In 1618, the Cambridgeshire barrister Michael Dalton published The Countrey Iustice, a guide to legal practice for justices of the peace in England. It was a popular book, reprinted at least thirteen times before the end of the century. At the time, country magistrates were appointed from the local gentry and many were not experts in the law. While they did not have jurisdiction to try serious offences on their own, they could arrest the offenders and bind them over to appear before a higher court. This included people accused of buggery. Dalton’s third edition, issued shortly before the centenary of the Buggery Act 1533, contained the following notes on that crime:

(Reference DaltonDalton 1626: 273)

The Countrey Iustice was consulted not only by magistrates but by lexicographers. In 1652, when Edward Leigh published his law dictionary, A Philologicall Commentary, he converted Dalton’s remarks on buggery into a definition:

While Leigh duly cited Dalton in a marginal note, Thomas Blount would credit neither author when he incorporated their explanations into the 1661 edition of the Glossographia, his dictionary of hard English words:

As will be clear from Appendix II of this book – which includes definitions of buggery reprinted from forty dictionaries and arranged in chronological order – Blount was not the first hard-word lexicographer to define this word. Yet the Glossographia’s entry provides a useful starting point because of its expansiveness. Blount had trained as a barrister, and he drew special attention to his dictionary’s treatment of ‘Law-Terms’ from its first edition onwards (1656: A3^r). Though buggerie is not in the first edition, its presence in the revision is therefore unremarkable. At 104 words, the definition is in keeping with the level of detail Blount affords to other legal terms, such as bigamy (156 words) and divorce (242 words). Yet it is more than twice the length of any other definition of buggery found in the hard-word and general dictionaries surveyed for this book. As such, Blount unites several features that are presented discretely, but repeatedly, by other lexicographers.

The most notable of these is the definition’s covert and overt intertextuality. Apart from his uncredited sources, Blount invokes biblical and legal authority by citing the prohibitions against sexual misdeeds in the laws of the Israelites and the English: Leviticus 18: 22–23;Footnote ² the Buggery Act of Henry VIII and its reenactment by Elizabeth I, under which buggery was a hanging offence; and the crime’s early common-law punishment by burning, as reported in La nouel natura breuium (Reference Fitzherbert and RastellFitzherbert and Rastell 1609: 269^r). These authorities had already been set down by Dalton and Leigh, but Blount, writing as a hard-word lexicographer as well as a legal scholar, also provides an etymology of buggerie from the Reports of the jurist Sir Edward Reference CokeCoke (1656: 36). In his zeal for citation, Blount may not have noticed that Coke’s tracing of buggerie to Italian contradicts Blount’s own claim at the start of his entry that it derives from French.

The entextualization of Blount’s entry moves across genres, from specialist reference works to one aimed at a lay audience – showing how the hard-word dictionary could act as an intermediary in the diffusion of elite discourses to the wider public. While Dalton’s Countrey Iustice was for magistrates and Leigh’s Philologicall Commentary for ‘young Students in the Law, Justices of Peace, and other Country Gentlemen’ (1652: A8^r), the Glossographia was ‘chiefly intended for the more-knowing Women, and less-learned Men; or indeed for all such of the illiterate, who can but finde, in an Alphabet, the word they understand not’ (Reference BlountBlount 1661: A6^r). Yet Blount’s choice of usership creates a problem for his definition. Although the reader learns that buggerie is both a sin and a felony, the nature of the act itself is left mostly in unglossed Latin: ‘carnalis copula contra naturam, & hæc vel per confusionem Specierum […] vel sexuum’. This learned formula may have been appropriate in Dalton’s and Leigh’s legal works, but it hardly suits a dictionary addressed to those who ‘neither understand Greek nor Latin’ (Reference BlountBlount 1661: A6^r). Still, it would be wrong to regard the formula’s appearance in the Glossographia as a simple accident of Blount copying mechanically from his sources. Lynda Reference Mugglestone and GorjiMugglestone (2007a: 24) points out that the use of Latin in ostensibly monolingual English dictionaries allowed lexicographers to conceal indecent material from the very audience their work was meant to aid. Of course, even if Blount had translated his learned description into something likely to be understood by a layperson – as, perhaps, ‘fleshly coupling against nature, and this either by confusion of kinds […] or of sexes’ – that would still not have explained the physical means by which the coupling took place. The note in Coke’s Reports (1656: 37) that a criminal conviction for buggery required evidence of ‘penetration and the emission of Seed’ would not be reproduced alongside Coke’s etymology in the Glossographia.

A reluctance to explain the specifics of buggery is another discursive feature that will recur throughout this book. It is an example of the ‘dictionary obscurantism’ (Reference MoonMoon 1989: 82) that has plagued definitions of same-sex lexis for centuries. Implicit in Reference BlountBlount’s (1661: A3^v) assurance that he would supply information he ‘thought fit for the knowledg of many’ was the proviso that he might withhold information he thought unfit for his readers, and other lexicographers would exercise similar discretion. Buggery, which was forbidden in word as well as deed – legal records habitually referred to it as a ‘sin, amongst Christians not to be named’ (Reference CokeCoke 1644: 58) – existed uneasily on the threshold between fit and unfit knowledge. It was a nebulous shadow that both threatened and defined the edges of lawful intercourse. However, when placed under a queer lens, it is precisely this liminality that makes buggery a useful focal point for understanding the construction of sexuality at large in the early modern period and after. The ‘negative potential of the queer’ (Reference HalberstamHalberstam 2011: 148) – its ability to rethink the cultural meanings of exclusion and incoherence – allows us to trace the borders of ethical sex from the outside, uncovering their naturalizing discourses and exposing their own contradictions.

Discourses must be pluralized, for a juridical discourse was clearly not the only one informing the ethics of sexuality. Blount, following Dalton and Leigh, calls buggerie ‘a sin against God, Nature, and the Law’ simultaneously. This chapter will explore how the framework of these three discourses – the interlocking of divine, natural, and human law – undergirded the construction of same-sex intercourse in many definitions across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Despite substantial changes to the scope, target audience, and methodology of hard-word and general dictionaries between the appearance of Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604 and Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, the codification of buggery during this period largely remained static (if indistinct). So did the codification of buggery’s near-synonym, sodomy. After the mid-eighteenth century, dictionaries’ obscurantism grew more pronounced. Those that had entries for buggery and sodomy at all tended to explain them in ways that retained the old regulatory framework but offered even less detail on sexual specifics. Yet I will argue that the effect of this ambiguation was, ironically, to open buggery and sodomy up to an even wider array of erotic potentials. By the same token, reading sodomy and buggery against semantically ‘broader’ sexual terms – copulation, coupling, occupying, fucking, and so on – reveals how definitions of these words were founded on narrow assumptions of androcentrism and cross-sex normativity; however, it is the tacit and taken-for-granted nature of these assumptions that makes them vulnerable to subversive reinterpretation.

Sex and the Laws of God, Nature, and Humankind

The first English definition of buggerie predates the English dictionary. In 1596, Edmund Coote published The English Schoole-maister, an educational manual which features, among other learning aids, a table giving the spellings of words, many accompanied by concise definitions. One of these is buggerie, or ‘coniunction with one of the same kind’. Eight years later, when Cawdrey released A Table Alphabeticall, he borrowed Coote’s entry and added a second sense: ‘buggerie, cōiunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts’. Interestingly, neither Coote’s monosemous definition nor Cawdrey’s polysemous one shows any disapproval of the acts alluded to, but then neither is explicit about what the acts involve. They don’t clarify that ‘one of the same kind’ means a member of the same sex. By contrast, Cawdrey’s explanation of sodomitrie (a word not in Coote’s table) as ‘when one man lyeth filthylie with another man’ is not so indefinite or dispassionate.

