Mark D. Jordan’s thesis is the spine of this page: sodomia is a medieval theological artifact. Penitentials, canonists, and scholastics sorted non-procreative sex into boxes of increasing panic. Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus (11th century) is the unlovely classic of clerical obsession. Aquinas placed “unnatural vice” in a hierarchy of sins against nature. The details matter to specialists. The public fact is simpler: a cluster of acts got a single name, and the name got a temperature.
From pulpit to docket
Church courts and, later, secular courts borrowed the vocabulary. Enforcement was not a steady drumbeat. It spiked with politics, heresy hunts, and urban panic. The same century that produced delicate monastic friendship literature also produced burnings. Consistency was never the point. Classification was.
Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) argued for a more tolerant early medieval West and a later freeze. Medievalists have been fencing about it ever since. You should read him, then read his critics. This site will not pretend the fight is over in a sidebar.
Islamicate and Jewish law, briefly
Classical Islamic jurisprudence discusses liwat among the hudud and ta’zir debates; Jewish law has its own halakhic trail from Leviticus through the Talmud. Neither tradition is a monolith, and neither is “the medieval.” They are parallel desks we will keep adding to, with sources, rather than one exoticizing paragraph.
Why this still sits in your phone
When a modern statute says “crime against nature,” it is speaking medieval with a legislative drafter’s accent. The American phrase, the English “abominable,” the colonial “order of nature” — they are all downstream of this naming project. That is why a theology book belongs on a law syllabus.
Educational material, not a diagnosis, prescription, or legal opinion. Consenting adults only. Laws change; check primary sources and a licensed professional in your jurisdiction. If you are in danger, local emergency services come first.