by Nanette Ashby
For the first episode of our brand new podcast Culturally Curious, I am joined by Dr Jonas Roelens. He is a historian and professor specializing in the history of homosexuality. His PhD research focused on early modern urban discourses on sodomy in the Southern Netherlands. I wanted to know all about his research, specifically the perception of sodomy during the Middle Ages and why it was so harshly persecuted. We speak about how sodomy was used in both politics and religious debates at the time. We also discuss how surprisingly different the role of Sex work was in society compared to today and how pleasure factors into this discussion. I especially wanted to get Jonas on the podcast to talk about what kind of challenges one can run into when doing this kind of research. In particular when looking for Lgbtq+ ancestors through the ages. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversations because it illustrates how our perception of sexuality changes based on the culture and time we live in. It was a pleasure to explore this field of research with Dr Roelens.
Please let us know your thoughts over on our instagram page @raffia_magazine // https://www.instagram.com/raffia_magazine/
If you like this episode please leave us a rating and review on Spotify- It is really appreciated!
You can find Dr Roelens’ work here: https://ugent.academia.edu/JonasRoelens/
Books mentioned:
- The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages by Katherine Harvey
- Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Studies in the History of Sexuality) by Michael Rocke
- The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun
Episode Transcript:
Dr Jonas Roelens
The sexual actions don’t really change but our social scripts our cultural codes surrounding them do change constantly.
Nanette Ashby
Welcome to the first episode of Culturally Curious where history and culture have never been so titillating with me, your host, Nanette Ashby. This week I’m joined by Dr. Jonas Roelens. He’s a historian and Professor specializing in the history of homosexuality. His PhD research focused on early modern urban discourses on sodomy in the southern Netherlands. I wanted to know all about his research, specifically the perception of sodomy during the Middle Ages, and why it was so harshly persecuted. We speak about how sodomy was used in both politics and religious debates at the time. We also discussed how surprisingly different the role of sex work was in society compared to today and how pleasure factors into this discussion. I especially wanted to get Jonas on the podcast to talk about what kind of challenges one can run into when doing this kind of research, in particular when looking for LGBTQ+ ancestors through the ages. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation because it illustrates how our perception of sexuality changes based on the culture and time we live in. It was a pleasure to explore this field of research with Dr. Roelens, you can find more information and links to everything we talked about in this episode in the show notes over at raffia-magazine.com Please let us know your thoughts are on our Instagram page @raffia_magazine. If you liked this episode, please leave us a rating and review over on Spotify. It is really appreciated.
Welcome to the first installment of Culturally Curious and we have Jonas Roelens with us today. What made you first interested in the field of research that you do in first place?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Well, to be completely honest, and I probably shouldn’t tell this to students, but I got into this field by procrastination. I just was a student myself, I was enjoying city life too much. I’m a former country boy, that was going to the pub. It was pre Corona of course. The deadline neared when I had to give it a theme for my bachelor thesis. And I hadn’t got a clue whatsoever. But I recently bought a book by Germaine Greer called the boy on the fleeting beauty of boys and art throughout history. And I figured, hell, why shouldn’t I write a paper on homo-eroticism and Renaissance arts? And all of a sudden, I discovered that besides that one book, there was a whole field of academic literature on representation of queerness of homo-eroticism in art. And so I got started, and I submitted that bachelor thesis. And I wrote the master thesis. And then I was rather arrogant. And I said to my promoter, well, I’m not done yet. Is there any way of doing further research on this theme. And luckily, for me, there was just this pot of gold discovered somewhere, so I got the scholarship. And I could start on a PhD research. And yeah, a few years later, I’m sitting in Nijmegen talking to you. If you don’t know what to do, or how to write papers, just bear in mind that leaving it to the very last minute can be very productive.
Nanette Ashby
That’s good to know. I also have to do my bachelor thesis proposal this week. So that’s good to know!
Dr Jonas Roelens
It may change your life!
