words, indicate that Burton, following the fashion of homophobia of his time, overstated his sentiments; in other words, that his tone was a little strident. At the same time, the views and scales he expressed bear on claims made in recent discussions of Renaissance same-sex relationships that the Renaissance had no concept of homosexuality and therefore, strictly speaking, knew no homophobia.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Nicolas K. Kiessling and J. B. Bamborough for reading early versions of this essay and making useful suggestions. The textual editors of the new Oxford University Press edition of the Anatomy, Thomas Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, kindly supplied me with a pre-publication copy of their text (3:49-51). The segment under consideration is of partition 3, section 2, number 1, subsection 2 (the subsection is entitled: “How love tyrannizeth over men. Love or Heroical melancholy, his definition, part affected”).

2. “They have intercourse not only with animals, but even with men, which is familiarly called the sin of sodomy.”

3. Vita Herculis (Basel, 1539), 23-24.

4. Theodoretus, Opera omnia quae ad hunc diem Latine versa (Basel, 1608), 1140-41 (PG 83, col. 1139-42).

5. Lucian, “Affairs of the Heart,” ch. 51, Loeb Classical Library, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 8:229. Some of examples of male-male infatuation can be found in the largest commonplace book ever printed, Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum humanae vitae (Basel, 1576) under the heading libido mascula, including Plato (col. 2302), Anacreon (2304), Nero (2303 and 2304). It is worth noting that Zwinger rejects the view of Plato as an ordinary lover as incredible: “Verum tantam turpitudinem in tam excelsum animum cadere potuisse, incredibile videtur. Amavit ille Socratico more, non corpus sed animum” (2302). On praeteritio, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2d ed. (Munich: Hueber, 1970), 436-37 (§882-86).

6. Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements (London, 1597), bk. 3, chap. 32; and “Cambysis,” in Matthias's Theatrum historicum theoretico-practicum, cap. 2, sect. 6 “Incestus,” 2d ed. (Amsterdam, 1656), 171.

7. Iudice causam quaerente nihil respondent, sed excutum pede calceum invertunt. id iudici abominandae veneris indicium est. “They do not reply to the question of the judge, but remove a shoe and turn it upside down. This is for the judge a sign of perverted love” (Legationis Turcicae epistolae quatuor [Frankfurt, 1595], 145). See also (on the same subject) p. 81 and (on lesbian relationships) p. 146. Burton owned this edition. See Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: The Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), no. 268.

8. See my essay “‘That matter which ought not to be heard of’: Homophobic Slurs in Renaissance Cultural Politics,” Journal of Homosexuality, forthcoming. Also Gilles Ménage, Anti-Baillet ou critique du livre de Mr. Baillet intitulé Judgemens des savants, 2 vols. (La Haye, 1690), 2:88-153. Jewel, An Apologie, or Aunswer in Defence of the Church of England (London, 1562), fol. 24^v.

9. Du Moulin, Omnia quae exstant opera, 5 vols. (Paris, 1681), 5:ix (col. 1); Goldast, “In S. Valeriani … sermonem de bono disciplinae colectanea,” in Valerianus, De bono disciplinae sermo, ed. M. Goldast ([Geneva], 1601), 71. It would seem that David F. Greenberg walked into the same trap as did generations of Renaissance Protestants when he credits della Casa with a work written in 1550, De laudibus sodomia sev pederastiae (The Construction of Homosexuality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 323). Della Casa, Le terze rime de Messer Giovanni dalla Casa, di Messer [Gianfrancesco] Bino et d' Altri, in Berni, Tutte le opere del Bernia in terza rima, per Curtio Navo et Fratelli (n.p., 1538): 2-2^v (22-33). There are editions with the same title of 1540 and 1542; I am quoting from the 1538 edition. Of the later editions, I noted that the one of London (Giovanni Pickard, 1721) replaces piccino (29) by piccolino, that Gilles Ménage in the segment he quotes (p. 105) from the poem (see my n. 8) has quelle sue stracci for questi fratacci (27)—I do not know on what authority—and that the edition of “Usecht al Reno, 1760” replaces the adjective in the notorious phrase mestier divino (31) by dots.

