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Moreover, the voices of these men rarely emerge in court transcripts and reports. It is possible that many of these cases were dealt with by informal measures of justice, such as mediation between two parties, which entailed no formal record keeping. We now need to address one of the methodological issues that this paper must confront.

We cannot use our knowledge of Present Day English as a basis for the compilation of a list of terms which may have been used to describe homosexual men in early modern England. Table 1 shows the initial list of terms we compiled using these three guides. When searching our corpus we looked for all of these terms in their singular and plural form and their variants. Firstly, within the corpus itself were lexicographical works of the period, some of which were not present in Lexicons of Early Modern English LEME , and these yielded further examples.

Secondly, as we explored the examples in the corpus we became aware of other terms, used in close proximity to the terms we were looking for, which had similar meanings. Table 2 below shows the outcome of that process of searching — the final set of words and phrases we explored in our study.

Note that the initial list in Table 1 included some items for which we found no corpus evidence. Table 2 confirms that, even with a billion words of data, there is scant evidence to explore many of the words that we may wish to.

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Accordingly, in the rest of this paper we will explore the most frequent terms in Table 2. We will then consider what value can be gleaned from the moderately frequent items before concluding the paper. We will begin our analysis by focusing upon the four most frequent items in Table 2 — sodomite, buggerer, catamite and ganymede — which are frequent enough to permit a corpus analysis based upon collocation.

The following graph illustrates how the usage of these words fluctuated throughout the seventeenth century in the EEBO corpus. The graph conflates the singular and plural forms of the words, as well as spelling variants, and shows frequencies per million words rather than the raw frequencies of terms Figure 1.

Frequency per million words of sodomite, catamite, buggerer and ganymede throughout the seventeenth century. Citation: Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 3, 2; Sodomite is mentioned over 2, times in the seventeenth-century EEBO corpus, though it does reduce in frequency as the century progresses. It occurs frequently enough that we were able to proceed to analyse the word using collocation 18 as the high frequency of sodomite allowed collocates to be calculated per decade throughout the seventeenth century.

However, the analysis encountered a significant issue— figurative usage. Collocation shows, very clearly, that the word sodomite is not as useful for this study as its frequency would indicate. Of the fifty-nine lexical collocates of sodomite , fifty-five relate to the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah —the overwhelming presence of the Biblical frame of reference in the early modern period is an issue here.

Lot is a character from the Biblical story and Genesis abbreviated as Gen. So the dominant pattern these consistent collocates reveal is of a reference to the city of Sodom and its inhabitants in the Biblical story. Why was the term sodomite used less frequently as the seventeenth century progressed? The word molly , for instance, does not appear as a nickname for homosexual men in the EEBO data before the end of the seventeenth century.

Frequencies per million words of the terms Sodom and Gomorrah in the EEBO corpus also exhibit a general decline through the century suggesting that the Biblical story was referenced to a lesser extent in public discourse, perhaps as a result of changing religious and cultural concerns. Collocation might also provide a clue why sodomite was in decline in the century. Unlike the collocates connected with Lot, a number of co-occurring words, beastly, murderers , and harlots , do relate to real-life sexual practice.

They are only present in the first half of the century and tend to appear in texts saturated with anti-Catholic sentiment.

A clear link to homosexuality and sodomite is not clear in the corpus. What can be said, however, is that the Biblical allusion certainly imbues sodomite with a strong negative discourse prosody when the word is used of a non-biblical referent. Sodomite is, however, associated with female prostitution. Indeed, if we consider the collocates of sodomite for the seventeenth century as a whole, rather than as part of a by-decade analysis, we find a striking pairing of sodomites and female prostitutes in early modern discourse.

A small number of examples of the phrase sodomitical boy do provide a clearer allusion to homosexuality in three seventeenth-century texts in the EEBO corpus 27 — yet again the religious frame of reference dominates as all are anti-Catholic in nature.