Nanette Ashby
So first of all, let’s contextualize what we’re going to talk about today. So what was happening during the Middle Ages in Europe, more specifically in the Netherlands, since that’s what you focused on? And also, what is the time period we’re actually talking about, because Middle Ages is quite a big span of time. So can you tell us more about that?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Yeah, precisely. The Middle Ages is like a millennium, it is 1000 years. And within that particular period, I focused on the later Middle Ages, the start of the early modern period, as well, so I looked at the 15th century and went on until the 16th and 17th century, so the gap between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. I researched the perception and persecution of sodomy in the Southern Low Countries. And sodomy is a broad umbrella term which is derived from the biblical tale of Sodom to a city, biblical city that was destroyed by God with fire and brimstone because the male inhabitants allegedly had unnatural, quote unquote, sexual activities with one another. And so God was obviously not pleased by this because they interfered with the divine hierarchy and the natural order. And so this biblical crime became alleged automation during the medieval periods to punish all kinds of unnatural sexual acts. And sodomy is indeed a very broad term because it is used to denote all kinds of sexual acts that aren’t aimed at procreation such as masturbation best reality, bestiality, child abuse, anal intercourse between men and women, but first and foremost homoerotic acts. And that’s interesting because it clearly illustrates how our attitudes, our perception of sexuality evolves continuously. A lot of people think that sex is purely biological and is determined biologically. And it’s true that the acts the sexual actions don’t really change, but our social scripts, our cultural codes surrounding them do change constantly. What is taboo nowadays, is perfectly normal in previous centuries, and vice versa. So, the idea that you align bestiality or a crime like child abuse with homoerotic sex with consent is very intriguing indeed. And so that was the case in the Middle Ages. And because it was so such a taboo, it was a biblical crime, it was punished very severely. In the Netherlands, general punishment was death through fire, which had a very symbolical meaning, the idea that you use that divine punishment in the sort of miniature version to make sure that no one would ever try and do this at home. That was the idea.
Nanette Ashby
It was a deterrent to show that is was really not a good idea to participate in.
Dr Jonas Roelens
No no no and they used a huge public scenery, it was a huge ceremony at the city gates or at the public square to make sure that everyone knew that a sodomite was being burned, and that this specific city was a place of law and order in which the kind of actions weren’t allowed.
Nanette Ashby
And what was happening during that time? For example, what would my daily life look like? And what were the things I would read in the newspaper around the time?
Dr Jonas Roelens
You would read a lot of condemnations. The discourse is purely and solidly religious because of course, the biblical punishment is omnipresent. And so you could read about it in whatever source you would like., basically. That’s really interesting on that whole medieval attitude on sexuality, sodomy is a huge taboo, it’s a crime that shouldn’t be mentioned, you should remain silent about it. Even in Latin it’s called the Peccatum mutum, the silent sin, but wherever you’re looked in the urban atmosphere, you could read and hear about sodomy, whether it’s in songs, in travel journals, in newsprints in theological legal tracks, it’s always discussed, always in a very religious condemnation, that religious combination is omnipresent. Look at what God did with the sodomites. So we should do the same. The fear that if we don’t interact or react, God will come upon us again and will unleash his wrath upon society is very present. I find that highly intriguing that the actions decisions of individuals allegedly had an impact on the entire community, they persecute people, because they are afraid that they will receive divine punishments like floods, or war, or plagues, etc. And what is intriguing by that is that these kinds of motives are still to be found in some parts of the world today, when plague strikes, or when when there’s an earthquake or whatever, you always have some people, usually religious fanatics, who claim well, this is a punishment of God, because we are too tolerant towards the LGBTQ+ community. Even during the recent COVID pandemic, you had rabbis and Christian preachers, etc, who claimed w ell, you see what we get from allowing pride to take place in our country. So that’s interesting to see that link between that medieval attitude and our present day perception of some people.
Nanette Ashby
It’s true. And you also said that it was a taboo, although we do have a lot of documents about it. Normally, sex is something quite private, it’s a taboo in our society as well. So how do you go about finding those documents in the archives? For example, how do you find these documents to prove it, and as you said before, the court records, for example, are usually always in a quite negative light as a negative witness or hostile witness.
