Repressing the Aberrant. Church and state authorities during the Renaissance and Reformation attempted to suppress homosexual as well as premarital and extramarital heterosexual activity. After about 1250 they increasingly defined homosexual actions as "crimes against nature," seeing them as particularly reprehensible because they thought they did not occur anywhere else in creation. Homosexual activity, usually termed "sodomy," became a capital crime in both England and the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) during the 1530s, although the two areas defined it slightly differently: in the empire it included relations between two men, two women, or any person and an animal, while in England relations between two women were not mentioned. Preachers and officials denounced sodomy with strong language, and linked it with other serious crimes such as heresy.

Sodomy. Despite harsh language about "sodomites" and "the unmentionable vice" (for example, homosexuality), the number of actual sodomy...