Coote’s spelling list had about 1,500 words; Cawdrey’s dictionary had just over 2,500. It may seem curious that buggerie (or sodomitrie) should appear in works of such small scope, not least when we consider that Coote aimed his writing at ‘Scholers, of what age soeuer’ (Reference Coote1596: A1^r), and Cawdrey aimed his chiefly at ‘Ladies [and] Gentlewomen’ (Reference Cawdrey1604b: A1^r). Yet the title pages of both works also explain that they wished to aid their users’ understanding of ‘words, which they shall in the Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere heare or reade’ (Coote) or ‘wordes, vvhich they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elswhere’ (Cawdrey) – and an audience of any age or gender might hear of the sin of sodomy when it was denounced from a pulpit. Cawdrey himself, an outspoken Puritan, had served as a priest before being defrocked in 1591 and becoming a teacher. In his religious writing, he suggests the utility of instilling virtue by cautioning against vice. His Short and Fruitfull Treatise, of the Profit and Necessitie of Catechising – a revised edition of which appeared in the same year as the Table Alphabeticall – begins by impressing on its readers the necessity of ‘training vp their children & seruants in the feare and seruice of the Lord’, for ‘God himselfe highly commendeth Abraham for this dutie […] and saith that hee would not keepe from him that which he ment to doe to the Sodomits, for that hee did know that Abraham would commaund his sonnes, and his houshold after him, to keepe the way of the Lord’ (Reference Cawdrey1604a: v^r–v^v). It is appropriate to pass on some knowledge of sinful acts in order to warn against them. In light of this, Reference CawdreyCawdrey’s (1604b) entry for ‘sodomitrie, when one man lyeth filthylie with another man’, becomes as much a prohibition as a definition.

It is reasonable to think that sodomy and buggery, due to their respective associations with the biblical destruction of Sodom and the Buggery Act of 1533, might belong to separate discursive traditions in lexicography: one painted as a sin against the law of God, the other a crime against the law of humankind. A simple means of investigating this is to conduct a quantitative analysis of all the definitions of buggery and sodomy and their variant spellings, as well as related word-forms, to be found in a survey of hard-word and general dictionaries. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 show the results of such a survey, for which sixty-eight entries were found in twenty-five dictionaries published before 1755. (The tables discount entries for the proper noun Sodom itself, as well as entries repeated verbatim across multiple editions of the same dictionary.) The definition of each entry was read for terms that could be contextually interpreted as belonging to the semantic field of religion (specifically religious ethics) or of secular law. Terms identified in the former category were ‘chastity’, ‘filthylie’, ‘God’, ‘heaven’, ‘lust’, ‘sin’, ‘Sodom’, and ‘wickedness’. Terms in the latter category were ‘Common-Law’, ‘crime(s)’, ‘criminal’, ‘felony’, ‘law’, ‘offence(s)’, and ‘offenders’. To this was added a third semantic field, nature, represented in the data by the terms ‘nature’, ‘naturam’, and ‘unnatural’. The number of entries containing words from any of these fields is displayed in the tables, with two stipulations. First, a single entry may only be counted once within each field (that is, an entry that contained both ‘sin’ and ‘heaven’ would be entered once under religion). Second, one entry may be counted multiple times across fields (so that an entry which contained both ‘sin’ and ‘crime’ would be entered under both religion and law). The second column in each table indicates the overall number of entries found for a particular headword; because some entries contained multiple semantic fields while others contained none, the figures in the semantic columns do not equal the number of entries found.

The data suggest that within these fields, sodomy is indeed most often defined in religious terms (in 56.5 per cent of the entries) and least often in legal ones (8.7 per cent). Then again, an explicit legal discourse is also the field least attested for buggery (18.2 per cent), which is instead most often defined in terms of nature (31.8 per cent) – an association also well-evidenced in the sodomy entries (26.1 per cent). These findings, though based on a small dataset, complicate any clear-cut picture of sodomy as a spiritual sin and buggery as a secular crime.

In fact, the quantitative analysis obscures how much overlap exists between discourses of sinfulness, criminality, and unnaturalness in representations of sodomy and buggery. We have already seen evidence outside of lexicography that would trouble an absolute divide between religious and legal domains – in the law commentaries that proscribe buggery with Scripture as well as statutes (Reference DaltonDalton 1626: 273) or call it a ‘sin, amongst Christians not to be named’ (Reference CokeCoke 1644: 58). The words sin and crime themselves flit between legal and religious contexts within dictionaries. Blount’s Glossographia (Reference Blount1661) casts buggerie as ‘a sin against […] the Law’ as well as against God and nature, and the transgressive breadth of sin is reiterated by John Kersey in Reference K[ersey]A New English Dictionary (1702), which defines it as ‘the violating of Divine or Humane Laws’. Meanwhile, Kersey’s Reference Phillips and Kersey1706 revision of Edward Phillips’s New World of Words explains that a crime is a ‘foul Deed, Offence, or Fault; great Sin’, so that the dictionary’s subsequent definition of sodomitical as ‘belonging to that hainous Crime’ may be read as a heavenly or earthly condemnation.

Such semantic overlaps abound in the lexicography of same-sex intercourse. One definitional term that was excluded from the above quantitative analysis for that reason was guilt and its derivatives. When Reference BaileyNathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) explains sodomiticalness as ‘Guiltiness of Sodomy’, and Reference NewberyJohn Newbery’s Pocket Dictionary (1753) defines sodomite as ‘One guilty of sodomy’, the reader is left to decide whether the guilt in either case is ethical, criminal, or both. Further ambiguity is posed by the explanation of to bugger as ‘to copulate beastlily’ in the second, supplementary volume of Reference BaileyBailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1727). The supplement has no entry for beastlily or beastly, but it explains beastliness to be ‘the Being like a Beast, Beastiality’. Does ‘to copulate beastlily’ then mean that buggery is committed between human and beast? Or does it convey moral repugnance, implying that whether one or both participants are human, buggery is beastly because it spurns rational and ethical principles? It is humans’ capacity to reason, after all, that is supposed to distinguish them from the senseless figure of the ‘brute beast’ so often invoked in definitions of buggery (e.g. Reference BlountBlount 1661; Reference KerseyKersey 1708; Reference BaileyBailey 1721; Reference MartinMartin 1749).Footnote ³

Allusions to sinfulness, criminality, and unnaturalness cannot be effectively severed in early English dictionaries because discourses of spiritual, temporal, and natural law were deeply imbricated in early modern thought. They form a trinity that has a long history in Western moral philosophy. In the Summa Theologica (I–II q. 91), Thomas Aquinas had written of three laws – divine (accessible through the Bible), natural (accessible through reason), and human (accessible through civil governance) – which exist as emanations of the eternal law, or the ordering of creation by God. The links between these laws were reasserted in early modern legal writing (Reference McCabeMcCabe 1964). Dalton begins The Countrey Iustice by affirming that it is from ‘the Lawes of God, and Nature’ that the ‘Common Lawes of this Realme of England, receiu[e] principally their grounds’ (Reference Dalton1626: 1). Within this mutually reinforcing framework, sodomy was not simply a sin against heaven and buggery a crime against humanity. To violate any law was to violate all three.

