This short book packs a real punch. Comprised of six chapters plus a detailed introduction, it contributes in new and interesting ways to our knowledge of gender and sexual diversity in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean.
Umberto Grassi's introduction, “Sexual Nonconformity: A Mediterranean Perspective,” is an exemplary discussion of the questions prompted by the collection's theme: eroticization of Mediterranean peoples, racist stereotypes of sexual vices ascribed to the religious Other, connections between religious and sexual unorthodoxy, and cultural hybridity. The review of the literature alone makes this introduction invaluable.
Chapter 1, Serena Tolino's “Normative Discourses on Female Homoeroticism in Pre-Modern Islamicate Societies,” adds lexicographical, medical, and legal perspectives to existing scholarship on female homoeroticism from literary sources. She notes that sihaq (Arabic, to rub or grind), the usual legal term for female homoerotic acts, was mostly ignored by lexicographers. Jurists, in contrast, debated the extent to which sihaq should be punished as zina (unlawful, usually penetrative sex) or liwat (anal intercourse). Ibn Sina offered the medical opinion that a woman with too large a vagina or whose husband had too small a penis might seek satisfaction in sihaq.
Chapter 2, Selim Kuru's “Generic Desires: Homoerotic Love in Ottoman Turkish Poetry,” examines the literary phenomenon of love poems to boys. Originating in Persian poems that praised the glory of God incarnate in youthful male beauty, the abstract nature of such praise became specific devotion to named boys in fifteenth-century Turkish poetry. Poems took three forms: gazal, rhymed lyric poems repeating the name of the beloved; şehrengiz, poetic lists of beautiful boys in a particular city; and mesnevi, narrative poems of falling in love with a boy. Kuru explains the movement, which fell out of favor in the nineteenth century, as “eloquent self-fashioning” (46) through “transgressive experiments” (49).
Chapter 3, Vincenzo Lavenia's “Between Heresy and ‘Crimes against Nature’: Sexuality, Islamophobia and the Inquisition in Early Modern Europe,” explores one facet of the Christian accusation of sexual vice against Muslims in a deliberate misinterpretation of a Quranic passage said to permit anal intercourse. “Your brides are like a field for you. Come to your field as you wish” (72; Qur'an 2.223), probably intended to reject the prohibition on sex during menstruation, became in the sermons of Jaime Bleda a justification for the expulsion of the Moriscos: “Muhammad, that nefarious, filthy and ignoble man . . . granted that: your wife and your servant are your property; plow them and spread your seed from whichever side you like” (84).
Chapter 4, Tomás Antonio Mantecón Movellán's “Beyond Repression: Gender Identities and Homosexual Relations between Muslims and Christians in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain,” documents prosecutions of men for sodomy in Sevilla, including Africans and Moors. He summarizes the cases, compares them to other European regions, and concludes that “homoeroticism offered a chance for social interaction across certain cultural frontiers” and even “facilitated the overcoming of barriers of the forbidden” (110).
Chapter 5, Luiz Mott's “Muslim Sodomites in Portugal and Christian Bardassi in North Africa in the Early Modern Period,” analyzes thirty-three instances of Moriscos and others charged with sodomy in early modern Portugal. He reviews what is known about these men and their lives, revealing a complex network of sodomites from all religious and ethnic groups, regions, and professions—as diverse as the Mediterranean itself. He adds the stories of another eighteen men described as bardaxos, bardajes, bardassi, or berdaches in Mediterranean languages: Christians who were enslaved, converted to Islam, and who served as sexual companions to men.
Chapter 6, Umberto Grassi's “Nonnormative Sexualities, Gender and Conversion in the Mediterranean World: The Case of Susanna Daza,” investigates a curious case of a Sicilian Morisca who denounced herself twice to the Inquisition. She confessed at first to having formed sexual relationships first with a Turk and then with a Jew, converting from Christianity to Islam to Judaism before developing “a personal hybrid religion” (140). Then she admitted to invoking the devil to help her to seduce a third partner, a Christian friar. Grassi explores the meanings of her actions within official discourse and popular religion on conversion, female agency, and sexual stereotypes.
This review only scratches the surface of the richness in this collection. The promises made in the preface—to consider the Mediterranean cross-culturally, including religious hybridity, as well as to engage with female as well as male sexual transgressions—are amply fulfilled.
