Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Tudor Lesbians

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Throughout history, it's mostly been queer men who were persecuted under the historical sodomy laws, but the Tudor period saw a spike in women being tried under it.Why was this? And why was it mostly happening in what is modern day Belgium and Netherlands?Joining Kate today is historian Jonas Roelens, who specialises in sexuality in the early modern period, to explore the unique things that were happening in Europe during this time that gave rise to such persecutions.His book, Citizens and Sodomites: Persecution and Perception of Sodomy in the Southern Low Countries (1400–1700), can be found here.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lester. How are you doing? Are you settled in? Are you sitting comfortable? Are you ready for us to begin? Well, so am I, but before we can.

I think you know what's coming. That's right. It's the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adults' subjects, and you should be an adult too. If you're not an adult, this is your warning to get out now,

while you still can and you get us all in trouble. And for the adults remaining, I wonder if before we could go any further, if I could beg just the teeniest, tiniest, tiniest, babyest favour from you, could you possibly vote for us in the Listeners Choice Awards at this year's podcast awards?

You can do that by going to the website wwww-britishpodcastawards.com forward slash voting and clicking on betwixt the sheets. If you do it, I think that we could win it this year. I think that we could. It's a team effort, guys. Let's do it. Right, on with the show. Welcome to 17th century Bruges in what at the time is called the Southern Low Countries, a place that has also been referred to as the capital of Sodomy.

Hmm, I don't think that they use that in the tourist advertisements, do they? Sodomy was a term that was first used to criminalise any sex act that wasn't a married man and a woman having sex for making babies. So, well, all of the fun stuff then, I guess. Here on a farm, there are two women, May Ken and Magdalena, and they're supposed to be working. However, there is more play than work taking place. They are having a fabulous time,

rollicking and frolicing in the sun, tickling and kissing, and as you will see, swimming in the pond. Well, it certainly beats farmwork. There's a slight issue though One of them is married to a man Who also works on the farm And his threats to hand them into the authorities

Cause them to flee across the lowlands together You'll have to listen on to hear how their story ends But what was happening at the time That allowed Macon and Magdalena To be so open with what they were doing Well I am ready to find out if you are What do you look for a man? Oh, many of course

You're supposed to rise one another Don't speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness, I have nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kailister. When you think about the word sodomy throughout history, it's often associated with men having sex with other men,

and, well, bum fun in general, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining, but the persecution of women as quote-unquote female sodomites is often overlooked. Why is that? Joining me today is Yonnas Rolans, a historian and professor specialising in the history of same-sex relations, whose PhD focused on sodomy in the early modern period in the southern Netherlands. But what does the term sodomy actually mean? Why was there a spike in women being caught and tried for it in this part of Yossohn? Europe in this period. And what happened next? I am ready to find out if you are.

Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Janus Rollands. How are you doing? I'm very fine. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. Glad to be here. Glad to be able to join you. I'm always thrilled to talk to people about history, but you in particular, I am really excited to talk about because your specialism is homosexuality, lesbianism, and, and I suppose you could say queer sexuality in the Netherlands in the early modern period. That is fascinating. What brought you to study that? I could give a really elaborate explanation, but the basic reality is that a long time ago when I was a student, I was in desperate need of a research topic.

And I procrastinated because I was experiencing a lot of student stuff at the time having very much fun. the evening before the deadline I had to come up with the subject and my boyfriend said, well, why don't you do something like this? And we're 10 years later and we finished the PhD and we're still talking about queer history in the southern low countries. But it's basically because I was in desperate need of some sort of topic. And my promoter, my mentor probably at the time didn't realize when she said yes to this topic that she would be stuck with it for another decade or so. But yes, that's the basic reality. I love that. That's the reality of academia, everybody out there is you've got to choose something. But I'm so glad that you did choose this because what's coming out of your research is really changing what people think of as queer culture in early modern Europe.