Buggery and sodomy were not alone in being understood as a breach of the ‘ordinance of the Creator and order of nature’ (Reference CokeCoke 1644: 58). Alan Reference BrayBray (1995: 25) has argued that in early modern England, same-sex intercourse was ‘not a [discrete] sexuality in its own right, but existed as a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexuality’. Anyone could fall prey to the vice of buggery or sodomy as much as to other acts that resulted from a ‘debauched’ or excessive carnal appetite. Still, not all transgressions were equally reprehensible, as we learn from the natural philosopher John Wilkins. In An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (Reference Wilkins1668), Wilkins aimed to lay the groundwork for a universal philosophical language, and to this end he drew up a set of tables that classify the abstract and concrete entities of the world. The tables are thematically organized, but they are made more accessible through a reference guide, An Alphabetical Dictionary (Reference Lloyd1668), prepared by William Lloyd. In the table concerning ‘JUDICIAL RELATION’, which categorizes criminal offences according to the principles against which they offend, the crimes ‘against […] Chastity’ are ‘SODOMY’, ‘BESTIALITY’, ‘ADULTERY’, and ‘FORNICATION’. Yet while sodomy and bestiality are classed as ‘CRIMES CAPITAL […] such as are or ought to be punished with Death’, adultery and fornication are not (Reference WilkinsWilkins 1668: 272–73). The reason for the distinction is hinted at by Wilkins’s explanation of ‘CHASTITY’ itself as the virtue ‘concerning the Moderating of our natural Appetites towards things which concern the Preservation of the […] Species’ (208).

This ethical concern for keeping sexuality within its ‘natural’, procreative bounds would recur in later dictionaries. Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) reaffirm that chastity is ‘a Christian and Moral Vertue, in abstaining from the unlawful Pleasures of the Flesh, and using those that are lawful with Moderation’. The lawful channel for pleasure was marriage, which served as an outlet for lusts that might otherwise lead to immoderate or immoral acts. It was moreover a civic duty: as Dyche and Pardon assert in A New General English Dictionary (Reference Dyche and Pardon1735), marriage is an ‘honourable Contract that Persons of different Sexes make with one another, whereby they are obligated to live in Love and Harmony together, and from whence springs the true Benefit of Kingdoms and Commonwealths, by producing Children for their Continuance and Encrease’. Any sexual practice that departed from the marital ideal was open to criticism in divine, natural, and legal terms. Thus, to mastuprate is ‘Dishonestly to touch ones priuities’ (Reference CockeramCockeram 1623) and onanism is ‘the Crime of self pollution’ (Reference BaileyBailey 1730). Concubinage is ‘the keeping a Whore for his own filthy use, an unlawful use of another woman instead of one’s wife’ (Reference BlountBlount 1656), and fornication is ‘The Act of Uncleanness or carnal Conversation between single or unmarried Persons of both Sexes’ (Reference Dyche and PardonDyche and Pardon 1735). Incest is ‘vnlawfull copulation of man and woman within the degrees of kinred […] forbidden by gods law’ (Reference CawdreyCawdrey 1604b), while Polygamists are ‘a sort of Christian Hereticks, who said it was lawful for a Man to have as many Wives as he pleased’ (Glossographia Anglicana Nova 1707). Taken together, definitions like these – with their grim evocations of dishonesty, uncleanness, unlawfulness, and heresy – circumscribe the legal, ethical, and natural bounds of sexual behaviour. In so doing, they implicitly conjure up a morally and semantically positive model of sexuality within those bounds: honest, clean, lawful, and orthodox intercourse is procreative, marital, monogamous, and non-consanguineous.

Nevertheless, as Don Reference KulickKulick (2005: 622) points out, every admonition contains its own undoing. When a dictionary proscribes a sexual act, it also unavoidably draws attention to the act’s viability. To denounce masturbation and premarital or extramarital sex is to acknowledge that they are possible. These counter-models destabilize, in the very process of their construction, the norms enjoined by dictionaries. Can a sexual ideal be natural if it must be enforced by human intervention? Can it be inevitable if alternative behaviours exist? The same unsettling potential is inherent in definitions of buggery and sodomy. Yet while the above transgressions (excepting masturbation) are overtly framed as acts committed between the sexes, the participatory scope of buggery and sodomy – the subjects who had to be involved in an act for it to qualify as one or the other – proved an additional site of instability.

Delimiting Sodomy and Buggery

Randy Reference Conner, Livia and HallConner (1997: 131) once remarked that bougrerie and sodomie were open to ‘cornucopian interpretation’ in early modern France, and the same could be said of buggery and sodomy in Britain. They were variably used to signify sex between men, between women, between man and beast, between woman and beast, and between woman and man in an ‘unnatural’ manner. The capacity of these words to be read in a cornucopia of disruptive ways lies partly in a legislative reticence to state precisely what the terms meant.

When Henry VIII made buggery a felony, the law did not describe the nature of the act beyond that it was a ‘detestable & abominable vice […] cōmitted with mankind or beast’ (Anno. XXV. Henrici VIII c1535: viii^v). The sex of the committer was not specified, and whether ‘mankind’ was meant to include women would be disputed for centuries. The Great Bible of 1539, authorized by Henry, translated Leviticus 18:22 as ‘Thou shalt not lye wyth mākynde as wyth womankynde, for it is abominacion’, where the use of ‘womankynde’ implicitly restricts ‘mākynde’ to men. Likewise, when Sir Edward Reference CokeCoke (1644: 58) proposed that buggery could be ‘committed by carnall knowledge [ … ] by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with bruite beast’, he appeared to dismiss the possibility of buggery between women or between a woman and a man. Yet a century later, the justice John Reference Fortescue AlandFortescue Aland (1748: 94) called for a more expansive reading of the Buggery Act, noting that it stipulated ‘not Man but Mankind, which has a very different meaning [ … ] tak[ing] in, all the Species of Man, whether Male or Female, Boys or Girls’. He justified this by pointing to the Anglo-Saxon root of mankind in the Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum of William Reference SomnerSomner (1659), which translated Man-cyn as ‘humanum genus’ [human race]. In 1716, Fortescue Aland had himself advised on a horrific case, Rex v. Wiseman, in which a man who had anally raped a girl was found guilty of buggery, though not all of the other judges consulted had agreed with the verdict (Reference Fortescue AlandFortescue Aland 1748: 91–92). Similar legal contests arose around the semantic range of sodomy, a word used in common law though not in the Buggery Act. The serjeant-at-law Sir Henry Reference FinchFinch (1627: 219) claimed that ‘Sodomitrie’ was ‘a carnall copulation against nature, to wit, of man or womā in the same Sexe, or of either of them with beasts’. Conversely, Reference CokeCoke (1656: 36–37) argued that while ‘Buggary’ might be committed ‘with Man-kind, or Beast’, ‘Sodomy is with Man-kind’ only. Reference Fortescue AlandFortescue Aland (1748: 95), who drew no distinction between the terms, ascribed to sodomy a diverse taxonomy: ‘Sodomy is the Genus, [which] with a Man is only a Species, and with a Woman, is another Species, and so with a Boy or Girl, is another Species, and with a Beast another Species’.

By contrast, early law lexicographers offer a surprising degree of consensus. While some law dictionaries – such as The Interpreter (Reference CowellCowell 1607) and Les Termes de la Ley (Reference RastellRastell 1624) – avoid the problem of definition by omitting entries for buggery and sodomy entirely, from Leigh’s Philologicall Commentary (Reference Leigh1652) onwards, legal definitions of buggery that encompass ‘a man or a woman with a brute beast [ … ] a man with a man, a woman with a woman’ become standard. This interspecies and intragender range is repeated by Blount not only in the Glossographia (Reference Blount1661) but in his own law dictionary, the Νομο-γεξικον (Reference Blount1670). It also appears in later revisions of The Interpreter by Reference Cowell and ManleyThomas Manley(1672) and White Kennett (1701), and in the anonymous Student’s Law-Dictionary of 1740 – the last of which alone has an entry for sodomy (a simple cross-reference to buggery). The pattern is partly disrupted by Giles Jacob’s New Law-Dictionary (Reference Jacob1729). Possibly in response to Rex v. Wiseman, Jacob’s definition of ‘Buggery, or Sodomy’ omits the pairing of a woman with a woman and replaces it with ‘Man with a Woman’. Later, this cross-sex coupling was perhaps considered to be dangerously broad, because the dictionary’s fifth edition (Reference Jacob1744) amends the wording to ‘Man unnaturally with a Woman’.

