queer masculinities

Helmut Puff: Switzerland 97
describe Switzerland’s misconstrued political order, also carried religious
and sexual connotations, characterizing the Swiss as ‘heretics’
and villains in sexualibus (though the document mentions neither bestiality
nor sodomy explicitly). 13 As Tom Brady points out, those who
rebeled against their rulers thought of themselves as ‘turning Swiss.’ 14
Claudius Sieber-Lehmann speaks of a downright ‘war of insults’ when
neighboring territories shifted allegiance or, like Basel, became a
member of the Confederacy in the early sixteenth century. 15 These
exchanges may in fact have helped to forge a sense of commonality
among the widely divergent regions of Switzerland. 16
An upstart in the European theater of states, the Confederacy was
also reputed to be an El Dorado for criminals of all persuasions.
Apparently, it did attract shady figures like the nobleman Richard
Puller von Hohenburg. Having lost all his Alsatian possessions due to
various criminal charges (including sodomy), Puller von Hohenburg
became a citizen of Zurich. There, he and his servant Anton Mätzler
were discovered to have engaged in same-sex eroticism and were burnt
at the stake as sodomites in 1482. Hereby the city council, urged by
Zurich’s Swiss compatriots, was able to avoid a feud over Hohenburg’s
possessions with a close ally of the Confederacy, the city of
Strasbourg. 17 During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, city officials,
literati, and humanists therefore increasingly sought to counter these
negative perceptions. By a variety of measures, they dressed up the
Confederacy’s image, among other reasons to bring legitimacy to this
state. Various historiographical projects, for instance, provided the
Swiss with an elaborate foundational myth. 18
During the Reformation, confessional allegiance opened another
combat zone, this time within Switzerland. Divided between Catholic
and Reformed cantons, the Swiss polity became the forum for an
exchange of sexual slurs on a grand scale. Catholics accused Huldrych
Zwingli, Zurich’s Reform theologian, of being a thief and a sodomite, a
‘villain of the penis’ (zärsbösewicht) who had ‘fucked’ a mule (or a cow,
or a mare) in Paris. The charge of bestiality against Zwingli was a sexual
slur befitting his country of origin (as opposed to the ‘Italian’ sin of
sodomy). At the same time, the defamer, Hans Seiler of Solothurn,
reified the foreign connection of ‘sins against nature’ by artfully setting
the scene in Paris. According to Pia Holenstein and Norbert Schindler,
this accusation was so successful that within a short period of time, the
‘cow-fuckers’ became a widely used slur for adherents of the Reform. 19
At the same time, Protestant pamphlets disseminated images of an
‘Italian’ Catholic Church infested with a great number of sins, sodomy