Abstract
Calvin was more than a famous Protestant reformer; he was also a trained lawyer. As such, in 1554 he was asked to give advice on a case involving five schoolboys who had been caught fooling around with one another.1 The case involved the children of very prominent families and, to a large extent, the names of those involved were kept quiet. The children were accused of ‘incest or buggery … with one another’ and their relatives were called before the Senate to discuss the entire affair.2 So ‘weighty’ was the matter that advice was also sought from the ‘ministers and learned men’. Initial reports suggested the number of youths involved ranged from four to nine, but it soon became clear that only five were implicated. The list of relatives who attended evidences the social and political prominence of the families involved: Jacques-Nicolas Vulliet; Jean Levet, goldsmith; Tivent Patru; Charles Goula.3 The two younger boys (Patru and Tares) were ordered to be beaten privately by their parents while the older boys were to throw effigies of themselves on a fire (warning them of their fate should they reoffend) and then be chained in separate rooms in the city’s hospital for three months.4 Upon their release they were beaten in front of all the assembled schoolboys.5
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Notes
Vulliet was an elder in 1553 and served as a judicial magistrate and auditeur in 1554; he fell from power in 1555 because of his ties with Calvin’s polit-ical opponents, the Perrinists. Patru was also known for his outspoken opposition to Calvin, having been involved in a riot after a sermon; see W.G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1994), p. 106. Jean Levet would later be a senator and Jean Goula was Geneva’s treasurer for much of the late 1540s and early 1550s.
Roger Edgeworth, Sermons very Fruitful!, Godly, and Learned (London, 1557): fos. 32D, 34C.
Indeed, what one usually finds are stray references to the sexual activities of older adolescents in the context of studies of adult sexual activity. Cf. L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 512–18 and M. Rey, ‘Cérémonies secretes’, Histoire 63 (1984), 103–4, 104 for discussion about youths aged 17 and 19. Alternatively, adolescents are discussed as a group with little focus on sex;
cf., A. Yarborough, ‘Apprentices as adolescents in sixteenth century Bristol’, Journal of Social History 13 (1979): 67–81 where there are references to contemporary comments on the lewdness and lustiness of adolescents (esp., 68, 70, 74–5).
See also B. Hanawalt, ‘Historical descriptions and prescriptions for adolescence’, Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 341–51;
K.L. Reyerson, ‘The Adolescent Apprentice/worker in Medieval Montpellier’, Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 353–70
and, more recently, P.J.P. Golde-berg and F. Riddy (eds), Youth in the Middle Ages (York: York University Press, 2004). Some works focus more explicitly on childhood as opposed to adoles-cence.
See L.C. Attreed, ‘From pearly maiden to tower princes: towards a new history of medieval childhood’, Journal of Family History 9 (1983): 43–58;
P. Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1450–1536 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991);
S. Ozment, ‘The family in Reformation Germany: the bearing and rearing of children’, Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 159–76.
J.-L. Flandrin, ‘Repression and change in the sexual life of young people in medieval and early modern times’, Journal of Family History 2 (1977): 196–211 focuses specifically on the sexual life of the young, but in a broad context.
The issue of child abuse in the Middle Ages is dealt with specifically (with some interesting examples) in N. Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 103–6.
He notes that most medieval literature seemed to assume that children were most likely to be abused by strangers or to be involved in incestuous relationships with siblings rather than older relatives — a view hinted at in S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, C. Galai, trans. (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 101 in a work which largely avoids the issue of sex and sexuality.
C. Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) tends to discuss ‘child abuse’ in the physical sense (80, 101) and youthful sexual activity in the context of masturbation (37–8).
The debate is extensive and, without considerably more detailed studies, difficult to settle. For the former positions see various works by Ariès, Stone, and Cunningham, especially P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, R. Baldick, trans. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage (London: Harper Collins, 1977);
H. Cunningham, Children & Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995). For the opposing view, see, especially, B. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval
London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Cf. E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
J.R. Banker, ‘Mourning a Son: Childhood & Paternal Love in the Consolateria of Giannozzo Manetti’, Journal of Psychohistory, 3 (1976): 351–62.
Indeed, magistrates were concerned by more than sexual abuse. Geneva’s authorities intervened (along with adult relatives) to protect children from the physical abuse of teachers and tutors. Similar reactions are evident else-where. For example, in Ghent, magistrates punished a man for physically mistreating his ward; that is, they actively intervened in the familial environ-ment. D. Nicholas, The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 114.
See note 11 for the substantive points. In Geneva, parents and magis-trates limited the ability of tutors and teachers corporally to punish their pupils. For more information on schooling in Geneva see Naphy, ‘The Reformation and Evolution of Geneva’s Schools’, in B. Kümin (ed.), Reform-ations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-Economic Impact of Religious Change c. 1470–1630 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 185–202. Indeed, treatises at the time discussed these contractual arrangements — R. Mulcaster, Positions wherein those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessary for the training up of children, London (1581), Mrnijv. For a specific example on the early modern theory of corporal punishment see Pierre Saliat, Declamation contenant la manière de bien instruire les enfans (Paris, 1537), p. 37. Opposition to corporal punishment may have arisen from a fear that this would lead to sexual arousal, cf., A. Stewart, ‘Boys’ buttocks revisited: James VI and the myth of the sovereign schoolmaster’, in T. Betteridge (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 132.
The very ‘modern’ feel about early modern reactions to child abuse is stressed by R. O’Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 164.