No such near-unanimous verdict is reached in the fifteen definitions of buggery collected from hard-word and general dictionaries of the time. Eight specify the same three potential pairings: men with each other, or a woman or man with an animal (Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey 1706; Glossographia Anglicana Nova 1707; Reference KerseyKersey 1708, Reference K[ersey]1713; Reference BaileyBailey 1721, Reference Bailey1730; Reference MartinMartin 1749; Reference NewberyNewbery 1753). Lloyd’s Alphabetical Dictionary (Reference Lloyd1668) points to Wilkins’s philosophical tables (Reference Wilkins1668: 272), which state that buggery is committed ‘with Beasts : or Males’, but the gender of the one doing the committing is not given, opening the possibility of unlawful intercourse between a woman and a man as well as between men. (The problem of agentless sexual definitions is returned to below.) Reference CawdreyCawdrey’s (1604b) assertion that buggerie is a ‘cōiunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts’ leaves it unclear whether ‘men’, without a contrastive use of ‘women’, should be read in a restricted male sense or in an ostensibly generic, genderless sense. A similar ambiguity is posed by the first part of Cawdrey’s definition: ‘one of the same kinde’ could encompass sex between women as well as between men. If Cawdrey meant to include the former, he would be in the minority. Only two of the non-specialist dictionaries expressly place sex between women under buggery: Reference BlountBlount’s (1661) and the second edition of Benjamin Martin’s Lingua Britannica Reformata (Reference Martin1754), which expands the first edition’s semantic range (‘sodomy, or sin against nature, as one man having copulation with another; or a man or woman with brute beasts’) to ‘one man coupling with another; one woman with another woman; or a man or woman with brute beasts’. Of the three remaining definitions of buggery, John Bullokar’s English Expositor (6th ed., Reference Bullokar1663) and Kersey’s New English Dictionary (Reference K[ersey]1702) offer no explicit pairings, while the New English Dictionary of Benjamin Norton Reference DefoeDefoe (1735) curtails the act to ‘one Man’s copulating with another’. Buggery in hard-word and general dictionaries thus covers a multitude of sins, but some more typically than others.

Conversely, the scope of sodomy appears to be more limited. None of the sixteen hard-word and general dictionaries that define it make mention of interspecies intercourse. When its human actors are explicitly gendered, they are male: sodomy involves ‘Masculine Venery’ in Reference BullokarBullokar (1663), ‘Male venery’ in Cocker’s English Dictionary (Reference Cocker and Hawkins1704), and ‘men’s lying with men’ in Reference WesleyJohn Wesley’s Complete English Dictionary (1753). Elsewhere, sodomy is described as the ‘unnatural coupling of one Man with another’ (Reference Dyche and PardonDyche and Pardon 1735; Reference NewberyNewbery 1753), where again ‘Man’ without a contrastive use of ‘woman’ could hypothetically also encompass ‘unnatural’ sex between a woman and man or between women. Nevertheless, the gendering of the participants in an act of sodomy exists against the backdrop of the biblical story of Sodom, allusions to which are commonplace in dictionaries.Footnote ⁴ Reference BlountBlount (1656) invokes Scripture to explain that sodomy was ‘so called from the City Sodom in Judæa, which for that detestable sin was destroyed with fire from heaven. Gen. 19’. The same chapter of Genesis is cited in the fourth edition of Bullokar’s English Expositor (1654), where a sodomite is ‘One guilty of that filthy sin of Sodom, mentioned Gen. 19. 5. thence called Sodomy’. Dictionary-users who consulted the relevant verse would read – as the King James Bible tells – that the men of Sodom ‘called vnto Lot, and said vnto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night: bring them out vnto vs, that we may know them’. Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) offer a summary of the passage under sodomy: ‘Buggery, a Sin of the Flesh against Nature, so call’d because it was notoriously committed by the Inhabitants of the City of Sodom’. This definition is repeated more or less verbatim by Reference KerseyKersey (1708, Reference K[ersey]1713), Reference BaileyBailey (1721, Reference Bailey1730), and Martin (Reference Martin1749). Maleness is not explicitly ascribed to Sodom’s inhabitants in any of these definitions, though attempted sex between men is at the heart of the tale in Genesis.

On the other hand, before Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) recount the story of Sodom, they equate sodomy with ‘Buggery’. If buggery can in turn be committed by ‘one Man with another, or [ … ] a Man or Woman with a brute Beast’, does it follow that any or all of these couplings could also be enacted under the name of sodomy? Or should the use of buggery in a definition of sodomy be read not as a synonym but as a genus term – a broader category of sexual acts of which sodomy is just one member? The latter seems to be the case in Lloyd’s dictionary as it cross-refers to Wilkins’s philosophical system, which classifies buggery twice, beside both ‘SODOMY’ and ‘BESTIALITY’ (Reference Wilkins1668: 272). Here, buggery appears to function as a hypernym for the two terms, whereas ‘SODOMY’ is only practicable with ‘Males’ and ‘BESTIALITY’ with ‘Beasts’. Yet other dictionaries do not conform to this hierarchical model. Reference BullokarBullokar (1663) and Reference K[ersey]Kersey (1702) both gloss buggery simply as ‘sodomy’, and similar definitional uses of ‘sodomy’ recur in the buggery entries of Reference DefoeDefoe (1735) and Martin (Reference Martin1749, Reference Martin1754). These instances suggest that, for some lexicographers, sodomy and buggery were synonyms: both were capable of signifying a man biblically ‘knowing’ another man, a human ‘knowing’ an animal, and, sometimes, a woman ‘knowing’ a woman.

The Semantic Paradox of Copulation

As to how sex between women or between men physically took place, lexicographers’ aversion to giving out particulars (whatever their own knowledge of them) has already been noted. None of the surveyed dictionaries are as explicit, in Latin or English, as Reference Fortescue AlandFortescue Aland’s (1748: 95) learned description of sodomy as ‘rem veneream habere in Ano’ [to have a venereal affair (literally, thing) in the anus]. Instead, the dictionary-user is more likely to encounter semantic dead-ends and roundabouts. Reference PhillipsPhillips (1658) defines sodomitical as ‘belonging to Sodomy, i. buggery, or unnatural lust’, and Elisha Reference ColesColes (1676) describes sodomy as ‘buggery, the sin of Sodom’, but neither dictionary has an entry for buggery. Bullokar’s Expositor (Reference Bullokar1663) is not much clearer when it explains buggery to be ‘Sodomy’ and sodomy to be ‘Masculine Venery, buggery’. Users who wish to escape the circularity by turning to the definition of venery are told that it means ‘Hunting; sometime fleshly wantonness’ – which, depending on the sense they choose, could leave them with a wildly inaccurate idea of what it is sodomites do. Yet this last definition also reveals that lexicographers’ impasses over intercourse extend beyond its same-sex forms.