Because what was going on in the Netherlands, which you're going to explain, seems to have been quite different from the other parts of Europe. Just for a start, take me back in time and paint me a piece. picture, what was the attitude to sex in the Netherlands in the early modern period? What are we looking at here? We're looking at a situation of a society that is hugely fallacentric when it comes to sexuality. So basically you need to have some sort of penetration in order to talk about full-fledged sexuality. Sex is steeped with sin. It's only valid or it's not sinful if you do with the Holy Matrimony for procreation. Every other sexual act according to the church is forbidden is deviant, et cetera, and that's deeply embedded in the society and culture of that

southern low countries, because we see that there are a whole range of sources, whether they're visual, literary, legal, etc., that talk about sex in a very condemning way. And of course, when you condemn sex, there is one specific type of sexual acts that come to the forefront, and that's sodomy. And that is a very broad, generalistic umbrella term aimed to describe a whole range of sexual acts that weren't aimed at procreation. And so that's very interesting to see how these attitudes towards sexuality evolve, because sodomy includes masturbation, bestiality, anal, intercourse between men and woman, child abuse, but first and foremost, sex between people from the same sex. So things we nowadays don't associate with one another. These are very particular

different sexual desires, sexual acts, but in that particular period, they are all coined under the same umbrella term. So sex is sinful, and the only proper sex to be having is putting a penis in something to make a baby when people are married? Exactly. What was the general attitude to same-sex? I mean, it's covered under sodomy, but was this regarded as more of a sin than the other things that could be called sodomy? Absolutely, absolutely. Sotomy is considered the most deviant crime. It's also a very explicit taboo. It's something that shouldn't be mentioned,

and that's very peculiar or even... It's a bit funny, actually, because if you read those sources, every author seems to apologize themselves for actually discussing the topic and urging their readers not to tell this information to anyone else, because your tongue will fall out,

the air will become corrupt. It's something that should be hushed, particularly in religious sources, that is typically stressed and accentuated, which is funny because these are the sources you need to go to if you want to read about sodomy. They are the ones that telling you to shut up about it, but they can't stop talking about it in the same way as well. And because they continuously talk about sodomy, they refer to the biblical sin or the biblical story of Solomon Gomorrah, two cities that were destroyed with fire and brimstone by God because the male inhabitants had deviant, unnatural, sexual acts that they had committed. it together. And because it's the biblical example, because it had a biblical reference, it was

considered so deviant, so heinous, and so dangerous also, because in biblical times, God had interfered himself. He had destroyed those cities. And whether people were innocent or whether they had committed that sin didn't matter to God, because the whole city was destroyed, which in late medieval and early modern societies was a very alarming message. Because in their own period, God could strike again and would strike again if they tolerated the presence of sodomites. And we see, for instance, in much learned texts, not only religious ones, but also in legal scholarly texts, that sodomites should be eradicated from society because otherwise God will send us famine, war, plague, floods and the like. So that religious discourse is

omnipresent in society in the southern Netherlands. And that's where we get the word Sodomie from, from Sodom and Gamara. Precisely. I've not actually read that biblical story. I really should. But is there people, were there people in Sodom and Gamara who were also masturbating, having sex with animals, abusing children? Or do they really focus in on the gay?

On a theological level, theologians are still discussing up until this day what those men were doing because biblical texts were well quite vague about it. Some present-day interpreters even think that those Sotomites were being accused of being inhospitable or just not being friendly to their neighbors. But for one reason or another, it became an umbrella term focusing on that same sexual desires and male same sexual desires mostly. This isn't the case in every European region, but in the late medieval and early modern

southern Netherlands, the story of sodomy really became a sort of gateway or a way to legitimize the prosecution and also to find a way to punish those people. because in the low countries, in the Southern Netherlands, death through fire, that at the stake was being used. And that was a sort of symbolical way of reenacting the divine punishment in a small-scale manner, so to speak. Wow. So they were burning gay people, people that accused the same-sex relations at the stake. That was the punishment. Exactly.

Yeah. And they did so with much upheaval. It was a really public ceremony in a public square or at the city gate, which has a very clear message in itself, especially to people arriving in the city. This is a place where law and order is abundantly present, so don't try this at home, because this will be where you'll end up if you do commit these kinds of acts. Sodomy is a crime that isn't only harming your own soul or your own afterlife, because if you choose to commit a wrong kind of sexual act, according to those people at the time, if you choose to do so, you'll end up in hell. But if you choose to do so,

you also endanger your fellow citizens, your friends and family and neighbors, because God will intervene once again and punish the rest of us. So it needs to be punished very publicly so that people are terrified when they see this. How does that compare to other punishments around Europe? I know that Sodomie was a capital offence all over the place, but burning at the stake seems particularly vicious. What is really fascinating about this region, the Southern Netherlands, that's more or less present-day Belgium is that they are really, really keen on suppressing sodomy and punishing those sodomites