10. After Ménage (see my n. 8), Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling once more published della Casa's (prose) letter of defense against Vergerio; see Casa, Latina Monumenta (Hallae Magdeb., 1709): 179-93. Here della Casa charges that his religious opponent Vergerio maliciously misreads the poem of his youth. He admits that the verses are licentious, but claims that they praise relationships with women, not men. Gundling reviewed the whole issue in his “Observatio VI: Joannes Casa an paederastiae crimen defenderit,” Observationum selectarum ad rem litterariam spectantium, 2d ed. (Halle, 1737), 2: 120-36, agreeing with Ménage and adding little of substance. Adolphus Clarmundus [i.e., Johann Christoph Rüdiger] argued what seems to be the opposite (Protestant) view in Vorrede zur Lebens-Beschreibung des weltberühmten Polyhistoris, Konrad Samuel Schurtzfleischens (Dresden & Leipzig, 1710) and Vitae clarissimorum in re literaria virorum, part 9 (Wittenberg, 1713), 8-9 (“Vorrede: Geneigter Leser”). Finally there is a rebuttal of Gundling (in style almost a return to the contentiousness of the age of the Reformation) by Johann Georg Schelhorn, Apologia pro Petro Vergerio adversus Joannem Casam, accedunt monumenta quaedam inedita (Ulm & Meiningen, 1774).

11. Elogia virorum literis illustrium (Basel, 1577), 711: “Ferunt eum ingenui adolescentis insano amore percitum, facile in lethalem morbum incidisse. Correpta enim cithara, quum eo incendio, & rapida febre torretur, supremi furoris carmina decantavit ita, ut mox delirantem, vox ipsa, et digitorum nervi, et vitalis denique spiritus, in verecunda urgente morte deserreent quum maturando indicio integrae, stataeque aetatis anni, non sine gravi Musarum iniuria, doloreque seculi, festinante fato eriperentur.”

12. Scriptores duo Anglici: De vitis Pontificum Romanorum, “Praefatio Joannis Balei ad Lectorem” (Lugd. Bat., 1615), 3 (2d count), 569-70; Bale, Scriptorum Catalogus (Basel, 1555-1559), 1:682.

13. Mercuriale, Medica practica seu de cognoscendis et curandis omnibus humani corporis affectionibus (Frankfurt, 1601), lib. 3, chap. 38 “De priapismo,” lists among the causes of priapism: “cogitationes frequentes rerum venererum, sermones, aspectus, abstinentia longa a coitu, propter hoc monachi solent saepe haec aegritudine tentari, nimias etiam coitus, strictura lumborum, manstrupatio sine seminis eiaculatione” (Frequent mulling over libidinous matters, words as well as images, long abstinence from intercourse—that is why monks are often tried by this illness—also excessive intercourse, constriction of the loins, and masturbation without ejaculation of semen). The passage in Galen (at the very end of De locis affectis, 6), to which Burton refers in the margin, is also on priapism. Galen here counsels a friend suffering from that condition to emit semen and distinguishes that action from a reprehensible use of the same activity.

14. Castro, De universa muliebrium morborum medicina, 2d ed. (Hamburg, 1617). For masturbation, see pars 2, lib. 1, chap. 15 “De gonorrhaea,” particularly p. 100 and (for the scholion) pp. 108-9. For tribades, fricatrices, subigatrices, and mutuus coitus incubus succubus, see pars 1, lib. 1, chap. 3 (p. 10) and pars 1, lib. 3, chap. 3 (p. 108). For the Caelius passage (about masturbation among the Lydians) which Burton cites (as does Castro), see Ludovicus Caelius Richerius [or Rhodiginus], Lectionum antiquarum libri xxx (Frankfurt, 1599), lib. 20, chap. 14 (cols. 939-40). Burton's reference (1.2 c. 14) seems faulty.