After calling buggerie a ‘cōiunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts’, Reference CawdreyCawdrey (1604b) defines coniunction only as ‘ioyning together’. Copulation is likewise just ‘ioyning, or coupling together’, a definition that is partly or wholly reiterated by Reference BullokarBullokar (1616), Henry Reference CockeramCockeram (1623), Reference PhillipsPhillips (1658), and Reference ColesColes (1676). Exceptionally, Reference LloydLloyd (1668) equates copulation with ‘Coition’, which is cross-referred to Wilkins’s tables and classified under ‘Propagation of the Species’ (Reference Wilkins1668: 234). But it is not until the next century that the erotic sense of copulation becomes a standard part of its definition. In Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706), copulation is ‘coupling, or joyning together’ but also more narrowly ‘carnal coupling between Male and Female’. This phrase is repeated verbatim in entries for copulation in Reference KerseyKersey (1708), Reference BaileyBailey (1721, Reference Bailey1730), and Reference DefoeDefoe (1735). Similar senses appear in other dictionaries: ‘the Act of Generation between Male and Female’ (Reference Dyche and PardonDyche and Pardon 1735; Reference NewberyNewbery 1753), ‘carnal copulation [sic] between male and female’ (Reference MartinMartin 1749). Meanwhile, Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) explain to couple as ‘to joyn together, to do the Act of Generation’, and similar definitions are given by Reference KerseyKersey (1708), Reference BaileyBailey (1721, Reference Bailey1730), and Martin (Reference Martin1749). Thus, from the moment copulation and to couple are specified to be erotic acts in English lexicography, they are limited to cross-sex intercourse, either by their assignment to a male and female pairing or by their curtailment to reproduction. This does leave the terms broad enough to encompass certain deviant cross-sex acts, such as adultery and fornication, although references to procreation implicitly restrict the scope of intercourse to a penis entering a vagina.

Of course, implicitly is the operative word: none of these definitions are frank about even penovaginal sex. It might be inferred, then, that the silence with which lexicographers met the physical mechanics of buggery and sodomy came not from a refusal to explain same-sex intercourse per se, but from a reticence to write openly about any form of sexual behaviour. This inference cannot be ruled out, but it can be complicated. Kersey showed no hesitation in observing that the ejaculatory vessels ‘serve to discharge the Semen in the Act of Copulation’, or that the uterus is ‘the Matrice or Womb of a Woman [ … ] where the Acts of Generation and Conception are perform’d’ (Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey 1706). It is true that uterus and ejaculatory vessels belong to an elite medical register, which lexicographers often treated with a greater degree of candour than lay vocabulary. (Compare Reference BaileyBailey’s (1721) veiled glossing of cunt, tutty, and tuzzimuzzy as ‘Pudendum Muliebre’ [the genitals of a woman] with his definition of vulva, ‘the Womb or Matrix; also the Womb-Passage or Neck of the Womb’.)Footnote ⁵ But coition and copulation could equally have been defined in medical terms. Is the fact that they were not necessarily a sign of discomfort? On the other hand, sodomy and buggery also belonged to an elite (legal) register – and as we have seen, authorities such as Coke and Fortescue Aland had indicated at least some of the ways they could be physically enacted. Could lexicographers not have done the same?

Perhaps the gaps that occur in definitions of buggery, sodomy, and copulation are different. As Reference FoucaultFoucault (1978: 27) remarked, there are ‘not one but many silences’. In dictionaries, there is the silence of prohibited knowledge: that which must not be spoken because it is unspeakable. But there is also the silence of what Valerie Reference TraubTraub (2016: 143) calls ‘presumptive knowledge’: that which need not be said because it goes without saying. Thus, Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) describe a cloke as ‘a well known Garment’ without naming the part of the body on which it is worn, and explain a clock to be ‘a well known Instrument, or Device to measure Time with’, without specifying the mechanisms of its measurement. Is the dictionary’s ensuing failure to explain the parts and mechanisms involved in copulation the result of obscurantism, or of the assumption that its penovaginal nature is so self-evident that it needs no explanation?

However such definitions of copulation are interpreted, when they are read beside definitions of same-sex intercourse, they become entangled in a conceptual crisis – one example of how sodomy, ‘that utterly confused category’ (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1978: 101), also ‘acts to confuse other categories’ (Reference Salih and BetteridgeSalih 2002: 113). We saw that Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) describe buggery as ‘the Coupling of one Man with another, or of a Man or Woman with a brute Beast’. How is this to be interpreted in light of to couple, ‘to joyn together, to do the Act of Generation’? The procreative sense of to couple might be applicable to the union of a man or woman with a beast, at a time when monstrous births arising from cross-species intercourse were still seen as possible – though this belief was losing credence by the end of the seventeenth century (Reference BatesBates 2005: 119). Yet the procreative sense of to couple does not allow for ‘the coupling of one Man with another’. Sex between men could instead be placed under Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey’s (1706) first, broader sense of to couple, ‘to joyn together’, but that would be a gross under-specification – one man can join with another for any number of activities that don’t count as buggery. It is also easy to find dictionaries in which there is even less leeway for interpretation. The Glossographia Anglicana Nova’s (1707) definition of buggery as ‘a Copulation of Man or Woman with Brute Beasts; or of one Man with another’ is controverted by the dictionary’s bald declaration that copulation is ‘the Conjunction of Male and Female’. Equally contradictory are Reference DefoeDefoe’s (1735) explanations of buggery (‘one Man’s copulating with another’) and to copulate (‘as in the Act of Generation [sic]’).

In these definitions, sexual intercourse is the union of a woman and a man: the concepts are coextensive. As a result, copulation is paradoxically both the antonym and the hypernym of buggery. On the one hand, sexual normativity cannot prescribe one form of behaviour (generative cross-sex intercourse) without proscribing another (‘degenerate’ same-sex intercourse). A norm is given shape equally by what it encompasses and what it excludes. On the other hand, because cross-sex intercourse is naturalized, it becomes the default category, a universal lens through which all sexual behaviour must be made sense of. The consequence of these conflicting forces is to position buggery as simultaneously illegal – beyond the framework of divine, natural, and human law – and incoherent, because that framework is founded on and inseparable from a model of sex as penovaginal and reproductive.

Subverting Sexual Verbs

In tandem with its cross-sex normativity, the dominant paradigm of sex in dictionaries is markedly androcentric. This becomes evident when other terms for intercourse are considered. Reference CockeramCockeram (1623) obliquely defines subagitate as ‘To solicite, to haue to doe with a woman’; Reference PhillipsPhillips (1658) is a little more transparent when he calls subagitation ‘a driving to and fro; also a solliciting, also a knowing a woman carnally’. To subagitate is still ‘to have to do with a Woman’ a century later in Reference BaileyBailey (1721, Reference Bailey1730) and Martin (Reference Martin1749), though both lexicographers resort to more formal diction when they note that the vulgar term to swive means ‘to copulate with a Woman’. In addition, Bailey is the first general lexicographer to include the sexual sense of occupying, ‘carnal Copulation with a Woman’ (Reference Bailey1727, Reference Bailey1730), and to fuck, sanitized in Latin as ‘Fœminam Subagitare’ [to subagitate a woman] (1721, 1730). Taken together, all these definitions recall Catharine A. Reference MacKinnonMacKinnon’s (1989: 124) famous summary of the sexual and linguistic objectification of women: ‘Man fucks woman; subject verb object.’ Because the dictionary meanings are framed using infinitives and nominalizations, they have no grammatical subject, but a woman is the object of all of them. Subagitating, swiving, fucking, and occupying cannot, by definition, be performed upon a man.