because other parts of Europe too, the burning at the stake was the common punishment, but we see it being used less often. It's quite uncommon up until the 18th century in large parts of Europe. If we look at the 15th and 16th century, which is a period I was mostly interesting in, we see that basically no other rules,

region in northwestern Europe punishes that much sodomites. And even if you look at other regions like Mediterranean Europe, for instance, we see that there's a huge variety in punishing those people. For instance, Venice is a really big metropole that also puts people at the stake. But if we look at Florence, for instance, the city of Florence only uses fiscal punishments. Texas affines people, rather. So they consider this sort of right of passage, young men who are already sexually active, but don't have the means to marry, to start a family of their own,

they can just go about doing their business, get a bit of sexual action going on, and then when you are old enough and financially reliable enough to start a family, you need to stop doing it, but in the meantime, they'll just find you. And a large deal of men in Florence, and medieval and early modern Florence, were fine at a certain point,

but that's quite easy if you compare those punishments with those in the southern. Netherlands. And even if you look at the neighboring countries, for instance, France, the Northern Netherlands, England, we see that in that late medieval, early modern periods. The number of prosecutions are really, really rare. Only a handful of cases can be found in that period, whereas the southern low countries with cities like Bruges and Ghent are really at the forefront of prosecuting those people. Why do you think that was? What would be your hypothesis for why this particular group of people

were so intent on burning gay people? What I think is very fascinating and interesting and hasn't been highlighted in literature that often is the link between Italy and the southernmost countries. And of course, that link has been described in terms of economy, both large cities, city-states with a huge amount of independence. Culturally, you have the Renaissance in the South,

we have the Flemish Primitives up north, but apparently also in terms of sexual culture, there's a sort of link. And because of that strong urban identity, I think that people felt it very important that the reputation and the safe being of their urban community was protected. And sodomy being a crime that not only threatened individuals, but entire communities, we see that it's very important to protect your society. And we see that that whole idea of unwanted minorities. Threatening society is something that comes up during the centuries. But for some reason or another, the focal point shifts. Like, for instance, in the 14th century, when the Southern Netherlands are threatened by the Black Death, the plague,

we see that the Jewish communities are being prioritized and they are being punished. In the 16th century, you have the Reformation coming up. and so Protestants are considered heretics and put at a stake. In the 17th century, you see that witchcraft evolves and enters the scene. And so you see that there's always some kind of unwanted minority and unwanted scapegoat, so to speak, that is demonized. And historians and social scientists alike have called this the scapegoat theory. And societies that are going through a difficult period are facing political or economical crises are in need of an unwanted. minority to focus their attention on, to make some kind of social cohesion. And the common

persecution of those people causes some sense of unification. And so in the 15th century, in particular, but also in the 16th century, Southermites were a prioritized scapegoat, a prioritized minority group in this particular region of Europe. So let's go into the nitty grisier of it then. Who was being targeted by these laws? Do we have referenced? records of who was arrested and executed? What class of people? There's good news and there's bad news. Luckily, we have sources, but unfortunately, unlike other regions like Italy, for instance, the sources are very short, very cryptical and cynical, because so suddenly is an unmentionedable sin. It's an unmentionedable crime. And so... Can't even read about it.

No, no, precisely. And so if we read about them in legal sources, those bailiffs, which are the people who are responsible for prosecuting criminals, are very brief. It's almost as if they feel ashamed to write about it. And so as a gender historian, that's very frustrating because you're sitting there in the archive reading for pages and pages on end about stupid thefts of socks, for instance. When you encounter a sodomy case, it reads like this. On this date, we sentenced this man to the stake for sodomy. And it has cost us this sum of money for a horse to bring him there, for a strong.

straw for the hangman, etc. So it's basically an economical source. The books need to be valid. And so we have very few information, but we can distillate some facts from these people. And so we see that people from all across society were being prosecuted, whether there were teenagers or elderly people, newcomers, migrants or people who were living there for years, people who had a one-night stand, people who had what we might call a relationship. for years on end. But there's also some sort of class justice. We see that certain groups have

privileges like clergymen, for instance, hardly ever appear in those sources, which is funny, because they are the ones providing the legitimation for persecution. But if a priest or a monk or another clergyman was found, they are being hand over to their own jurisdiction to the officiality, to the church courts, and they are always treated rather nicely. They have a fine. They are put in jail for a few weeks, and that's the end of it. The nobility has the same sort of privilege, so we basically see people that are already, the majority of those people are already in the margins, people that are unwanted for other reasons. And so you see that it's intertwined with one another.

