This compact monograph explores (too narrowly for its own good) a remarkable strand in the Western Christian discussion of Adam and Eve’s fall in the garden of Eden, which Genesis ii–iii represents as the result of eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Taking as his focus the Italian peninsula over three centuries from 1500, Grassi uses records from various Italian inquisitions to examine cases of dissenting and libertine belief that viewed the Fall as the consequence of sexual lust, frequently also relating it to radical rejections of Jesus’ saving role on the cross. At the centre of considerable variations on these themes was the proposition that the sin of Adam and Eve, in what Genesis narrates euphemistically as the illicit eating of fruit, was actually a non-reproductive sexual act: that is, anal intercourse.

In its most radical form, this exegesis extended to the thought that God was angry because he had wished to reserve that particular pleasure for himself, rather than sharing it with the human race. One apothecary named Marcello Impicciato, examined by the Neapolitan Inquisition in 1598, maintained that the Creator God had placed Adam in the Garden of Eden in order to enjoy him sexually (p. 24), and others echoed this conclusion. Speculation on the apple that was the instrument of Eve’s temptation to Adam in Genesis led to the salacious comparison of the apple shape to the buttocks; a more varied modern diet has largely replaced the apple theme with the peach, a visual image which Grassi can trace back at least as far as the satirical Italian poet Francesco Bern (d. 1535). Counter-Reformation inquisitors may not be the only ones to find some of this material challenging. In the background lurked the common motif of fraudulence in all religious claims, especially those of the three great monotheisms; this culminated in the collective sub-literary efforts of various French and Dutch libertines, eventually published in 1719 alongside an (unreliable) life of Baruch Spinoza as the Treatise on the three impostors.

Grassi’s concern is Renaissance unbelief, so he largely misses the opportunity of placing his theme in the background of mainstream medieval Western Christianity. He does rightly undertake some contextual work on his sexual theme, right back to the Church in late antiquity, and to the twelfth-century Jewish anti-Christian rhetoric of the Toledot Yeshu, but he makes no reference to another important twelfth-century invention: an anti-sodomitical myth which parallels and was clearly originally linked to the hypothesis of Adam and Eve’s sodomy. It is equally bizarre and extra-biblical. Sometime around 1200, a writer now anonymous announced that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world had died at the hands of God the Father, because the baby Jesus would not condescend to enter a sinful world where humanity was committing sins against nature. In its extended form, the ‘Great Sodomite Massacre of Christmas Eve’ based itself on distorted citations of Jerome and a sermon wrongly attributed to Augustine, which is good evidence that the text started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public. The Italian jurist Egidio Bossi (1488–1546) cited the same pseudo-Augustinian sermon (Sermo ad fratres in eremo no. 47, ‘On the vehement detestation of the sodomitic sin’) in relation to the sodomitic, albeit heterosexual, sexual act attributed to Adam and Eve.

Grassi points out that discussion of Adam and Eve’s sodomy was associated with the Franciscan order of friars (p. 26); it was, for instance, a late sixteenth-century ‘libertine’ Franciscan in Sicily who claimed that he had heard a celebrity Franciscan preach on the subject when he was young. The ‘Great Sodomite Massacre of Christmas Eve’ was similarly a frequent subject of fraternal preaching in the three centuries after 1200 (particularly on Christmas Day); such major Franciscans as Bonaventure and Bernardino of Siena were among its exponents, while the Dominican Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine discussed it in his anthology of saints’ lives, the famous Golden legend. Not surprisingly, the story of the massacre spread from the pulpit in pious conversation throughout the medieval West. Moreover, it is directly visually linked to the Fall in at least one of the great thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées, the Codex Vindobonensis in Vienna, where a picture of sodomitical couples being tormented in Hell directly follows the story of the garden of Eden. I expound these themes at greater length in D. MacCulloch, Lower than the angels (London 2024), pp. 290–3.

The importance of all this is to ground Grassi’s theme more securely in mainstream Western Christian belief as developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when both these newly crafted malevolent myths formed part of the new paranoia about sodomy associated with the Gregorian revolution on clerical and lay sexuality in the Latin Church. They outlined how a wrong turn among God’s human creatures was punished on the eve of the Nativity in order to smooth Jesus’s journey into the Incarnation, but that God’s wrath failed to curb the impulse, as proved by its deplorable recurrence in later centuries. They also explained why Jesus had said absolutely nothing on the subject of sodomy in the Gospels. In this scheme, anal sodomy might be either single-sex or heterosexual, but either way it was clearly a bad thing, punishable up to and including by burning at the stake.

The distinctive feature of Grassi’s study is that, in the sixteenth century, libertines took the hatred of sodomy felt by all decent folk as expressed in the legends and turned it on its head, as part of their gleeful wholesale inversion of morality and belief. Many others had probably already done so during the medieval period in private conviction and transgressive conversation, but only in the sixteenth century did the literate among them go as far as publishing their thoughts, even beyond the blasphemous and salacious material extracted from them by inquisitors. This was the age not merely of inquisitorial proceedings but also of Antonio Vignali’s sodomitical The tangle of pricks (first published around 1540) and the conventual Franciscan Antonio Rocco’s astonishingly candid defence of pederastic sex Alcibiades the schoolboy (published in Venice in the 1650s). What is interesting is that this public or semi-public exposure scared the orthodox off both anti-sodomitic traditions: preachers ceased to speak of the Great Sodomite Massacre during the sixteenth century, and Grassi cannot trace the Adam and Eve sodomy topos even in inquisitorial records beyond 1700. That is in itself a further indication of the original twinning of these themes.

We are in Grassi’s debt for opening up an important byway in Christian discussion of sexuality. He should have put it in its wider context; contrariwise, he probably gives too much space in his text to the Dominican freethinker Tommaso Campanella, since he does not present any evidence beyond supposition that Campanella gave credence to or expounded the myth of Edenic sodomy. Yet there is much here to draw on to illuminate wider matters of great importance.