These definitions are performative rather than reflective of how the verbs were always used in everyday language, as we know from the evidence of other text types. Swive, fuck, and occupy may not have been codified in legal treatises as buggery and sodomy were, but the law ironically provided a space for subversive uses of these words to be set down for posterity. Witness statements and criminal confessions include instances of men as the objects of sexual verbs whose subjects were women or other men. In the seventeenth century, testimonies given in church courts describe cases of women ‘occupying’ men (Reference FoysterFoyster 1999: 73, cited in Reference TraubTraub 2016: 185). At the turn of the century, a sodomy trial pamphlet called An Account of the Proceedings against Capt. Edward Rigby reported that Rigby had asked another man in a tavern ‘if he should F – him’ (1698: [2]). Thirty years later, A Genuine Narrative of All the Street Robberies Committed since October Last, by James Dalton, alleged to have been dictated by Dalton while he was in prison, recalls his run-in with a secret club of sodomites; the club’s repertoire of bawdy songs includes the lyrics ‘We’ll kiss and we’ll Sw – e, / Behind we will drive’ (Reference Dalton1728: 42). Such examples belie the semantic limits of these verbs in general dictionaries, and remind us that in lexicography, as in the legal system, citizens did not enjoy equal autonomy. The parallels between language and the law are aptly drawn by John Reference BarrellBarrell (1983: 113), who remarks that ‘some members of the language community were enfranchised, and could use their voice in making the laws which bound them, and some were not’.

However, no regulatory system is without its loopholes. The lack of grammatical agency in dictionaries’ definitions of sexual verbs means that the person who does subagitate, swive, fuck, or occupy a woman remains ungendered. This is surely a side-effect of androcentrism: a tacit male viewpoint is assumed even when a male agent is absent. With the exception of the anonymous works, all of the pre-1755 dictionaries surveyed here are supposed to have been compiled by men. Yet even beyond the masculine bias of these particular texts, Ethel Reference Strainchamps, Gornick and MoranStrainchamps (1971: 248) has argued that androcentrism is so embedded in the words fuck, swive, and occupy that any lexicographer who does not define them as exclusively taking a male subject has misrepresented how these words have historically been used to objectify women. Without discounting that history, I want to consider how the lack of an explicitly gendered subject in these definitions could nonetheless allow for what Reference TraubTraub (2002: 125) calls a ‘potential for female erotic agency from within the confines of patriarchal ideology’, even if the potential is unintentional.

Despite the dominance of the ‘man fucks woman’ formula, we have already seen that it was possible for a sexual verb to take a female subject in the English of earlier centuries. Apart from court records, bilingual dictionaries sometimes acknowledged models of erotic agency that their monolingual counterparts did not. John Florio’s Italian–English lexicon A Worlde of Wordes (Reference Florio1598) glosses the verb phrase menar le calcole as ‘to be a free whore, to occupye freely’, and the feminine noun fottitrice as ‘a woman fucker, swiuer, sarder, or iaper’.Footnote ⁶ The Latin–English dictionary of Adam Reference LittletonLittleton (1735) was not as bold in its translation of the verb crisso, leaving it half in Latin as ‘To wag the tail (de muliere dic. in actu copulationis)’ [said of a woman in the act of copulation]. Still, this was enough to strike the fancy of the Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister when she consulted Littleton’s dictionary almost a century later. In 1820, Lister made a note of the crisso definition in her diary and confided that the thought of a woman ‘bend[ing] herself impudently’ had so excited her that she masturbated in bed that night.Footnote ⁷

Lister’s personal papers occupy a unique place in the history of sexuality, brimming as they are with her thoughts about sex and her relationships with women – though the more explicit passages are ciphered in a ‘crypt hand’ of her own design. Classically tutored and erudite, Lister kept several volumes in which she wrote out extracts from the books she read. In one of these, she collated a short glossary consisting mostly of sexual entries taken from Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, including his definitions of buggery and fuck (see Figure 1.1; a transliteration is provided in Appendix I). Lister did not annotate either definition, but how did she interpret the erotic potential of ‘Fuck [ … ] fœminam subagitare’? Could she – or anyone else with a certain frame of mind – have come across an agentless definition like this and chosen to read in a female agent instead of a male one?

Figure 1.1 Anne Lister’s erotic glossary, 1820.

By permission of the West Yorkshire Archive Service.

The question is of special salience for dictionaries that directly addressed themselves to a female audience. Cockeram’s English Dictionarie (Reference Cockeram1623: A1^r) was intended for a readership that included ‘Ladies and Gentlewomen’, and Reference Dyche and PardonThomas Dyche and William Pardon’s New General English Dictionary (1735: A3^v) was ‘particularly recommended to those Boarding Schools, where English only is taught, as is the Case commonly among the Ladies’. What was a lady to make of the assertion that to subagitate is ‘To solicite, to haue to doe with a woman’ (Reference CockeramCockeram 1623), or that to swive is ‘To be familiar with, or carnally know a Woman’ (Reference Dyche and PardonDyche and Pardon 1735)? She might bypass the question of agency and simply identify with the syntactic object, the passivized woman. Or she could adopt the perspective of the male lexicographers and construct a male subject – and subjectivity – for the verb, and in so doing ‘immasculate’ herself by empathetically crossing the gender divide (see Reference FetterleyFetterley 1978: xx). Or she could read the unspecified agent as a woman and so transgress the bounds of lawful sexuality, even if only in her mind. Arguably, the cross-sex normativity and androcentrism underpinning these definitions must other or queer the female dictionary-user however she interprets them. Then again, as Lister showed, using a dictionary queerly may be a self-affirming act. Sara Reference AhmedAhmed (2019) points out that sometimes queer use – ‘when things are used for purposes other than the ones for which they were intended’ (26) – is ‘the work you have to do to be’ (223).

Reading a definition is itself not a passive behaviour. Lexicographers cannot wholly control the new epistemic and erotic pathways that users might trace through their work. However, they can try to divert users from particular courses of discovery by concealing the points that might otherwise lead them there. This tack would increasingly be taken from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, as entries for demotic sexual verbs began to disappear from dictionaries and the obscurantism surrounding sodomy and buggery deepened.

Changing Legal and Lexical Norms after 1755

In his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature, committed either with man or beast’ as ‘a crime not fit to be named’, for ‘the very mention of [it] is a disgrace to human nature’ (Reference Blackstone1769: 215–16). This act of preterition is similar to Reference CokeCoke’s (1644: 58) calling ‘Buggery’ a ‘sin, amongst Christians not to be named’ a century before – except that unlike his forebear, Blackstone followed his own advice. While buggery and sodomy are listed in the index to the Commentaries, neither word occurs in Blackstone’s description of the offence. In the following decades, this self-imposed censorship spread to the published proceedings of the courts. The sessions papers of the Old Bailey began to record cases of sex (or attempted sex) between men less as ‘sodomy’ or ‘buggery’, as they had regularly done before, and more under euphemisms such as ‘an unnatural crime’ or the filleted form ‘b – – y’.Footnote ⁸ These textual absences did not correspond to any judicial lapse. Harry G. Reference CocksCocks (2003: 24) has shown there was a steady increase in committals per capita for buggery and related offences in England from the 1780s to the 1850s (in line with a surge in prosecutions for other types of crime, owing to changes in the legal system’s ability to regulate the private sphere as well as the public). Gestures towards erasing the words buggery and sodomy thus went hand in hand with attempts at obliterating the act.

By the time Reference BlackstoneBlackstone (1769: 215) had called same-sex intercourse a crime unfit to be named, ‘of a still deeper malignity’ than rape, both buggery and sodomy had been omitted from Reference JohnsonSamuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson is the first general lexicographer to include neither term, though allusions to the act can be found elsewhere in his dictionary. Under rape (n.s. 1), a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost reads: ‘Witness that night / In Gibeah, when the hospitable door / Expos’d a matron, to avoid worse rape.’ The worse rape in question was, as biblically knowledgeable readers would have known, that of a man by men (Judges 19:24). The sense of rape that the quotation is meant to illustrate in the dictionary, ‘Violent defloration of chastity’, is seemingly vague enough to encompass sex between men. Yet Johnson defines defloration (1) in turn as ‘The act of deflouring; the taking away of a woman’s virginity’, which complicates the possibility of a male victim.