You see, society passes by when you're reading those sources, but some people are more overrepresented than others. So priests were let off. It's honestly just blown my mind. Have you found cases then where people are accused of sodomy, a priest was involved, and they've gone, oh, well, he can go and do his thing and we'll burn this the other person? As a matter of fact, I have. They have some cases in which a priest is being accused of having sex with some teenage boys, and the teenagers were prosecuted, and the priest is handed over to the church court, and no single file was being preserved with his name on it, so I don't know if he was ever punished. only in the 16th century in a very specific context

priests or clergymen were being prosecuted and that is because in certain cities the city council was being replaced the Catholic city council was being replaced by a Protestant one and the Protestants were very keen on prosecuting Catholics because it was a sort of ideal don't go to that

deviant church go to us, we're pure, we're clean, we don't do these kinds of acts so it was a sort of propaganda move but that's the only moment in which clergymen were treated like any other citizen, but otherwise they were protected, legally protected. It's hundreds of years ago, but it still makes me so angry that that happened. So the sources are very brief, very vague. Do you have any sense of how they found these people? Because sodomy is a very difficult crime to prove. How do you accuse someone of that? It's an difficult

crime to prove, but it's an easy crime to accuse one of committing sodomy. Because if I were to claim here in your podcast that you've killed someone, Kate, I would have to show a body or some sort of murder weapon or whatever. But if I would go about and say that my neighbor has committed sodomy day and night with some friend of his, it's my words against his. So we see that a lot of those cases come about from the bottom up. And that's something really interesting because, of course, that bailiff or the city alderman, they can't go around in every bedroom every evening to see if everyone lies in their proper bed. and isn't committing unnatural sex, even though privacy is a rather modern concept, we see that a lot of those cases come up because people are being accused by someone they know, whether it's someone in their own family, their own streets, an economic competitor.

So the citizens themselves are rather worried about sodomy and they often snitch on one another. And that is how we see that those cases end up in trial. And it's basically the same like in which trials those rumors can go about for years on end. People can rumor or gossip about those actions without taking action, so to speak. And in certain trials, we see that, well, this certain man has been committing sodomy for more than 10 years now. But for one reason or another, now we come forward, we come to court and we accuse this person. And when that happens, the outcome is almost invariably clear because I have found,

between 1,400 and 1700, I have discovered over 200 trials, 207 trials to be precise. With 406 accusations, and of those 406 accused individuals, 252 have actually been executed, have been put at the stake, which means that you have a mortality rate of 62%, which is huge. If you compare it to, let's take the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish Inquisition, which is a far more renowned tribunal, the mortality rate is around 10%. It's a bit more, it's a bit less, according to... But 62% is huge. You see the willingness to prosecute those people

reflected in those numbers, I think. We'll be back with Janus after this short break. What makes what was happening in the Netherlands stand out from a historical point of view is they were also prosecuting women for sodomy. And almost everywhere else, lesbians have just flown under the radar. They've been almost regarded as, well, they can't have been having proper sex.

It was just jolly japes. It's just girls being girls. But the Netherlands did not do that. They prosecuted women. As you were saying, there's a sort of this idea of lesbian impunity in late medieval and early modern Europe because of that fallacentric view on sexuality. Whether it's a lawmaker or a church father, they found it very hard to believe that women could have sexual. intercourse without the interference of a man.

And because of that biased view, they don't write about it in their legal tracts, in their religious treatises, etc. And consequently, a lot of women who were attracted to other women were disregarded. Their crimes were considered less evil or less serious and they weren't punished. And so it's hard to find trials of same-sex trials involving women all across Europe. But if you look at those trials in the side, Southern Netherlands, we see that the situation differs somewhat. If you look at the 15th century, for 1,400 up until 1550, so to speak, I found 25 women who were being prosecuted,

which is at the point almost 10% of the entire group of prosecuted people. And one could say, well, 10% that's not a big deal. But if you compare it to the continent, it is a big deal, rather, because nowhere can you find that much amount of sodomy trials in one particular region. So that's another example of the willingness to prosecute sodomy, how they prioritized this type of crime in this particular region. How does that compare to other places around Europe? Because I was racking my brains trying to think of anywhere else that had put women to death for the crime of sodomy.

