Contaminating Infidels, Burnt Bodies, and Saved Souls: Sodomy and Catholicism in the Early Modern Age

The essay addresses the genesis of some norms that assimilated the 'vice against nature' to the heresy. Why did this happen in the Iberian Peninsula and in the early modern age? To what extent did the border between dissidence or religious otherness and (considered) devious desires be fleeting? As we shall see, Islamophobia contributed to the strengthening of legislation against sodomy through the fortune of a common place that was born in the twelfth century and circulated until the expulsion of the moriscos: that the Koran, in Sura 2 (Al-Baqara), legitimizes that vice also between two males. After 1492, when the Iberian Peninsula began to eliminate the long-standing coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians, the myth of an entirely Catholic, masculine and de-Semitic land served to prosecute the 'nefarious crime' and to identify sodomy as a vehicle of heretical and physical infection. Rejection of sexual contamination played a role in shaping common faith as much as the danger of heretical and racial contamination. However, law and theology did not have unanimous positions, and the Roman Inquisition did not follow the Spanish and the Portuguese ones, leaving the punishment of sodomy to other magistratures also to preserve the honor of the clergy. Additionally, casuistry and the practice of confession posed an intriguing question: could sodomite be able to repent before the death sentence? and how far could he be reposted in the Church or, in Heaven, in the community of saints? In short, could the sodomite convert, or his body was marked forever? The circulation of two stories reported at the end of the sixteenth century in the biographies of Vicente Ferrer and Juana de la Cruz help to shed light on the theme of the body of sodomite in the post-Tridentine Catholic world.