Dr Jonas Roelens
That’s one of the main problems or areas that you need to cross as a scholar or academic doing this kind of research, because as you told my main source are those legal records those court records so unfortunately, I would love to find a diary or personal letters or have people involved but I always have to look at them or learn back them through the lens of the authorities of the persecutors. So whenever I’m reading interrogations or verdicts, it’s not those people themselves talking. It’s the authorities. It’s the bailiff, it’s the local aldermen, etc, who are talking, which is very annoying. Because as you said, they are always very condemnatory, they are very negative. It’s difficult to find the voice of those people involved. Yet those court records can tell us a huge deal about the day to day business of those people’s daily lives, where they met one another, what kind of sexual activities they were doing, if they were long term lovers or if it were onenightstands. Those are all aspects you can read through the lines in those court records. So one could tell much about the typical, I wouldn’t call it subculture because that’s a bit anachronistic, but about the places where those people met and found one another. For instance, I found in the city of Brugges, which was renowned for its sodomites. At the time nowadays, it’s a boring provincial city or town. I can say that because I grew up not far from there. And whenever the tourist buses leave at six o’clock it’s dead and no one goes out anymore. Beautiful but boring. This is evolving into a touristic. But at the time, it was the Metropole of Flanders. And in fact, Europe, or every prestigious economic goods was to be found there. And so you had a lot of foreign tradesmen, etc, a very vibrant atmosphere, a lot of bath houses, which were also used as brothels and very urban metropole. And so there were a lot of places like taverns in bath houses that were known to be prone to sodomites. And so you had these local subculture networks in that city, and those places can be found through those court records. So yeah, it’s very difficult. It’s a difficult task. But if you look, if you are prepared to do the hours and read all those foliages, you can find a lot of information, even though it’s still a taboo. A lot of court records are very short, cryptic, it’s very annoying and frustrating to read pages and pages on simple thefts of commodities and utility products. And then you finally find the sodomy case and then the hangman rights are, yeah, we prosecuted this person on this day for sodomy point. Oh, and it cost me this much amount of money because I used straw and a chain and a horse to carry him around. And so it’s mostly a financial account. Basically, they want to make sure they they didn’t lose any money over the execution, rather than telling me or us what actually occurred.
Nanette Ashby
During your research and the court cases, something I’ve come across was that sex or virginity was also seen as quite a commodity. Could there also be a connection that because of this commodification of virginity that sodomy was even more perpetuated, or that that had a connection?
Dr Jonas Roelens
But that’s interesting, because let’s zoom out and look at medieval Italy, for instance, you have very good studies on like medieval Florence, a city that was also renowned for its sodomy culture. If you wanted to slur or scold someone in that period, for instance, in German – Du bist ein Florenzer! You’re a faggot, one would say now, this is a very negative perception. But Florence was known for its homosocial subculture. And there you see also that that sort of commodity, young boys or young adults, who are already sexually active but not yet ready to start a family of your own because they lack financial means. You see preachers like Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola, preaching about how dishonest it is for parents to prominade, to walk with their young teenage boys hoping that they would find an older gentleman who would be interested in them and would give them presents and would start a sexual relationship with them. So this is a very rare case of the commodification of sex in which the beauty of those teenage boys is used as a as a benefit for the family. And then on the other hand, you find that prostitution is tolerated there to a large extent, because they want those boys to go to prostitutes, rather than having sex with other men or boys. So you see that they have a very, how to say it, very utilitarian function towards it. That’s very true what you say about the commodification. Yes, yes. And virginity plays a huge role in it of course, especially in certain circles, the elite the nobility, once you’re you lost your virginity, you are a social outcast if you’re not married. So there are very clear visual distinctions as well. Young girls are allowed to wear their hair loose, but the respectable women should tie their hair and hide it, etc, etc. So we have all these cultural codes to distinguish between people based on their sexual status.
Nanette Ashby
Okay, so you could, for example, see if someone who was already sexually active by the things they wore and how they did their hair, how they presented themselves?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Especially with girls. Yeah, not so much with boys. But with girls. There are cultural codes. For instance, prostitutes that were required to wear certain colors to distinguish them from others. But there are also ridiculous beauty ideals that also go back to those marital status and types of virginity because for instance, you had tracks of course written by men, who .discuss the ideal form of the female breasts. Bigger is not better at that time because the small breasts refers to virginity, the more sex you had at court allegedly, the bigger your breasts became young women with small breasts were sure to be virgins, and so that was idealized in art, etc. Really strange. So it seems to us but that whole aspect is important at the time.
Nanette Ashby
Okay. And coming back to Netherlands, the Netherlands was split up into two parts, and that one part stayed Catholic and one Protestant. Do we see that there is a difference in how sodomy was seen, the prosecution levels for example, is there a difference? Or is it just christian.