Johnson’s four-word description of rape may be contrasted with the definition provided by the final dictionary surveyed for this chapter: Robert Hunter’s seven-volume Encyclopædic Dictionary, published from 1879 to 1888. Hunter allocates 113 words to defining the legal sense of rape, explaining it to be ‘Carnal knowledge of a woman by force against her will’, and enumerating the various punishments for the offence depending on the age of the victim and whether an offender acts as the principal instigator or an accessory. Sodomy, by contrast, is dealt with by Hunter in seven words: ‘An unnatural crime; carnal copulation against nature.’ Buggery is simply ‘Sodomy. (Blackstone.)’

Despite the Encyclopædic Dictionary’s antiquated reference to Blackstone, the 124 years between Johnson and Hunter were a time of significant change in the legal codification of buggery and sodomy in England. However, their treatment in English lexicography was not nearly as elaborate as it had been in the previous century and a half. Despite the burgeoning number of general dictionaries being produced from the 1750s onwards, definitions of buggery became rarer, definitions of sodomy more reticent. Table 1.3 tracks the statistical decrease in entries for these headwords in a survey of sixty-seven hard-word and general dictionaries that began publication between 1604 and 1754 (twenty-two dictionaries in all) or between 1755 and 1883 (forty-five).Footnote ⁹

Whereas 54.5 per cent of the dictionaries published before 1755 include an entry for buggery, the number drops to 15.6 per cent afterwards. Entries for sodomy, while increasing in raw numbers, nonetheless experience a slight decline in frequency from 63.6 per cent to 57.8 per cent. The decreasing documentation of same-sex lexis in general after the mid-eighteenth century, and the reasons for this, will be explored at length in Chapter 3. For now, it suffices to note that when buggery and sodomy are defined in dictionaries from 1755 onwards, it is almost always in terms more evasive than those used in prior decades. The Linguæ Britannicæ Vera Pronunciatio by James Reference BuchananBuchanan (1757), published just after Johnson’s dictionary, conforms to the pattern of the earlier period by observing that buggery and sodomy both comprehend the ‘unnatural’ union ‘of one man with another’. The anonymous New English Dictionary (1759) does the same for buggery. After 1759, none of the collected definitions of these terms refers explicitly to a same-sex pairing again until 1861.

In fact, during this century-long gap, definitions of sodomy do not afford it any clear sexual dimension at all. As in the court proceedings of the Old Bailey, sodomy is overwhelmingly euphemized as an ‘unnatural crime’ (Reference Marchant and GordonMarchant and Gordon 1760; A General and Complete Dictionary of the English Language 1785; Reference EarnshawEarnshaw 1816; Reference MaunderMaunder 1830; Reference ClarkeClarke 1855), an ‘unnatural sin’ (Reference AshAsh 1775), a ‘sin of the flesh against nature’ (Reference FisherFisher 1773; Reference BarclayBarclay 1774), or a ‘crime against nature’ (Reference KnowlesKnowles 1835; Reference BoagBoag 1848; Reference CraigCraig 1849; Reference OgilvieOgilvie 1850). Similar framings of the act as a violation of spiritual, natural, and temporal laws were rife in pre-1755 dictionaries, yet while they sometimes defined sodomy without any overt mention of sexual content, its sexuality was made clear by cross-reference to buggery. After the 1750s, entries for buggery are few and far between. The next surveyed dictionary to include one is The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (Reference Ash1775) by the Baptist minister John Ash – incidentally the first general lexicographer to define fuck since Bailey (see Chapter 3). Ash dispatches buggery with a three-word definition: ‘An unnatural intercourse.’ The explanation of intercourse as ‘Communication, commerce, exchange’ offers little in the way of clarity.

Buggery surfaces again in 1831, the year in which the first volume of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language was printed in London. First published in the United States in 1828, Webster’s is not a British dictionary (though American was dropped from the title of the reissue), but its influence on British lexicography was significant. Whereas Webster’s explanation of sodomy follows the post-1750s tendency towards non-sexual imprecision (‘A crime against nature’), his definition of buggery recalls those of an earlier age by listing the potential participants in the act: ‘The unnatural and detestable crime of carnal intercourse of man or woman with a beast; or of human beings unnaturally with each other. Sodomy. Encyc.’ Curiously, while Webster specifies that buggery with a beast may be committed by ‘man or woman’, the gendered pairings that might be involved in non-bestial buggery are subsumed under the genderless phrase ‘human beings’. Here, Webster departs from his cited source, the Encyclopædia Britannica, which had been reprinted in the United States in 1798. Although, in another case of bibliographic nationalism, the American reprint of the Encyclopædia had removed Britannica from its title, its article for buggery still refers to the statutory law of England and explains the crime to be ‘unnatural copulation [ … ] either [by] a man or woman with a brute beast; or [ … ] a man with a man, or a man unnaturally with a woman’ (Reference DobsonDobson 1798). By chance, this was identical to the scope of the post-revolutionary sodomy law in the state of Connecticut, where Webster had practised law as a young man and where he lived for most of the years he worked on his dictionary (Reference AllenAllen 1909: 2–4).Footnote ¹⁰ Webster could thus have reproduced the Encyclopædia’s description of the human couplings possible under buggery – man and man, woman and man ‘unnaturally’ – without alteration. As such, his partial degendering of the entry does not live up to his claim that ‘legal terms are defined, it is believed, with technical precision’ in his dictionary (Reference WebsterWebster 1831, I: A2^r). Ironically, by effacing the genders of the participants in human-only buggery, Webster’s definition broadens the potential scope of the word to encompass acts that the Encyclopaedia’s entry did not, such as sex between women.

Still, Webster’s buggery definition seems to have been too obscene for some of the British lexicographers who drew from his work. While John Boag simply duplicates the definition in A Popular and Complete English Dictionary (Reference Boag1848), James Knowles skips over buggery when he copies Webster’s entries for bugelugey and bugginess in A Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language (Reference Knowles1835). John Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary (Reference Ogilvie1850) is virtually an illustrated reprint of Webster; David Reference MicklethwaitMicklethwait (2000: 276) says that ‘aside from leaving out many of [Webster’s] quotations, [Ogilvie] took scarcely anything away’ – yet buggery is again among the losses. Reference OgilvieOgilvie (1850) does not show a comparable reticence towards terms for cross-sex crimes. He updates Webster’s definitions of adultery and incest to reflect the English and Scottish penal codes, and observes that bigamy ‘By the law of England [ … ] is a felony, punishable, principal and accessory, with seven years’ transportation, or imprisonment, with or without hard labour, not exceeding two years’. This observation shows that Ogilvie was familiar with the Offences Against the Person Act 1828, which had repealed the death penalty for bigamy in England two decades before.