15. The story of the Turkish lady's elaborate scheme of wooing the daughter of a mean citizen is told in considerable detail by Busbequius, Epistolae (Frankfurt, 1595), 146. For H. Estienne, see L'introduction au traité de la conformitié des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ou Traité préparatif à l'apologie pour Hérodote, chap. 13 (Lyon, 1592), 97-98. See also my essay mentioned in n. 8.

16. See Herodotus, 2.89.

17. As Burton says, the story is told by Hegesippus (or Aegesippus), De bello Iudaico, lib. 2, chap. 4 (Cologne, 1559), 218-20.

18. Theatrum humanae vitae, 2301; Plinius, Historia mundi [i.e., Nat. hist.], ed. Jacobus Dalecampius (Frankfurt, 1599): 830 and Nat. hist. 35.3 (Meihoff ed., 5:234): “Gaius princeps tollere eas conatus est libidine accensus, si tectorii natura permisisset.” The difference shows strikingly the importance of using Renaissance editions when elucidating Burton's text. Burton's reference to Aelianus in the same sentence is to the unnamed Athenian youth who fell in love with the statue of good fortune and embraced it; see Aelianus, Variae historiae libri xiv, lib. 9, chap. 39 (Lyon, 1604), 259.

19. For Lampridius's account of Heliogabalus, see, e.g., Historiae augustae scriptores sex, ed. I. Casaubon (Paris, 1603), 169D: “Libidinum genera quaedam invenit, ut sphinthrias veterum malorum vinceret: & omnes apparatus Tiberii et Caligulae et Neronis norat.”

20. The reference is to Seneca Nat. quaest. 1.16.

21. Plutarch, Moralia, trans. H. Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 12:519-23; Plutarch, Quae exstant omnia, Lat. trans. Xylander (Frankfurt, 1599), 2:990D.

22. Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 194-96.

23. Johann Peter Lotichius, Gynaicologia (Rinteln, 1630), 18-19. As far as I can tell, Lotichius's praise of women is serious and not declamatio.

24. For a more strident version of a sentence in similar position, i.e., at the end of a clearly Protestant disquisition on sodomia (which also mentions della Casa), see Heinrich Salmuth: “I will say no more, since its mere name may somehow infect my pages” (Nihil dicam amplius: cum vel solum ipsius nomen chartas quodammodo inficiat); Guido Pancirolli, Rerum memorabilium libri duo cum commentariis ab H. Salmuth (Frankfurt, 1646), pars 1, tit. 43 (p. 222).

25. Theatrum humanae vitae, 2301-302.

26. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. 3, chap. 1, 13 (Oxford, 1890), 286.

27. He annotated his copy extensively; see Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton, no. 268.

28. Lectionum antiquarum libri XXX, lib. 15, c. 9 and 10 (1599 ed., cols. 676-80).

29. Rhodeginus, Lectionum, col. 679: “Cognata iis sunt, quae Maximus scribit Tyrius: Cum masculo, inquit, corpore iniqua fit permixtio, sterilisque congressus. Quid saxis mandas semina? Sabulum quid aras?” As we saw, Burton's printer may have misread the Roman numerals, mistaking book XX for book II.

30. Estienne, L'introduction au traitté de la conformité des merveilles anciennes avecles modernes: ou Traitté préparatif à l'Apologie pour Hérodote, chap. 13 (Lyon, 1592), 97: “Ie vien de reciter un forfait merveilleusement estrange: mais i'en vay reciter un autre qui l'est encore d'avantage, (non pas toutefois si vilain) advenu aussi de nostre temps, il y a environ trente ans.” After telling the story, Estienne says that the modern cross-dresser is more detestable than the ancient tribades (lesbians).

31. “And in truth it was this very Socrates who said of Alcibiades: gladly would I keep silent, and I am averse, he offers too much incentive to wantonness.” Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. F. Dell and P. Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1955), 652.

32. My argument here owes much to Stephen Orgel's essay “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 7-29. Other important works on the subject include Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982); James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); G. Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Eve K. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Claude J. Summers, “Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or, the Anxieties of Anachronism,” South Central Review 9 (1992): 2-23.