![]() Joan Cadden has demonstrated that the discourse of “nature” was far from unitary. 2 Boswell argued that this changed in the thirteenth century, when legal systems began to adopt strict penalties (and sometimes enforce them) and churchmen, following in particular the lead of Thomas Aquinas, used the discourse of “nature” to cast any nonreproductive sex as deeply deviant. 1 When Peter Damian wrote his Book of Gomorrah sometime around the middle of the eleventh century, the first major blast against same-sex relations among the clergy, the Pope declined to act on it. ![]() John Boswell argued that up until the twelfth century, same-sex desire and activity were not a major concern to the church or to lay society (writing in the late 1970s he used the terms “homosexuality” and “gay people”). The chronology of the widespread criminalization of same-sex activity in medieval Europe is generally agreed upon.
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