Dr Jonas Roelens
No, no, there are, there are, there are differences between those religions and the way in which they deal with it. But what is often, what I find fascinating and what is often unmentioned in your typical history class in high school and even at university when they talk about the reformation, is how sex and sodomy is omnipresent in that discussions. Protestant preachers like Luther and Calvin are talking a lot about sexuality in fact, not only because they find celibacy unuseful and they prefer the marital states and so men and women should be married and have sex and unlike the Catholic vision very should remain chaste and celibate, but they also use homo-eroticism and sodomy as a sort of slur, as a way of making sure that people detained from Catholicism and join the Protestant flock because they they constantly slur the Pope, the Cardinals, your common priests, your monks, as prone to sodomy, as sodomitical monsters. And those monasteries are depicted as free havens for sexual orgies, etc, etc. And the idea is very clear. You’re sexually unfit, you made the wrong sexual choice, because engaging in sodomy is a choice, there’s not some thing as a sexual orientation. So it’s your own fault, your own responsibility. So those priests are unpure, join the good side, so to speak, get away from the dark side. And of course, it’s propaganda and they enlarge knit and broadsheets and songs, etc. But there is something to say in those monastic environments, there was a century old tradition of remaining silent about scandals and condoning homoerotic acts. So, Luther was very clever and looking at their Achilles heel or their weak spot and using it to his own advantage. But in terms of actual prosecution, you see that the southern parts present they Belgium remains Catholic, the northern part becomes Protestant, but it doesn’t have an immediate effect. It’s only until the 18th century, so way past the middle ages that the Republic present the Netherlands becoming preoccupied with sodomy. It’s in the 1730s, when they started prosecuting people, which is interesting in itself, because at the time, the Netherlands is going through a crisis, and it’s always in periods of crisis, whether socio economic or cultural or religious, that people tend to become more anxious, scared about sodomy. When I was talking earlier about Brugges, they started prosecuting sodomites when the city was going through an economic crisis, when those foreign merchants went away to Antwerp. When there was political upheaval, you need the scapegoat, an unrelenting minority. It is the same in the Republican in the 1730s, when the so called Golden Age is vanishing. And when the seven things are no longer their monopoly, and why? Because our men became a feminist and started having sex with one another, and are not real men anymore. So the same kind of dynamics are at display here.
Nanette Ashby
That can also be reflected in today’s society that we’re still looking for some minority to blame.
Dr Jonas Roelens
Unfortunately yes. Yes, you see it, it’s a very human reactionary thing. In present day politics, you see it very often, it’s the fault of that particular political party who is at power at the times, it’s those minorities, it’s the migrants who come to steal our jobs. It’s those people. Trump was talking about the Chinese virus, it’s their fault. It’s so, it’s very human, I think, to look at an minority. And that’s, I think, one of the important lessons that history can teach us looking at these patterns. Why do people become more tolerant or intolerant at certain points in history? I think that’s very fascinating and has a lot of interesting lessons to our contemporary society as well.
Nanette Ashby
That’s true. We talked about the aristocracy and the clergy. But do we actually know what the everyday person had to say about this? Because based on the literacy rates, a lot of people couldn’t actually put down their ideas and thoughts. So does that mean that the information we have is biased? Or do you think that the same things that are written down, that we have, are reflected in those societies
Dr Jonas Roelens
To a certain extent, especially for that medieval period, it’s certainly biased, because as you rightfully pointed out, to the majority, the vast majority of our sources is written by the elite by literate people, by scholars by by clergyman etc. Then again, especially in the Low Countries, you shouldn’t underestimate the level of literacy, especially in that urban environment, boys and girls get a very good degree of basic education. So many people can read, not Latin, of course, but in the vernacular, we see a lot of texts also discussing sodomy and we see how sermons that were addressed to the public were later distributed in print. So one can fairly assume that those ideas are also trickling down into the general public. Another clue that gives us away something about how people thought or felt about it, or how they knew about it is by by false accusations. People used sodomy as a way of dealing with with people they didn’t like whether it’s in relative in their family or a competitor in their same guilt or neighbor or whatnot, you see that people accuse others of sodomy. And sometimes they are, of course discovered and then they get fined because they slandered someone, but it shows that people know about it, have negative ideas about it and use it to their own advantage. So one could say that the general public was aware of these acts and the associations surrounding it. One nice example, for instance, is a guy and once again, Brugges because a lot of sources come from that city is one who is constantly fired. He has a lot of jobs, but he sucks at all of them. And so he constantly gets fired, and at a particular moment is fed up or tired to death. And it goes to the commercial building Wall Street of Brugges, so to speak, and at the gates, he puts a big list and said, well, all these people are buggers. And then he puts a list of names and we don’t know if that’s true, but we know that he was frustrated and angry and he uses that slur so people also use it in up fights. When someone from Ghent and someone for Antwerp have a beer, for instance, and they get into a brawl. They say, well, you’re a bugger. You’re a bugger. So you see that. It’s a it’s a slur. It’s a slang. It’s used a lot. Yeah, so you can find those regular common people in those sources once in a while.
