You will never forget your first time reading Zeb Tortorici's excellent book, Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Mine was this past April. It was in the undergraduate comparative history course that I teach at the University of California, Santa Barbara on Contested Sexualities. From the book's opening retelling of the 1656 case of Lorenzo Vidales, a thirteenth-year-old mestizo, who was discovered committing pecado nefando with a goat to Tortorici's own expressly honest interventions about the corpus of materials he examined, my students and I were hooked. We learned much (sometimes uncomfortably so) about sex in colonial New Spain and the layered and intricate processes that went into making that history knowable. But Sins Against Nature is arguably most impactful for how it introduced undergraduate students to the time, labour, and intellectual processes that produce history; especially history this good.

There is so much to praise in Sins Against Nature that it is difficult to know where to begin. Nonetheless it seems logical to start with the impressive scope of the archival materials that constitute the corpus of this study. Tortorici employs corpus as both a nod to its original Latin usage, which denoted the body of a human or animal, and as a methodological intervention to argue for the historical connection of bodies and archives. In this way, corpus captures the dualities the book intends to queer while simultaneously serving as a record of colonial desires and archived bodies. Tortorici located the human and non-human bodies of the corpus in over twenty-four different archives from repositories in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, and the United States. They appeared in 327 documents that originated from secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as national, regional, and local ones. These various cases—the majority from the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries—enable Tortorici to interrogate the dichotomies of natural/unnatural, reproductive/sodomitical, human/animal all the while reminding students that such reproductive ideologies underpinned the project of colonial rule.

While the extent of Tortorici's research is impressive, so too is the book's integration of method and theory. Unlike many histories of sexuality Sins Against Nature is not limited to one specific sex act. Instead, it hones in on a plethora of sex acts and desires—oftentimes we learn that these were incorrectly inscribed by contemporaries and archivists alike (see, in particular, Chapter 2)—that included masturbation with the Eucharist (Chapter 6), “sucking semen” and “carnal congress with a corpse” (Chapter 1) as well as sex with non-human animals such as donkeys, mares, dogs, mules, cows, goats, sheep and the one animal indigenous to New Spain that Tortorici found in the archival record, turkeys (Chapter 4). Drawing together such a diversity of cases—all categorized as “sins against nature”—Tortorici destabilizes both heterosexuality and homosexuality to expose how individual desires and communities encountered the mechanisms of colonial rule over matters of unnatural sex. Worthy of note is how Sins Against Nature links the two bodies of scholarship on the concept of the “contact zone”. Tortorici interrogates—drawing from Mary Louise Pratt—how geographically and historically separate peoples came together in unequal relations of power over matters of sex and desire, and on the other—following Antoinette Burton—how those historical processes were reconstituted for and through the archival process itself. As a result, Tortorici exposes both the haunting legacies of colonial institutions on our ability to understand the past while chronicling how those in the past comprehended, ignored, destroyed or misplaced sex in the archive. The archive, Tortorici writes, “should be seen as a contact zone between past and present but also between temporality diverse and interconnected processes of documenting (bodies) and consuming (information)” (7).

The book's six chapters revolve around four main themes: the visceral (how individuals from the sixteenth century through to Tortorici himself reacted to sex), the human (what sorts of sexual acts and desires were expressed by those living in colonial New Spain), the animal (how and why humans used animals for pleasure), and the divine (how religious desires and figures aroused men, women, and priests and the consequences, if any, of such arousal). Through these themes, Tortorici demonstrates a keen eye for the nuance of historiographical arguments as well as his skill for reading against and along the grains of archival evidence to offer essential and thoughtful historical correctives. For example, in tracing the webs of accusations from some of New Spain's earliest sodomy trials Sins Against Nature moves us beyond the tired dichotomy of top male-masculine-penetrator and bottom female-feminine-penetrated to argue that such misconceptions obscure the lived histories of desire and sex (65). Instead, drawing on sodomy trial testimonies, Tortorici insists that ideas of masculine and feminine cannot be reliably mapped because of inherent linguistic, cultural, and ideological problems and that in none of the testimony were tops described as being more masculine and bottoms as more feminine or effeminate. Significantly, neither was less worthy of punishment. Gendered language mattered and helped make the act of sodomy comprehendible. The frequent use of the phrase—“as if they were man and women”—aided individuals and colonial courts in making sense of the crime. However, Tortorici importantly reminds us that there is little evidence of the motives or desires behind any of the acts of penetration documented in the archive.

Sins Against Nature makes countless other arguments that are equally notable. The discussion of the “signs of sodomy” gives a history to the physical gestures and verbal expressions—the affective and epistolary traces in the archive—associated with queerness (116–120). The examination of the Catholic Church's systematic abuse of power and how the desire for the divine led individuals to sexual practices and abuses indicate that current debates over culpability and sexual assault have a long, sordid, and sad history (Chapters 5 and 6). Tortorici's perceptive insistence that rural life, in particular, that human and non-human animals shared intimate spaces, helps explain the 144 archival references to bestiality in his corpus (127). While there is much to praise, my students were uncomfortable with what they saw as a disparity between how Tortorici discussed the cases of sodomy and those of bestiality. Many interpreted a higher degree of compassion in the book for the animals sodomized by humans than the young men found to have had sex with another man. To this end, they sought tables detailing those men implicated (akin to those included in the text for the bestiality cases) and a more sustained discussion of how age, race, and power shaped these human-human colonial sexual encounters. These perceptive observations led us to some meaningful conversations about the distinction between victim and survivor in cases of sexual assault, a reading unquestionably inflected by the “Me Too” and “Time's Up” campaigns of the present.

Ultimately, Sins Against Nature asks readers to think reflectively about their visceral reactions to sex and archives, and that is where I want to conclude. As Tortorici explains, “visceral reactions unsteadily guide us into the uncharted territory of how we ourselves, as archive users, can be physically and affectively moved by the archive that we might not fully like, expect, or understand” (31). This explanation reminded me of an experience I had years ago as a graduate student working at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. One morning, as I unlatched the locker that would store my backpack, a magazine tumbled down on me from above. It smacked onto the tile below. As I looked to the floor, my gaze met the cover of the latest issue of a Playboy Magazine. I had serendipitously discovered sex in the coatroom of Canada's state archive. Disappointed it was not something I would have taken more interest in, I quickly retrieved it. I looked around and hastily, hoping no one saw me, stashed it back atop the locker from where it had come. When I left hours later, it was gone. That day I had responded viscerally—a twenty-first century version of Velázquez Rangel discovering two indigenous men having sex in a temascal or Ingacia Gómez shrieking at the spectacle of José Lazaro Martínez carrying out a carnal act with the corpse of her elderly aunt in the San Juan de Dios cemetery in Mexico City—to an out-of-place external stimulus, to sex in the archive. Sins Against Nature belongs in your hands and on your bookshelf.