As insightful on English Protestant theology and English national identity as it is on the place of homoerotic desires within British culture, this is an original and well-researched study that deserves a wide readership.
The Historian This is a powerful and important book. As St. Paul insisted, sodomy was a crime not to be named and so homoerotic desire ... Read morequickly became screened by hyperbolic accusations of all kinds of iniquity. In disentangling these complexities, Cocks demonstrates not only how the 'story of Sodom's destruction is central to the history of homoerotic desire, ' but how its various inflections have been shaped by religious, political and cultural contingencies.
Times Higher Education This lucid and fascinating study richly illuminates its subject. Cocks learnedly traces sodomy's complex cultural roles and homoerotic applications from its ancient conceptual origins through the ensuing centuries into our present. He has superbly enhanced our knowledge of Western cultural, intellectual, and sexual history.
Kenneth Borris, McGill University Cocks argues that English Protestant thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assembled an argument against sodomy as peculiarly a sin of the papists and a sign of the coming apocalypse, and that the early eighteenth-century Societies for the Reformation of Manners used the same argument against the unprecedented wave of early eighteenth-century sodomy and that these cases could not therefore have signalled the beginning of a modern sexual system.
The English Historical Review Visions of Sodom by H. G. Cocks redraws the map of a terrain many of us thought we knew well: the history of sodomy in early modern Europe. What emerges powerfully from this beautifully conceived and densely textured study on England is that theology, prophecy, and millenarianism, with their histories, continued to matter well throughout the period. A rare and superb achievement as well as a stunning read.
Helmut Puff, University of Michigan Show Less