Crimes Against God, Rape, and Sodomy in Renaissance Venice

OK, I managed to read another chapter of Guido Ruggiero’s The Boundaries of Eros this morning, on sodomy in Renaissance Venice (14th-15th centuries).

Once again: I am reading this and other books to try and form an opinion of Silvia Federici’s claim (in Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation) that there was a dramatic increase in working class violence against women in the 14th and 15th centuries, encouraged by the ruling class as a means of diffusing class rebellion. She basesm this on the work of Jacques Rossiaud, whose book Medieval Prostitution I have yet to read.

Having now read most of Ruggiero’s book (there remains an essay on “normal sexuality”) I can’t say that he confirms or disproves Federici’s claim. What he does do is provide a very readable and interesting account of illicit sex in Renaissance Venice.
It seems that of the various sex crimes that were prosecuted at the time, a clear hierarchy of concern emerges, with the following being the order from least serious to most serious:

1. rape of a woman
2. adultery
3. fornication
4. crimes against god (sex with clergy, in a church, or between Christians and Jews)
5. sodomy

These categories are unfortunately not the exact categories used by the Venetian officials at the time, they’re the categories Ruggiero uses. So for instance, rape of a noblewoman by a non-noble was actually considered very serious, as was rape of a pre-pubescent child (though less serious than consensual sodomy). Sex between Christians and Jews was more serious than sex with clergy, and in fact was one of the (rhetorical?) motivations behind legislation stigmatizing Jews. Likewise, Jewish men who had sex with Christian women were tried and convicted, but Christian men were not prosecuted for having sex with Jewish women.

Nevertheless, if the above hierarchy is misleading it nevertheless gives enough information to make some clear observations. Indeed, the exceptions only seem to prove the rule.

What we can observe is that the State was completely and utterly uninterested in women’s welfare except insofar as these women represented a form of capital for the men in their lives. Ruggiero gives some examples where individual men obviously made decisions which seem to have been motivated by love/affection/care/etc. (i.e. risking prosecution to continue an adulterous affair, even when this meant leaving one’s family and losing one’s position of power) for women in their lives, but in the eyes of the State this was besides the point.

RAPE

The penalties for rape tended to be minor. “Slap on the wrist” would be an exaggeration. Especially in the case of unmarried women, any compensation seemed to hinge on the loss of the woman’s virginity, which reduced her value for her future husband. Thus a common penalty involved providing money to be used for the woman’s dowry (to make up for her loss of marriage-value), and penalties could often be avoided altogether if the rapist and his victim agreed to marry.

Which brings up a question: why would the victim of rape agree to marry her rapist, especially as this often meant that he would get off the hook for having raped her in the first place?

Ruggiero answers this question as follows:

“For many women with limited dowry potential [i.e. poor women – me], rape, which robbed them of their virginity and tainted their sexual status in the eyes of their contemporaries, may have meant that their chances of marriage declined considerably. With great pressure to marry and limited possibilities, there may have been a certain dark logic in accepting the attacker as husband.” (p. 99)

Imagine that: as a consequence of being raped you face a life of heightened poverty, so that you end up accepting your rapist as your husband as “the lesser of two evils”. All ofb which would be encouraged and arranged by your father, brothers, and the State.

While disgusting enough, what Ruggiero exposes is different from what Federici describes. Ruggiero describes an overwhelming indifference to rape, and seems to imply that this reflects a continuity with pre-Renaissance attitudes. Regarding an increase or decrease of rape and prosecutions of rape between the 14th and 15th centuries, he finds there is mixed evidence, but too many records are missing to be draw any solid conclusions (though he does note that the fairly rare use of corporal punishment of rapists increased slightly with time). Moreover, he gives no evidence of intellectuals of the day considering rape-between-workers as a means of keeping the “lower orders” in their place – indeed, he suggests that rape almost always went from top to bottom, as in men would tend to rape women of lower social standing than themselves.

Of course, this does not contradict Federici’s claim, but it doesn’t confirm it either. Seeing as Federici bases her claim on work by Jacques Rossiaud, I will have to wait until his book arrives at the library to actually form a solid opinion.

SODOMY

Sodomy – a word that at the time was understood to mean homosexual acts, heterosexual or homosexual anal intercourse, and bestiality – was at the other extreme. This was a crime which seems to have shaken the ideological foundations of the Venetian State. No other sex crime was dealt with as seriously either in terms of penalties (almost always death by burning) or policing (actual rewards were eventually offered to anyone coming forth with information about sodomites, and a counter-proposal that those making false allegations be penalized was rejected out of hand). Finally, this was the only sex crime where the State eventually was pushed to punish nobles just as harshly as commoners.

It seems that a turning point in the lives of queer Venetian men came in 1406, when the Signori di Notte (a body charged with investigating, judging and sentencing crimes) uncovered a large queer scandal that involved at lest 15 nobles (many from important families) and 18 non-nobles.

The investigation and prosecution of this case – which lasted until 1408 – forced the State to up its ante considerably. Jurisdiction was shifted from the Signori to the Council of Ten – a more specialized and heavy-handed legal body charged with dealing with the most serious of crimes. A turf war erupted with the Church. In then end, all but two of the men were executed.

Once the campaign against sodomy was taken over by the Ten, it completely left the trajectory of other sex crimes, and became something like a crime against the State, in a way that would prefigure massacres to come. As has already been noted, the 1406-1408 case involved a power struggle with the Church, which led to the Ten forcing the appointment of a new bishop, the establishment of a reward for information leading to the successful prosecution of sodomites, and also to the first expansion of Venetial law to regulate behaviour over the sizeable Venetian fleet. Homophobia seems to be the engine that propelled many important changes at that time.