On the other hand, the very alien nature of early modern ideas on sex and the young can be found in the rather Freudian interpretation of the rearing of Louis XIV in D. Hunt, Parents and Children in History: the Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France, London (1970), 159–79; cf., Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, 106–7, 507–12.
and the reality was that many social factors continued to play a part in sentencing. P. H. Labalme, ‘Venetian Justice in the Renaissance’, Tijdschri ft voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 52 (1984): 217–54, 236.
Although sex with males and females under (about) the age of 12 was normally treated very harshly indeed, Venice provides an example of a man convicted of a non-penetrative sexual assault against a six-year-old girl who was only forced to pay her medical bills and contribute to her dowry. Labalme, ‘Venetian Justice’, 236–7 (esp. n. 85). In 1884, a 15-year-old Dutch army trumpeter was imprisoned for three months for frottage against the buttocks of a three-year-old boy. An adult soldier, in 1873, was jailed for five years for fondling (but not penetrating) two boys, aged 15 and 12; G. Hekma, ’Homosexual Behavior in the Nineteenth-century Dutch army’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): 266–88, 281.
A. D. Harvey, ‘Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal 21 (1978): 939–48.
Genevan sources seem wholly unconcerned with the issue of passivity — both active and passive participants were treated the same. Age alone seemed a mitigating factor. Individuals variously argued the importance of active versus passive and also previous sexual relations with women, but to no avail. See Naphy, ‘Reasonable Doubt: Defences Advanced in Early Modern Sodomy Trials in Geneva’, in M. Mulholland and B. Pullan (eds), Judicial Tribunals in England and Europe, 1200–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1: pp. 129–46.
For a discussion on the issue of passive-active see D.M. Halperin, ‘Is there a History of Sexuality?’, History & Theory 28 (1989): 257–74, 260, 268 and Labalme, ‘Venetian Justice’, 225.
Also Martha Vicinus, ’Adolescent Boy: fin de siècle femme fatale’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5 (1994): 90–114, 94 where the constant tension arising from classicism’s approval of ‘boy-love’ and social reactions to same-sex relations are discussed.
A.N. Gilbert, ‘Buggery and the British Navy, 1700–1861’, Journal of Social History 10 (1976), 72–98.
A similar toleration of sexual harassment was noted among nineteenth-century Dutch soldiers in Hekma, ‘Dutch Army’, 277–8. Cf. the article by C.L. Talley, ‘Gender and Male Same-sex Erotic Behavior in British North America in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 385–408 which makes a similar point.
Indeed, adults generally undertook to control each other’s children and children seem rarely to have been unobserved, J. Warner and R. Griller, “My pappa is out, and my mamma is asleep”: Minors, Their Routine Activities, and Interpersonal Violence in an Early Modern Town, 1653–1781’, Journal of Social History 36 (2003): 561–84.
K. Gravdal, ‘Confessing Incest: Legal Erasures and Literary Celebrations in Medieval France’, in C. Neel (ed.), Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 329–36, has argued persuasively that such child sexual abuse did take place in the medieval period. This leaves one wondering what can and should be done in any discussion of Geneva where an argument must, perforce, proceed from silence.
Notes
Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 92.
Martin Ingram, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 63–84, p. 82.
Notes
A useful summary of these ideas is provided by Ilaria Taddei, ‘Puerizia, adolescenza e giovinezza: Images and Conceptions of Youth in Florentine Society during the Renaissance’, in Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650 (Toronto, 2002), pp. 15–24.
Ottavia Niccoli, Il seme della violenza: Putti, fanciulli, e mammoli nell’Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Bari, 1995), pp. 10–14.
David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, 1985), pp. 203–15;
Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 187–90, 194–5, 305, 313;
Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 116–17;
Daniele Beltrami, Storia della popolazione di Venezia dalla fine del secolo XVI alla caduta della Repubblica (Padua, 1954), 180–1.
Patricia Labalme, ‘Sodomy and Venetian Justice in the Renaissance’, Tijdschri ft voor Rectsgeschiednis 52 (1984), p. 237;
Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), pp. 129–30.
Nicholas Davidson, ‘Theology, Nature and the Law: Sexual Sin and Sexual Crime in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, in Trevor Dean and KJ.P Lowe (eds), Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1994), p. 88.
Claudio Povolo (ed.), Il processo di Paolo Orgiano (1605–1607) (Rome, 2003), pp. 132–4.
Daniela Hacke, ‘Marital Litigation and Gender Relations in Early Modern Venice, c. 1570–1700’ (University of Cambridge unpublished PhD thesis, 1997), pp. 92–5.
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996), pp. 88–9, 94–105, 115–18, 126–9, 243–6.
N.S. Davidson, ‘Sodomy in Early Modern Venice’ in Tom Betteridge (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modem Europe (Manchester, 2002), pp. 74–7.
Gabriele Martini, Il ‘vitio nefando’ nella Venezia del Seicento: Aspetti sociali e repressione di giustizia (Rome, 1988), pp. 124–5.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Marriage in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), pp. 106–8; Martini, Il ‘vitio nefando’, pp. 121–2.
Oscar Di Simplicio, Storia di un Anticristo: avidità, amore e morte nella Toscana medicea (Siena, 1996), pp. 25, 66.
Mary Hewlett, ‘Women, Sodomy and Sexual Abuse in Late Renaissance Lucca’ (University of Toronto unpublished PhD thesis, 2000), pp. 221–6.
Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (1980), pp. 165–7;
Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), pp. 93, 96, 125; Hacke, ’Marital Litigation’, p. 73; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, pp. 116, 260, 312.
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Naphy, W.G. (2007). ‘Under-Age’ Sexual Activity in Reformation Geneva. In: Rousseau, G. (eds) Children and Sexuality. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590526_4
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