Nanette Ashby
Okay. We also touched on sex work already, but I wanted to get some more information. From my research, I heard that sex work was a lot more accepted than it is today. Today, it’s very criminalized. And even though the Netherlands is known as a very liberal and very open society, but it came up that actually sex work was seen as more like a necessary evil, that it was actually it had its function. And that if you decided to stop with sex work, the retention was to just get married and have children. So I think it’s quite interesting that prostitution was seen as a lesser problem than sodomy. Is that confirmed or?
Dr Jonas Roelens
It shows up time and time again, the idea that prostitutes are to be pitied or that it’s a huge taboo is a very Victorian idea, actually. And in the Middle Ages, it’s hardly the case. Especially in the Netherlands, we see that those women engaging in sex work aren’t the the poor, marginalized tragic figures that should be pitied or despised, they are far more accepted and protected than you can imagine. They do have legal protection, we know cases in which if brothels are being punished, it’s never the sex worker itself, it’s the person organizing, running the brothel because they are causing upheaval or accesses or not paying their personnel as much as they should. A sex workers are protected from excessive rents to rent a place, etc. So you see that it’s far more acceptable than one could imagine. And it has a huge tradition, as you said, the lesser evil is a theory that was developed already by St. Augustine. So one of church fathers who claim that, well, if you want to keep your castle clean, you need to have a place where you can deposit the shit, so to speak. And so if you want to keep your society pure, well, you need to have some outlets, you need to have some places in which people can engage in that kind of action. So what I find particularly interesting is that sex work was some kind of export product in the Netherlands. And you’ll have a lot of brothels in England and in Italy as well that have Dutch names. The Flemish peacock or the Dutch whatnots – very often birds. Not only names, but Dutch women were wanted there as well. And they weren’t part of some some human traffic network or they weren’t victims. No, they were wanted. I wouldn’t call them celebrities, but they were appreciated for their profession, and they were highly in demand. And so yeah, not the marginalized figure we tend to make out of them.
Nanette Ashby
Okay. As you said before, part of sodomy is also masturbation and doing things that is not the PnV, penetration sex. So how does pleasure then come into the whole thing? So pleasure isn’t really something you should engage in? But of course, people want to have pleasure. So how does that work?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Now we touch upon what we mentioned earlier, the distinction between the visions of the elite and day to day basis or practice. That’s also true for heterosexual activities, of course, because the Church teaches that you should only engage in intercourse to procreate and you shouldn’t enjoy it. And there’s only one position and that’s the man on top and there’s one, I can’t remember his name, but one medieval theologian who actually makes a calendar of the days on which you can have sex and Fridays out of the question because that’s the day Lord died. Sunday is the Holy Mass, forget about Easter and Christmas, etc. So if you want to have sex, you need to book your date quite early according to but of course people didn’t follow those rules and especially in worldly sources, you see that pleasure is being celebrated and also very intriguing medicinal sources. Yeah, scientific sources, doctors, physicians who claim that well, sex is healthy and natural and one should engage in sex because you need to unleash your bodily fluids to remain healthy. And sometimes, although masturbation is considered sodomy, according to some, some doctors prescribe masturbation to remain healthy, and one should engage in pleasure, because and that’s also a strange idea, but it has surprising consequences. Women need to have sexual pleasure as well if you want to have a baby, because some doctors believe that women also ejaculate and also have semen. And it’s a combination of both human male and female that results in a baby. So you can’t just go about and do your business without having consent of your partner and making sure that she is also enjoying it. So that’s an another issue that one hardly associates with medieval sexuality, but it’s part and parcel of medicinal views on sexuality. So pleasure is far more present than one imagines. So we have a lot of projections, we have ideas and fantasies on the Middle Ages. Like for instance, the chastity belt is also one of those things – a Victorian invention that is used in Victorian age to stop youngsters from masturbating and was never used in the Middle Ages, except in plays and in jokes from some foolish people who believe that that will keep their wife chaste, or loyal. But it’s not really considered a serious option in that period. So people or sex is not so much taboo. They talk about it, they make jokes about it, they write dirty novels about it. So, so yes, and pleasure is omnipresent in all of those media. So that’s very cool.
