My Thoughts on a Scholarly Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages

The book that I am writing about is The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period by Michael Goodich. It is about laws regarding homosexuality in Europe in the second half of the Middle Ages, both what they said and how they were actually enforced. It proceeds in chronological order from the tenth century through the fourteenth century, describing how prohibitions on homosexuality were laid down in canon law in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but their full enforcement and incorporation into secular law did not occur until the fourteenth century.

The book is written in a very matter-of-fact style. Most of the time it is just presenting the story of what happened without doing too much analysis. However, the analysis that it does do is quite insightful and relevant. The style can make it a little bit hard to follow what the significance of each of the events is, but it's not too bad and the introduction does a good job of summarizing it. I liked the style. It was nice to have just the facts presented without any unnecessary commentary or clear biases.

I found this book interesting because I didn’t know much about its topic. I knew that homosexuality had historically been looked down upon by European cultures, but I didn’t know how far back those attitudes went or why exactly they came about. This book filled those gaps in my knowledge and added lots of other interesting information, such as the discrepancy between what the law said and how it was enforced in practice.

I thought that this was a good, well-written book about an interesting topic. The combination of the scholarly style that it is written in and the fact that it replicates a lot of the terminology from the Middle Ages meant that the vocabulary was rather advanced, which made it harder to read at first but overall made it clearer. It also taught me a lot of interesting new words. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history.

-Nibaw