Ruggiero suggests that this reaction may have been partly provoked by the rebirth of a clandestine gay subculture, perhaps inspired in part by the spread of humanist ideas and renewed interest in the Greek classics. Not that there would have necessarily increased the number of men (Ruggiero does not deal with lesbians, and apparently neither did the Venetian authorities) with same-sex desire, but it would have certainly changed the way some men would have understood their desires, and thus (as in our time) would have given rise to a “new” form of queer identity.

A separate subculture (real or imagined), combined with the fact that the Ten had already had to engage in political struggle to successfully prosecute the 1406-1408 sex scandal, combined with the belief (which may have been sincerely held) that tolerance of sodomy would inevitably lead to the actual destruction of the city, as happened to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gommorah, led to an exponential increase in the number of prosecutions. Whereas 16 people had been convicted of this crime between 1326 and 1400, 168 were convicted between 1401 and 1450 and 330 were convicted between 1451 and 1500 – as Ruggiero explains, “it is clear that once the ten began to take responsibility for the crime, they pursued the matter more vigorously with a resultant increase in the number of prosecutions and in the number of important Venetians tried and senetcned” (p. 127)

Ruggiero writes that:

“A paranoia that seems at times to have shared certain affinities with the witch scares that were to swept Europe shortly appears to have gripped Venetian authorities in the mid decades of the fifteenth century. Outsiders sexually, from the perspective of the threatened dominant culture, both witches and homosexuals engendered a fear based, on he one hand, on man’s powerlessness to stand up to their seemingly growing powers and, on the other hand, on God’s threatened wrath against societies that tolerated such ungodly ways. In both cases man had the power to literally burn the danger out of society. This provides an ultimate brutal parallel – in each case society had become organized and disciplined enough to have a vision of the normal and abnormal as well as an institutional response to eliminate those perceived as dangerously deviant. Both homosexuals and witches were, in a way, among the first victims of a more aggressively organized society flexing its new muscles of discipline and control.” (p. 140)

It would seem that, a least in the case of Venice, the campaign against sodomy (which overwhelmingly meant of prosecution of queer men) stands out as the main form of repressive State violence which begs explanation at this time.

CRIMES AGAINT GOD

Finally, neither the most serious nor the least, but interesting in its own right, Ruggiero describes sex crimes which were supposed to personally wound God. These were sex with clergy, sex in sacred places, and sex between Christians and Jews.

Without discussing the entire chapter, it was interesting to note the State had repeated problems with nuns, especially with certain convents. This is explained by the fact that many young women (often teenagers) were sent to convents so that fathers could provide larger dowries for their other daughters. In these cases, religious life was not entered into by choice, or out of religious conviction, but more as an extreme way of controlling female sexuality. One is reminded of those “rehabilitation centers” today where anxious parents send their queer children, only the convents were for life.

So it is important to separate the idea of “nuns” in that day from the impression we might have from the modern world where we expect these women to be willing and active champions of the Church – in the Renaissance it seems like many of these women were engaged in a far more complicated relationship with men, the spiritual authorities and their own selves.

Significant numbers of nuns seem to have rebelled against these sexual prisons, and it is in his discussion of this “crime against god” (often described as “incest”, with the logic that God is the father and the nuns were all his wives) that Ruggiero seems to be exploring an area where women were actively resisting and reclaiming parts of their lives that the Church and State sought to deny them.

Ruggiero provides many examples of nuns having long-term relationships, at times with the collusion of other sisters, and also of experiencing a kind of sexual freedom that we find nowhere else in this book. The use of convents as orphanages for foundlings and abandoned children helped those who became pregnant to hide the consequences of their acts.

In one case in particular, the Benedictine convent of Sant’ Angelo di Contorta seems to have been an institution successfully taken over and subverted by the women who lived there. The abbess herself was involved with different men, and at least four children were born to nuns here between 1401 and 1487. Furthermore, there wee a total of 52 prosecutions for having sex with nuns from that one convent in the same period of time, and its reputation was so notorious that in 1474 the pope ordered that no new nuns were to be brought in, effectively ensuring that the convent would die out.

The drawback in this chapter, as throughout this book, is that even when women enter the picture it is in their relationship with men. Lesbianism is not touched upon. And while contraception is touched upon (in passing observations about anal intercourse and coitus interruptus), abortion is completely absent from the picture. This is unfortunate, as especially in the convents – a female world where women would have the greatest opportunity to share and develop knowledge and affectionate relations – one suspects that these either must have had a significant existence or else – if they did not – that fact in and of itself would seem to indicate some large repressive mechanism which otherwise remains invisible.

If, as may be the case, Ruggiero’s silence on these questions is because his study is based no legal prosecutions, and the male-centered legal system of that day was blind t the existence of sexuality without men, then at the very least he could have said so. An omission like this is the kind of thing that annoys me about studies like his, in part because it is not difficult to acknowledge limitations of this sort, but when one fails to do so a limitation becomes something that actually obscured potentially important phenomenon.

So that’s pretty much it for those three chapters of this book. Later this week I hope to finish it off. Despite my annoyance at the male bias in what gets left out of this book, i still have to say that this book is a rewarding read…

Categories: book-review,history, queer, sexuality, violence-against-women