Nanette Ashby
That’s really cool.
How strong the case need to be for conviction, because you mentioned that it could be abused by people who are frustrated, and use as accusations. But how strong the case need to be to actually conclude in a burning of a person?
Dr Jonas Roelens
It depends on a lot of aspects. One, for instance, is the social capital of the person involved, because in a lot of cases, you have people who come to testify in defense of one accused, like this is our neighbor, he’s a very respected person, in our community, etc. So that is taken into advantage. People from the nobility are legally protected for being prosecuted, the king or the prince or whatever could detract them from urban courts. Other aspects are the individual zeal of the persecutor, while one particular bailiff is very keen on prosecuting someone or not, because those people are often very corrupt. You have a lot of cases in which they accept hush money, and then they let it go, let it drop. It depends. Sometimes rumors are enough, because the city authorities, especially in the Low Countries have a practice called passing truth. Once a year, they go to every parish, and they say, well, what kinds of crimes did we fail to resolve? So now’s the time to snitch on your neighbors and whatever. And you have sometimes that sodomy is being mentioned as well. So rumors are sometimes enough. Sometimes you have cases in which people are persecuted for something that happened 12 years ago, so you didn’t have really, you don’t have any actual proof. And in other cases, people are let scot free because they say, well, we didn’t have any confession or any testimonial or whatever. Then again, confessions are taken under torture. So you can argue whether or not those are actual proper confessions and proof for what actually happened. In other cases, people are caught red handed because privacy is a very modern concept. And people had sex in public places like those taverns and inns. But they also had to share beds or workplaces and whatever. So in a number of cases, people were actually arrested while being in the midst of the action.
Nanette Ashby
Okay, as you mentioned, if people had money or were proud to lead, it was not very likely for them to get prosecuted. Was that the same for the church as well?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Another parallel with the medieval period, if you make the rules, you can bend around your rules. And that’s part of the reason why Luther who I mentioned earlier was so keen on talking about sodomy among the clerical class. Of course, sodomy was omnipresent in that particular subculture as well, because they were due to celibacy and because they were living in an all male environment, you had the perfect mixture of elements. And yes, it occurred a lot. And it was also true that they were punished far less severely because they had their own courts. They didn’t have to go to the urban court. They had their Episcopal court where they were punished by their peers. And unfortunately, the church was very keen on keeping scandals away much like in our present. Cases of child abuse were washed up and priests were transferred to another parish, etc. much like up until the 21st century. So yeah, again another parallel even though the theological condemnation is very severe and sodomy should be avoided at all costs. If it happens among certain groups, it’s a lesser evil than when it happens in unwanted groups like vagabonds or migrants or whatever they are punished, far more intense than those clergymen.
Nanette Ashby
There is a trend to try and find representatives of minority groups, for example, feminism, they’re looking for female artists, and also the LGBTQ+ community. What are some issues that come with that, when you try and look back at history and want to find those role models?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Right, the field of doing research, doing historic research on homosexuality started with just that, a treasure trove looking at the very first gays in history as a sort of legitimization. Well, look, if this famous king or this this bright poet, or this talented sculptor was was homosexual, then how could it be bad? We herald those people. So let’s herald homosexuality. That was one of the main agenda points of the fields at the beginnings, but we’ve evolved and we know, as I said, sex isn’t purely biological or determined biologically, it’s culturally constructed. So we need to acknowledge that people in the past didn’t identify as queer or gay or homosexual, or whatever, as we do nowadays, because every society and culture has its own ways of giving meaning to identities, I find that very difficult or inconvenient truth, especially towards young students, young people who are in many cases, often searching towards their own identity towards their own sexuality, and who can perhaps find confidence, faith, comfort in the past, and I don’t want to be the person telling them that they can’t use those forefathers or figureheads with their own benefits. It happens in far more recent fields as well, because after the one of the main new topics historians are working on is trans history looking at intersexuality, trans identities in the past. You see the tendency to look at what they call transestors. But it’s the same thing at play, you need to be very on your guard. When looking at identities in the past, I think it’s important to stress that there have always been people attracted to people of their same gender and that there have always been people who felt uncomfortable with the assigned gender at birth, and that intersexuality or and those issues that are widely discussed in our present day society aren’t a modern fad, or a trend or a hype. People discussed it throughout the human history, but they always had other terminology, other mental frameworks to talk about it to give meaning to it. So you can’t just pinpoint one finger and say, Oh, look, here, he’s he’s gay, let’s celebrate them. But you need to make people aware has been discussing sexual identities generate entities throughout our history. So it’s not something that pops out of the blue. It’s, it’s more visible, it’s more debatable. It’s another way of giving meaning and looking at it, but it’s not the new tendency or a new idea. So that’s what I want to stress when talking about it to students and teaching about it.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, because that reminds me when I was in high school, studying art, we found that that Michelangelo was supposedly gay. And our teacher was very firm, and we don’t talk about it. That is not up for debate. We’re not considering that and anything we do. And remember that there was a lot of protests from us, because we thought that was interesting and cool and new, and it was the thing everybody was talking about. But I remember being surprised how harsh it was.