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A translation of a dialogue by the Italian historian, Gregori Leti , who was well-known for his anti-papal histories, draws a parallel between whores and sodomitical boys, thus contaminating the latter with the stigmatisation of commercial sex implied by the former. An exploration of the word sodomitical alone shows that four collocates attach themselves to it in the seventeenth century: filthiness, abominable, lusts, sins.

These words suggest that sodomitical relates more directly to sexual impropriety than the term sodomite. Yet, sodomitical could still act as a representative term for an array of sexual sins. He often attempted Buggery with several Beasts, before God-left him to commit it. Historical context can help to explain this broad meaning of sodomite — Saslow : 97 notes that canon law included all manner of non-procreative sexual activity under the umbrella of sodomy.

Burg : xi writes that sodomy was used in law to mean homosexual acts, homosexual child molestation, bestiality, heterosexual anal-genital contact, and homosexual masturbation. However, in practice, he argues that a simple reference to sodomy, without further qualification, meant sexual acts between adult men. Hence we undertook a search for the singular of sodomite only and found that, to some extent, the results supported the views of Bly.

An immediate consequence of excluding the plural instances of sodomite was the reduction of many references to the biblical story of Lot. For the singular form, the top ranking collocate is buggerer. This is because, in early modern England, being found guilty of sodomy could result in the forfeiture of life and property. Our focus of investigation now naturally shifts from sodomite to buggerer , which appears in the seventeenth-century EEBO corpus times. Other writers also offer definitions.

Buggerer is another term which is presented pejoratively: it is frequently included in lists of people who are perceived as being offensive. For example, a religious treatise by Twisse states that fornicators, idolators, adulterers, wantons, thieves and buggerers are all forbade entry to the kingdom of God. Buggerers, as well as sodomites, were also sometimes thought to be foreign. Let us now turn to examine the two other frequently-occurring terms: ganymede and catamite.

These terms are strongly linked to one another. Catamite is derived from the name Catamitus, the Latinised form of Ganymede. These terms show another lens through which homosexuality may be referred to in the period, classical allusion. Ganymede was a beautiful boy who was abducted by Zeus in Greek mythology.

If we examine the collocates of ganymede , we see that just as religious texts overwhelmed references to sodomite , classical references dominate with the mentions of ganymede. Almost all of the collocates, considered for the seventeenth century as a whole, refer to the mythical Ganymede. Many of these collocates, such as beautiful, lovely and pretty , present Ganymede as attractive and worthy of adoration, but he is also described as wanton.

The collocates do, however, strongly suggest a link to homosexual attraction. Hence any Boy, loved for carnal abuse, or hired to be used contrary to Nature, to commit the detestable sin of Sodomy, is called a Ganymede, or Ingle.

Hence in ganymede we have clear lexicographic evidence of a term which is linked both to homosexual activity and prostitution. These links become clearer when we look at the collocates of catamite: stale, concubine, whores, wanton, boy, kept and young. They provide a very frank representation of a catamite. Rather he appears to be paralleled with female prostitutes 33 and described as stale.

Let us consider the term pathic. While the term is moderately frequent, it still does not provide clear evidence of relevance to this study, for many of its 66 appearances in the seventeenth-century EEBO material relate to homosexual practices in Ancient Greece or Rome — 24 of the examples appear in translations of classical writers such as Juvenal, Ovid, Suetonius and Virgil. While interesting, these classical references represent another problem for a study such as this — while the word generally refers to homosexuality in these examples, unlike in the case of catamite and Ganymede , they do not tell us much about Early Modern sexuality at all.

But they are once again indicative of the importance of a classical framing for mentions of homosexuality in the early modern period.

That is evident in Table 2. It is less certain whether the influence of the classical world permeated to the English lower orders, many of whom were illiterate. However, given that the lower orders were typically not involved in the production of the texts in EEBO, it remains the case that a fusion between references to homosexuality in antiquity and the use of terms from the classical world to refer to contemporary homosexuality exists in the written record to the extent that it represents a challenge for a corpus-based study of homosexuality in the early modern period.

These classical allusions can, however, on occasion give rise to a direct comment on attitudes to homosexuality in early modern texts, as can be seen when we look at a variant of pathic, pathicus.