And I was drawing a blank. Is there anywhere else that was doing it? There are other examples. If you look at Spain, there are a few examples. examples, some in France, some in the Holy Roman Empire, which is present-day Germany. So you can find those trials. They're often buried in literature, but we only find isolated trials against female Sotomies in this period.

And that's the basic part of it, which is so fascinating about the southern low countries. It's not one single case. It's not one isolated trial. That's why it's so peculiar. That's why it's so interesting. Because even though we find those other trials in other European cities, Most authorities actually refused to announce that they sentenced women for having intercourse with members of their own sex.

These women were tried in secrecy because the idea was, well, if we do this in a public way, other women in town will watch and will become curious and will try to do this themselves. And so we won't tell what particular crime they had committed. And we will use particular or specific punishments that are considered feminine. So if a murderer, for instance, were to be executed, a man would have been beheaded, a woman would have been buried alive, for instance. So they use different crimes according to their gender. And that's also the case in a lot of those trials across Europe for female sodomy, which is something that is not happening in the southern low countries.

Female sodomites were burned just in the same way as their male counterparts in an equally public setting, in an equally public sphere. They were less inclined to keep this a secret. These female trials were displayed as publicly as the other ones. What else really surprised me, and I hadn't been aware of it until I read through some of your work, was that although it sounds like women were being horrendously punished and they were in this piece, but they actually also had quite a lot of agency, and it was quite an egalitarian society for women in other ways. Yeah, and that might sound as a paradox to your listeners,

the word I have been telling about how fiercely these women were being prosecuted. But I think, and that's my theory, of course, that in order to explain why these female sodomites were penalized more frequently in the southern low countries, and in other parts of Europe, we need to look at the general situation for those women. I told you, if you look at the texts of lawmakers and religious people, it's not that women are mentioned in those texts. That's the same for the entire European continent. So that can't be the explanation.

So these women didn't appear in writings of those scholars at the time. We do see that in general, women in the low countries had a huge amount of agency compared to other European regions. For instance, little girls could go to school from the age of seven up until they were 14, where they learned to read and write and they had the mathematics classes. women could pursue careers as writers, as artists, as scholars. They were able to start up a known firm, a known store without the interference of a parental guide or a husband, etc. When women had to inherit, when their parents died, they received an equal share of money. It wasn't just their brothers who received everything and they were dependent on their fathers or their husbands rather.

So women were independent. They were part of public life in the Southern Lowland. And that is perhaps because this is such an urbanized environment, you shouldn't forget that large parts of Europe are rather rural still at the time. But in the southern low countries, the economy is an urban economy. So it's beneficial if your wife, if your daughter can read and write, can help you in your own business. And so these women, they have a lot of liberty. They can travel around the country without male guidance, et cetera. they are considered full-fledged citizens, full-fledged inhabitants,

but that means that they are also fully responsible for the reputation of their society. And if we look at a crime like sodomy, which is not only an individual sin, but also threatens the entire society, the entire city, it is not so surprising that women are considered responsible for that reputation as well. If you're fully participating in society, then your crimes are also fully being held accountable. And if you look at other regions, for instance, Italy, where women are hardly prosecuted at all, you see that the situation of women in general is totally different there.

Women are being locked up in the house of their fathers and go straight up to the house of their future husband and live in a private sphere. They are invisible in public life, so to speak. And if you're more visible, if you're participating in public life, then your crimes are also more visible and also more important to prosecute. And that is perhaps the, or at least that is my way of explaining that particular situation in this region. That makes sense. Are they written about differently in the records? Is there any chance that they expanded a bit more on the cases of who was prosecuted? Unfortunately, no, but what is intriguing is that they are actually considered or

treated as the other men who are being prosecuted for sodomy. Let's say that, There is a sort of division and punishment that the person who takes the initiative to have sexual intercourse is most culpable. Because as I was saying, there's no such thing as a sexual orientation. You as an individual can choose to commit good or wrong sex. And if you choose to, you are culpable. If you take the initiative to seduce someone, then you are the worst part of the two. And then you should be sentenced or prosecuted most severe. we also see that happening with women.

So even if there is no sense of phallocentric penetration, the same line of reasoning is being used when two women are being prosecuted together. Who took the initiative? Who was lying on top? Who was being the most virile? Who did what, for instance? And so these distinctions are used for women as well.

And the broad definition of sodomy, the broad conception of that crime, also becomes visible when looking at these female trials. For instance, I found a woman in Brussels who was accused of bestiality with her own dog. And in other parts of Europe, bestiality is something that only men can commit, because only men have a penis that they can use to penetrate an animal, to abuse an animal with. But this woman, Catalina is her name, was accused of bestiality as well. So both she and her dog ended up at the stake.

