Editor’s note: Below are just a few passages from Chapter 13 “European Society in the Age of the Renaissance” from the Houghton Mifflin textbook “A History of Western Society.” In instances where we felt the information is too graphic for our readership, we have included a notation.

• For instance, one priest had a long love affair with a married woman and hired a “hit man” to kill the husband. Indicted for homicide and adultery, the priest was decapitated.

• In another case, while his wife was out shopping, middle-aged Mucccino raped his 11-year-old niece. The court ordered Muccino whipped with branches to the place of justice, where his (word deleted) was mutilated. The courts saw sexual crimes as “originating in bodily parts that had to be punished or removed.”

• When early modern Italians used the term sodomite, they usually had males in mind, partly because those acts were most conspicuous, partly because theological and “scientific” teaching held that women could not have erotic pleasure without a man.

• The term homosexuality was coined only in 1892, but erotic activity with a person of the same sex goes back very far in human history.

• Sodomy was not a marginal practice. Moreover, careful and statistical analysis of judical records shows that all classes of society engaged in it—those in textile trade, in commerce, in education, and in the food industry, especially butchers, as well as construction workers, tavern keepers and innkeepers.

• An occasional sexual experience with a boy did not preclude sex with women.

• In 1476 an informer denounced the carpenter Piero di Bartolomeo for sexual relations with Bartolomeo di Jacopo, son of a grocer. When interrogated, 15-year-old Bartolomeo di Jacopo confess that Piero “did (this) out of great love and good brotherhood, because they are in a confraternity together and they did as good neighbors do.”

• Homoerotic relationships played important roles in definging stages of life, expressing distinctions of status, and shaping masculine gender identity.