Dr Jonas Roelens
That’s of course, a ridiculous reaction of a teacher, the person in question should have said, well, we shouldn’t or it is difficult to call Michelangelo gay in the present day. But let’s take a look at at why that is being said. Then let’s take a look at his love poetry he wrote to Tommaso dei Cavalieri And let’s take a look at the drawings he made for that boy. And so yes, of course, Michelangelo had love interests towards other men towards adults. He also made drawings and sculptures that were explicitly homoerotic who use Greek mythology to make to give meaning to that. So yes, let’s discuss it with students. Let’s talk about it. Let’s use the historical terminology and contextualize it.
Nanette Ashby
It was not up for debate.
Dr Jonas Roelens
Don’t censor it! What kind of ridiculous ideas that?!
Nanette Ashby
Well I come from Southern Germany, so we’re not that open.
Dr Jonas Roelens
Then again, in its own days, Albrecht Dürer was gossiped about his love interest towards men as well, so Germans should know that.
Nanette Ashby
We ask our guests the same question at the end, what are you still curious about in your field?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Oh, lots of stuff. I am very keen on looking at in future research projects on the 18th century. That’s a coming project. Because in the literature, it’s always mentioned how that 18th century is the rise of the subculture. Paris, London, Amsterdam has those Molly houses, visual groups, and everything changes. It’s sort of the proto identity. And I think that’s very fascinating. And those, those three cities have come to symbolize the entirety of Europe. And I want to look at some small scale cities like Antwerp and some northern cities of France to look at continuities, because you won’t tell me that in the course of a single generation, or in a few years, everyone has changed their mentalities and I find continuities far more interesting than a sudden changes. So that’s one of the points I want to investigate and some further research and representation in arts because I’m recently working on a new book and guided tour in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent that tells queer stories. So I was able to make a tour based on 10 plus paintings and artworks that are there in the permanent collection, but have never been talked and discussed about in a queer sense. So I want to expand that and look at how can we tell stories through art through visual history through visual sources on that perspective? So lots of work to be done.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, that’s true. Do you have any recommendations books, for example, if people want to dive into this topic, more?
Dr Jonas Roelens
Very recent or good book on medieval sexuality in general, but I forget the name of the author is The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (by Katherine Harvey) medieval sexuality. It’s just came out a few months ago, and it’s quite accessible. So that would be my number one to go. There’s a whole range of literature on sodomy during the medieval and early modern period, as well. I talked about Florence. Michael Rocke Forbidden Friendships, that is one of the books that that formed my academic career. So that would be a great one. But there’s a lot of new interesting research as well. A new book is the The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun, and she discusses intersexuality throughout the early modern and medieval period. So that’s a good example of how the field continues to move on, not simply male, same sex acts, which was the huge issue back in the day. And now we start to look at other sexual identities and possibilities. The study of the past is always shaped by present society. And we see that these ideas are trickling down into our research. So I think we have some very interesting intriguing publications to come.
Nanette Ashby
There are always more books to read!
Dr Jonas Roelens
Exactly.
Nanette Ashby
Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for listening everybody! And we hope to see you again in two weeks. Bye! Bye!
You can find more information and links to everything we talked about in this episode in the show notes over at raffia-magazine.com. And please let us know what you think over on Instagram at @raffia_magazine. If you liked this podcast, why don’t you leave us a lovely review on Spotify? Thanks so much for listening and all your support for the podcast. I’ll catch you in the next episode. Bye!
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