They were put... They burned the dog too? Yeah, they did, they did. Certain lawmakers were writing about it that certain curious people might wonder why we should kill those animals as well. Because they don't have a soul and consequently they can't commit sin. But it is a huge scandal if we were to let those animals roam about because then the crime could never be forgotten. People would start talk about what was happening, would even point at that particular dog or cow or whatever and would reminisce about, do you still know, so we need to erase the memory about that particular crime so animals like animals were put on at the stick as well which was also happening in trials in which women were involved that is wow every time i think that i've heard people doing as mad as they possibly could there's always something there that can better it aren't there we'll burn the dog as well are there cases where we've got the names of women who were prosecuted for having sex with one another? Yeah, we do. In most cases we have those names. In certain

cases, they're only referred to as the daughter of this certain man or the wife of this certain man, but in most cases they have their own names. We have their own, we have their ages, we have their social backgrounds. So we have, for instance, two female minors, which are both called Gretchen, Gretchen in present-day English. And they are being punished for being misled to commit some kind of sodomy with others. So this is a very clear example of two girls who didn't take the initiative and because of their youth, they were only flogged. They were put on a scaffold and were flocked until they bled, whereas their accomplices, the woman who took the initiative was being burned. So we have these distinctions. We have these background stories. We also have, it's considered

even more deviant if they were married in fact because they cheated on their husband and they cheated it's in an unnatural way, even more so. And we have women who take that matrimony, who take that marriage as a sort of life insurance because we have one particular intriguing group trial in bruges at the end of the 15th century, in which, if I'm not mistaken, nine women were being prosecuted at the same time.

So eight of them are being put out of scaffold, and one is being spared for the moment because she claims that she is pregnant. She is expecting a child. And so they put her in, not in the regular prison, they put her in the madhouse for nine months. They have several doctors inspecting her. But of course, when there isn't a child coming up after nine months, it becomes clear that she was making this story up. And she is being executed as well.

So we have these situation sketches, so to speak. And of course, it remains frustrating because you want to delve more deeply into their lives. You want to know more about their background stories, but because it's such a taboo, it is described very briefly. So I don't know. If you want to have a full background story, you need to fast forward a bit. In the 17th century, I have found an example of Maikin and Magdalena, they're called. They are two women also in Bruges. Bruges is the sodomy capital of the region, at least in terms of prosecution.

And those women are working at a farm. and working is perhaps a bit of a stretch because they are constantly caught red-handedly when they are at the farm being tickling one another, kissing one another, swimming in the pond of the farm and it's a problem or it's considered as a problem because one of those women is married and the husband threatens to hand them over to the law and so these women fled. They make this huge tour all across the low countries and they are they pop up in several cities, but they have to continue their journey because everywhere they are being chased

away. But eventually, the alderman of Bruges get a hold of them, arrest them and interrogate them. And that trial document goes on for pages and pages. So I was extremely happy when I found that one in the archives. And what struck me and what continues to struck me is how self-assured those two women are, how openly they talk about their desires, about their experiences, knowing that they could be put at the stake that what they had done is considered a huge sin and is punishable by death, they are extremely open about it. So Magdalene talks about how she was only a child when she was in a brewery with other women and how she saw two women doing it and how her interest in female sodomy was raised

by that particular childhood memory and how she ever since has committed sex with dozens of women and how if the judges were to put up seven men in a row to have sex with her, she would still prefer one single woman because she finds them so much more attractive. And she is good at having sex, she boasts of herself, because other women are begging her to have sex with her as well. So she finds it way more fun to have sex with women. and so she talks about this in a very present day and a very modern emancipated way, so to speak.

And the eldermen are flabbergasted with that whole situation. Even at one point, there are other witnesses who think that this Magdalene is not even a full-fledged woman at all. They believe that she is a hermaphrodite. They believe that she has a penis to penetrate her female partners with. others even believe that she is the devil in disguise or that she had made a pact with the demon to receive a penis from him. So you see how difficult people find it to look at two women who, I don't know if they were in love or they were just madly lusting for one another. That's not very clear in the sources.

