Annual Lecture
Ieder jaar organiseert UCEMS een publiekslezing in het Engels. In 2023 was de spreker prof. dr. Tess Knighton. Eerder werd de lezing verzorgd door onderzoekers als prof. dr. Alec Ryrie en prof. dr. Linda Briggs.
Annual Lecture 2024
Early Modern Europe & the Origins of Modern Homosexuality by Sir Noel Malcolm
6 mei 2024
17:00-18:00 uur, met aansluitende receptie
Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, 0.06
Registreren kan door middel van dit formulier.
Modern scholarship on the history of homosexuality has identified two very different patterns of male-male sexual relations in early modern Europe. Before 1700, it is argued, such behaviour was essentially different from modern homosexuality: it involved men having sex only with teenaged boys (not other men), and it implied nothing about a distinctive sexual orientation or identity, being purely ‘acts-based’. But around 1700, it is also claimed, something much closer to modern homosexuality emerged quite suddenly in England, France and the Netherlands: this did involve a sense of identity, as well as a special subculture. Why such a major change should have occurred so rapidly has never been explained. This lecture offers a new approach to the whole issue, making it possible to give, for the first time, a coherent account of all the evidence.
Sir Noel Malcolm
Sir Noel Malcolm is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His main research interests are in British and European early modern history – especially, but not only, intellectual history. His work on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) has led him into the many areas of Hobbes's own work: not only political philosophy, but also ethics, metaphysics, theology, biblical criticism and optics. Malcolm has published editions of his Correspondence (2 vols., Oxford, 1994) and of Leviathan (3 vols., Oxford, 2012), as well as a volume of essays, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002). Another interest concerns Western knowledge of, and involvement in, the Ottoman / Islamic world. In 2001 Malcolm gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford on 'Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought'; in 2010 he gave the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge on 'Early Modern Europe's Encounters with Islam'. There are some connections between this and his on-going interest in Balkan history – especially the history of the Albanian.
