queer masculinities

Helmut Puff: Switzerland 99
both sodomy and bestiality trials. Moreover, he did so in two locations,
Geneva, a city with few rural holdings where bestiality was practically
unknown, and the rural canton of Fribourg where charges of bestiality
were prevalent. The author demonstrates how persecutions for sexual
‘heresy’ and for witchcraft were in fact linked – a link he attributed to
‘the unusually high degree of religious motivation behind these two
governments during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ before a
more secularized state did away with these trials altogether.
Problematically, religion – typically associated with the premodern –
functions as a blanket explanation in this argument, with little consideration
given to the ways in which rulers and subjects inhabited the
religious. In fact, governmental political authority greatly increased
with the various Reforms, inducing city councils, for instance, to
control public enunciations of what passed as illegitimate sexuality. 23
Stephanie Krings studied 29 cases of sodomy and bestiality proceedings
in St. Gallen between 1463 and 1742, three of which centered on
charges of same-sex sexual acts. Interestingly, male–male sexuality was
considered a more severe offense than bestiality. 24 William G. Naphy’s
work on the Republic of Geneva sheds light on Geneva’s ruling elite
and their approach to a variety of sexual delicts. 25
So far, the occasional studies on homoeroticism have largely been
inspired by the two paradigms of social and legal histories. Much
remains to be done. Swiss cities were a center of humanism in the
north and the forms of male sociability in this context warrant an indepth
analysis. 26 My study, Sodomy in Reformation Switzerland and
Germany, 1400–1600, tries to broaden this horizon by working toward
a cultural history of sodomy in a German-speaking context. Ultimately,
I intend to contextualize notions of queer sexuality in the age of
Reforms and its concomitant religious, political, and ideological shifts.
This means looking at the resonances between sodomy trials and religious
pamphlets, artistic discourse and defamation on the streets.
Significantly, such a study requires reading the Protestant politics of
matrimony into the politics surrounding sodomy.
The configuration of highly public images this article took as a starting
point suggests that a case might indeed be made for a specifically
Swiss history of male–male sexuality. To date, there is little in terms of
an existing historiography on queer masculinities for early modern
Switzerland. 27 Yet the question of whether the history of queer sexuality
truly follows borders – borders that were relatively unstable during
the early modern period – must be asked. Don’t we need to query the
very notion of broadly conceived national, cultural, or geographical