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While this appears only once in the EEBO corpus, in a discussion of the Ten Commandments by John Turner , the text is both unusual and valuable, to say the least, as it raises the question of consent in male sexual relationships in unambiguous language:. So also when the Law forbad Sodomy, or the use of Carnality contrary to nature … yet the Decalogue does not at all concern it self about them, the reason is, because though in this case there be a mutual offence, committed between both of the contracting parties … and between the Pathicus and the Cinaedus … yet it was not an offence violently committed by one of the parties upon the other, for then it could not be mutual in them both, but it was by mutual, reciprocal and interchangeable consent.

So, while our response to the issue of disentangling antiquity and the use of classical terms to discuss homosexuality was close reading, the effort invested in close reading was worthwhile, as a very relevant example for our study was thus revealed. This extract also offers another term we had not yet considered: cinaedus , which is mentioned by Bray : 13 but is not listed in the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

This is probably the source of the term cynedian which we included in our original list but that had no matches in the seventeenth-century EEBO corpus. Yet a small number of English texts do offer some clues to the meaning of cinaedus. This example is interesting as it introduces an element of effeminacy into contemporary definitions of homosexuality. This is consistent with the observation of Allen : 84 who claims that the term cinaedus was the Latin version of the Greek term kinaidos , which means a man who is effeminate or given to cross dressing.

While classical references give rise to Greek and Latin borrowings to frame and label the behaviour, a number of contemporary early modern European words have also been put forward as terms used to describe homosexuals in early modern English. Yet there is scant corpus evidence for this: nimfadoro appears just once in the EEBO v3 corpus.

Then again, the single example we have from the corpus and the LEME entry does not allow us to say anything other than this is one of a range of possibilities. We see once again the benefit of having slightly more data when we consider bardash , another potentially relevant term with foreign roots. It is a slightly more common term, appearing in nine texts. This additional evidence is sufficient to show that it does appear to refer to a man who practises same-sex. Its various cognates — the French bardache and Italian bardascia — also appear in a handful of texts with similar meaning.

However, in the late seventeenth century, effeminacy was a charge also thrown at men who were thought to be overly interested in sexual conquests involving women. He notes that in the early eighteenth century, the association between effeminacy and homosexuality was reasserted and men who wished to avoid the association simplified the style of their clothing and stopped greeting one another with kisses in public.

Although a higher volume of evidence would permit a more comprehensive analysis of relatively rare terms such as bardash, for example, by allowing an exploration of collocates, extant examples do shed light on word meaning and the construction of the group in public discourse. There are some terms, however, that initially appear to be neither clouded by a classical frame of reference nor by references to a meaning in another European language. For example, the noun ingle , and its variant ningle , are promising both in terms of frequency and in terms of their apparent meaning; ingle appears times in the seventeenth-century material of the EEBO v.

Some refer to surnames, some are variant spellings of mingle and single , and others are ambiguous. If we discard the examples of the word form ingle which are not relevant or which are ambiguous, we do identify a moderately frequent way of referencing homosexuals. We have identified 27 examples of ingle which unambiguously reference men who engage in same-sex.

He then directs us to the entry for Ganymede. Coles writes that an ingle is a catamite but that the term can also mean a blaze or fire.

The ingle is almost invariably presented as being male and in the service of men. The words used to describe homosexual men in early modern England were overwhelmingly laden with a negative meaning and were almost always mentioned in the writing of people who viewed homosexual men as deviant and other.

None of the texts we came across during our analysis were self-referential. Yet despite scholarly warnings that early modern people did not conceive of sexualities such as heterosexual and homosexual, we found that terms such as ingle, catamite and, to a lesser extent, ganymede , were used to convey sexual orientation; indeed, when referenced by the most hostile observers, these terms often reduced their recipients to the whole sum of their sexual activity.

Labels such as ganymede and catamite , despite being frequently pejoratively applied, carried a lesser threat than a term such as sodomite which was associated with heresy and could ultimately lead to execution.