One of the observations that inspired me to do this focused series on texts related to Ottoman Turkey was the repetitiveness of the content. When specific content (not simply the topics or motifs) is recirculated and republished in different combinations, it can give the impression of being a far more dominant narrative than it may actually have been. "Look at all these authors saying the same thing!" But part of the dynamic here is that with the rise of publications for the popular market, the demand for content often outstripped the rate at which publishers were willing or able to source new content. Hence, a great amount of recycled text, either repackaged with a new introduction or reorganized an shuffled around to appear novel. Think of the practice, perhaps, as the Large Language Model text generator of the Early Modern period.
The polemical pamphlet Satan's Harvest Home gets cited a lot in studies of 18th century sexuality, but when you look at the content and its context, it becomes less clear what genre it actually meant to represent. Compare, for example, to the anti-masturbation tract The Onania which purports to be a moral treatise, but is difficult to distinguish in content from pornography. In this same era, medical manuals that addressed sexual issues were becoming a subject of scrutiny for similar reasons.
Another interesting feature of how the content is organized is the way in which male and female homosexuality is linked. It has not always been the case that the two topics were treated as parts of a whole. And the component tract "Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy" did not itself touch on female homosexuality--the chapter on the Game of Flats was added to it when incorporated into Satan's Harvest Home. Several texts of this era suggest that the (supposed) rise in female homosexuality was directly due to the rise of male sodomy, and the resulting lack of male attention to female sexual desires. This is a theme touched on in some of the Ottoman reports, though in those there is also the element of gender segregation, not only the assertion of male preference for homosexual encounters.
This finishes up the series of texts I'm newly posting for this topic. Next up will be the podcast in which I take an overall look at European perceptions of sexuality in the Ottoman Empire, and how those perceptions were integrated into discourse about lesbianism in Europe itself, becoming part of a long tradition of assigning the practice as newly-arrived due to foreign influences.
Comments