But confronted with those kind of sexual desires, people find it very hard to make sense of them, to give meaning to them. And so they come up with medical explanations such as one of them must be an intersex person. or even Bimological explanations. The devil has something to do with this. At first sight, the alderman don't really take that explanation into account. Those peasants, those testimonials passed by, but at the very end of the trial, the alderman, those learned men, start to have their doubts as well.

And so Magdalene is asked about, are you sure you not a witch? Are you sure you haven't been handing out poisoned apples, and the like to people. So it's being linked with other types of crimes, of religious crimes, of heresy, of witchcrafts, which illustrates how difficult people found it to make sense of two women having sex with one another.

What happened to her? Is there any chance she was let go? Yeah, she was let go at the end, but she was flocked, she was whipped with rods, and she was banished for eternity. So we don't know how things ended up for her. She could consider herself lucky that she didn't end up at the stake. It's perhaps because the alderman were doubting about whether or not she was a woman or a hermaphrodite

that they didn't know how to deal with this particular case. But in the end, if you're being banished, that's not a gift. And you need to start a whole new life. You don't have a social network. You don't have possessions or money to do so. So I think that for both Mykin and Magdalene, things were rather difficult. when they receive their sentence. And I would give a finger to know how they ended up

and how they managed, if they managed to settle. But unfortunately, the sources remain silent in this particular case. Wow. How many cases of women being tried as Sodomites have you found? 25, if you look at the medieval period. If you take the entire period into account, So I did my research from 1400 up until 1700, so three centuries. We come at 27 women.

So the majority of them were prosecuted in the late medieval period. And then you have Mykin and Magdalene in the 17th century. But if we don't take the division male-female into account, you see that the entire number of trials starts to diminish after the 16th century. So in the 17th century trials such as this are a rarity, whether it's male or. or female sodomy. And that also perhaps explains why the alderman didn't know what to do with Mykin and Magdalene because it didn't happen as much as it did for their predecessors. But yeah, we're talking about 27 women up until now because of course I didn't research every single city in the region

and perhaps there are other examples that are waiting to be discovered. But even so up until now, it's a very rare find. It's an exceptional find that women were considered or capable of committing these kind of acts and that they acted upon this so vehemently, that they were so willing to prosecute these women is really unique in late medieval and early modern Europe. Were Magdalena and Mike, were they the last to be put on trial as female sodomites? Yeah, the last female sodomites up until the ebb to now,

as far as the sources can tell us. Those were the lasts that were being prosecuted. Yeah. Final question. How does knowing all of this history shape your understanding of where we are today with the fight for gay rights and for equality? When I just started my research, I was rather neutral because I'm born in the 90s, so I'm this 90s bitch who didn't have to put up a huge fight.

All my rights were taken care. of because of my predecessors. I had to, my first day at academia, I could tell everybody I had a boyfriend, we're married. All those things are being taken care of. But looking at these historical figures, it came clear to me that history isn't a line of continual evolution for the better. We see that if that medieval period is a period of social upheaval, of political and economical crisis. And every time some crisis starts, we see that it has an immediate effect on those persecution numbers. The city of Bruges is a very good example. The numbers go through the roof at the end of the 15th century, a period in which that city is struggling. It is no longer

the economic metropole. It was the century before. There are revolts, rebellions, social upheavals. And so the number of prosecutions start to rise, which is illustrative, because when people are facing crises, economical, religious, cultural differences, difficulties, they are looking for scapegoats. They are looking for minorities. They become less tolerant for what goes against the norm. And that is very, I find that really eye-opening. Also for our present-day society, which is a polarized situation with economical threats, with climate change, with warfare going around. And we see that people are opposed against one another.

And I think one of the first groups that is being disadvantaged in this kind of situation are sexual minorities. And this is true for late medieval bruges, but it's also true for our present-day society. So looking at history really opened my eyes in the sense that we need to be aware of these rights of these things we have accomplished and we shouldn't take them for granted. Janice, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Not in person, but where could they find

more about you? If they want to know more about me and read about my work, they can do so. I recently published a book Citizens and Sothermites, The Perception and Prosecution of Sotomy in the Southern in the countries. It's published at Brill publishers. And most of my articles are also online on academia.com.com.com, which is free. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been marvellous. And apologies for my appalling English. I am not... Oh, it was awful. It was absolutely it. It was amazing. No, no, no. I often listen to your podcast and compared to native speakers, it's a bit rubbish, but hopefully our listeners will be able to understand it. You were magnificent. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Janus for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the sex life of Henry VIII to incest in ancient Egypt, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckwith, The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

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