Noel Malcolm
Author of Kosovo: A Short History
About the Author
Noel Malcolm is a British columnist, writer and editor who was born in 1956. He was educated at Cambridge University and was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge from 1981 to 1988. Malcolm left teaching to become the Foreign Editor of the Spectator and a political columnist for show more London's Daily Telegraph. Malcolm has written Bosnia: A Short Story, which puts the Bosnia-Hercegovina conflict into historical context and Kosovo: A Short Story, which outlines its history from medieval Serb state into modern times. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Noel Malcolm
Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (2015) 226 copies
Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (2019) 66 copies
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Volume I, 1622-1659 (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, Volume… (1994) — Editor — 18 copies
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Volume II, 1660-1679 (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, Volume… (1994) — Editor — 15 copies
Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (2007) 11 copies
Associated Works
The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (2010) — Contributor — 8 copies
Scribes and transmission in English manuscripts 1400-1700 : English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Volume 12 (2005) — Contributor — 4 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1956-12-26
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- UK
- Education
- Eton College
University of Cambridge (Peterhouse, Trinity College) - Organizations
- University of Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College)
The Spectator
The Daily Telegraph - Awards and honors
- Royal Society of Literature (Fellow)
British Academy (Fellow)
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 16
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 1,163
- Popularity
- #22,094
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 10
- ISBNs
- 61
- Languages
- 6
- Favorited
- 1
One of the most thought-provoking books I have read in some time, Forbidden Desires is an ambitious comparative study of sex between men in the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Its argument unfolds in a very readable narrative: this is a rare academic book for which I must tell you that my review contains spoilers. From the starting point of a scandalous case of sodomy in the household of the senior Venetian official in 16th-century Constantinople, Noel Malcolm first compares patterns of sex between men in the eastern and western Mediterranean, before asking whether these also prevailed in northern Europe.
The Mediterranean half of the story is relatively straightforward. Synthesising a large body of research based on legal codes, court cases (both secular and ecclesiastical) and literary sources, Malcolm paints a convincing picture of a broad Mediterranean pattern of sex between men. In both the Ottoman Empire and the western Mediterranean (strictly speaking Iberia and Italy, because the study does not take in the south of France, nor the Maghreb), this consisted of illegal but nonetheless relatively common sexual relations between men under 30 and ‘beardless youths’. Those whose sex lives sat outside this pederastic model faced much harsher condemnation, both legally and socially (the ‘inveterate sodomite’, for example, who kept having sex with men after his marriage, or the older man who took the passive role in sex). This pattern has its variations: there was a more open literary culture around love for boys in the Ottoman texts than in the Italian, while Italy (especially Florence) seems to have had a wider sodomitical culture than Iberia. Malcolm has little time for scholars who dismiss European travellers’ accounts of Ottoman sexual practices as only Orientalist fantasies, pointing out that the Ottoman sources provide ample confirmation of a real-life phenomenon.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Catherine Fletcher is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.… (more)