Crucially, the 1828 Act had also replaced the archaic Buggery Act 1533, though it retained ‘Buggery’ or ‘Sodomy’ as a capital offence (The Statutes of the United Kingdom 1828: 105). The new statute would have ramifications beyond England. That same year, a version of it was implemented in the South Asian territories then under the control of the East India Company (456), one of many sodomy laws that would eventually be imposed on colonized peoples throughout the British Empire. The 1828 statute made convictions easier by removing the need to prove the ‘Emission of Seed’: ‘Penetration’ was now all that was required to show that ‘carnal Knowledge’ had taken place (105), though precisely what constituted such knowledge, and which body parts were admitted to be penetrative or penetrable, was unspecified. General dictionaries were no more informative than the law. Following Reference WebsterWebster (1831–1832), Reference OgilvieOgilvie (1850) explains carnal knowledge (s.v. carnal) to be ‘sexual intercourse’. He has no definition of sexual intercourse but defines sexual as ‘Pertaining to sex or the sexes; distinguishing the sex; denoting what is peculiar to the distinction and office of male and female’. Sex itself is ‘The distinction between male and female; or that property or character by which an animal is male or female’. Other dictionaries offer similar definitional chains (Reference BoagBoag 1848; Reference CraigCraig 1849; Reference NuttallNuttall 1863; Reference LongmuirLongmuir 1864). Yet if carnal knowledge is, by extension, intercourse that pertains to ‘the distinction between male and female’, or intercourse that is ‘peculiar to the [ … ] office of male and female’, then the possibility of carnal knowledge between members of the same sex appears to be precluded in dictionaries – in opposition to the use of the term in the 1828 Act. Like earlier dictionaries’ treatment of copulation, the conflicting meaning of carnal knowledge across these texts is a reminder of the plurality of knowledges (and the corresponding ignorances) that ‘circulate as part of particular regimes of truth’ (Reference SedgwickSedgwick 1990: 8). Despite their contradictions, these knowledges need not work against each other. The naturalization of cross-sex normativity may be served at different times by overtly forbidding other forms of carnal knowledge or by proceeding as though they simply did not exist – as though there were nothing else to know.

Thirty-three years after the 1828 Act, the death penalty for ‘Sodomy’ or ‘Buggery’ was replaced with ‘Penal Servitude for Life or for any Term not less than Ten Years’ by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (The Statutes of the United Kingdom 1861: 439). The law was in effect catching up with the practice of the English courts, which had not executed anyone for buggery since 1835 (Reference CocksCocks 2003: 203). Once the Empire had formally abolished slavery in 1833, the transportation of convicts to the colonies as a source of forced labour had become more profitable than capital punishment. By chance, 1861 also saw the same-sex dimension of sodomy restored to a general English dictionary after an absence of just over a century. In words that seem to echo the mercenary interests of the times, Arnold J. Cooley’s Dictionary of the English Language (Reference Cooley1861) described sodomy as ‘Sexual commerce bet[ween] males’. A decade later, Chambers’s English Dictionary (Reference DonaldDonald 1872) asserted that sodomy is ‘Copulation between males’, and also reinstated an explicit same-sex dimension to buggery: ‘The copulation of men with each other, or of a man or woman with a beast: sodomy.’ Copulation between women was once again absent, though the 1861 Act had retained the semantic ambiguity of the Buggery Act 1533 as well as its 1828 replacement: buggery or sodomy could be ‘committed either with Mankind or with any Animal’.

Despite the coincidence of the 1861 Act with the re-emergence of sexualized definitions of sodomy and buggery, the changing legal status of the crime was not overtly attended to by lexicographers. References to the capital punishment of buggery in Reference BlountBlount (1661) and Reference Phillips and KerseyPhillips and Kersey (1706) do not recur in nineteenth-century general dictionaries before 1861; nor do allusions to the repeal of the death penalty appear in dictionaries thereafter. The few lexicographers who define buggery do so in the language of earlier centuries. Following Reference WebsterWebster (1831–1832), Reference BoagBoag (1848) and Reference DonaldJames Donald (1872) note that buggery may be committed with a ‘beast’, though that word had been supplanted by ‘Animal’ in the Acts of 1828 and 1861.

Victorian law lexicons are hardly more attentive. The definitions of buggery in the New Law Dictionaries of James Reference WhishawWhishaw (1829) and Henry James Reference HolthouseHolthouse (1839) take no notice of any legal authority later than Sir Edward Coke’s seventeenth-century commentaries, while A Concise Law Dictionary (Reference Mozley and WhiteleyMozley and Whiteley 1876), The Students’ Pocket Law-Lexicon (Reference RawsonRawson 1882), and A Dictionary of English Law (Reference SweetSweet 1882) have no entries for buggery or sodomy. John Jane Smith Wharton is an exception: the first edition of his Law Lexicon (Reference Wharton1848) cites the Offences Act 1828 under buggery, and the third edition (Reference Wharton1864) duly replaces this with the Act of 1861. Still, the definition does not otherwise change between editions: buggery remains a ‘detestable and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the Creator and order of nature’. More than two hundred years after Dalton’s Countrey Iustice (Reference Dalton1626), the discursive trinity of divine, natural, and secular laws persisted.

Having dwelt this long on the lexical and legal codification of buggery and sodomy in particular, it is worth stepping back for a moment to consider the wider symbolic relationship between the dictionary and the law. Analogies between the two have a long history. While Anne Fisher democratically asserted in the preface to her Accurate New Spelling Dictionary (Reference Fisher1773: i) that ‘Dictionaries are but vocabularies, or catalogues of the unconnected words of our common language, to which we all have an equal right’, other lexicographers took a more authoritarian view. The liminary poem that opens Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (Reference Blount1656) suggests that if the biblical Tower of Babel had succeeded in ‘center[ing] Mankinde in one joynt consent’ then ‘Language and Laws had firmly held together’ (A7^r), but in the absence of this harmonious state the dictionary must be relied on as a ‘National Interpreter to Books and Men’ (A8^v). One of Reference JohnsonJohnson’s (1747: 33) early hopes for his dictionary was that it would go some way towards ‘settl[ing]’ the language ‘under laws’. In recent times, scholars have continued to describe dictionaries past and present as ‘linguistic legislators’ (Reference GershunyGershuny 1974: 168), ‘law-giver[s]’ (Reference ReadRead 2003: 191), and ‘arbiter[s]’ (Reference BéjointBéjoint 2010: 233), whose pages contain ‘edicts to be obeyed’ (Reference Mugglestone and DurkinMugglestone 2016: 549) – at least in the eyes of some of their users.

The analogy between lex and lexis takes on new significance when dictionary entries are viewed as performative. Judith Reference ButlerButler (1993: 107) compares the utterance of a performative to the action of a judge: ‘the judge does not originate the law or its authority; rather, he “cites” the law, consults and reinvokes the law, and, in that reinvocation, reconstitutes the law’. Like the judge, lexicographers exist ‘in the midst of a signifying chain’ (107), reciting discourses and reinforcing norms drawn from authorities that include statute books, legal treatises, the Bible, and – not least of all – other dictionaries. However, it is important to recognize that lexicographers do not enjoy the incontrovertible authority of a judge in the courtroom; nor do they necessarily adhere to dominant social norms in their personal lives. The Puritanical beliefs that led to Robert Cawdrey’s defrocking by the Church of England in 1591 included an aversion to the Book of Common Prayer and a rejection of ring-giving in the marriage service (Reference StrypeStrype 1701: 129–30). Nathan Bailey, also a Dissenter, was censured by his Sabbatarian church in the 1710s for ‘frequent light and low conversation with two single women, he being a single man and a high professor’ (Reference BallBall 2009: 94). Other lexicographers were disadvantaged because of their gender – such as Anne Fisher, who was ill-used by her rivals in the book trade in the 1770s (Reference Rodríguez-Álvarez and Rodríguez-GilRodríguez-Álvarez and Rodríguez-Gil 2006) – or because of their class – such as John Ogilvie, who worked as a ploughman before an accident in 1818 cost him a leg and turned him to scholarly pursuits (Reference Bayne and HaighBayne and Haigh 2004).

Moreover, as inconsistencies between dictionaries attest, the chain of meaning is not always stable and linear. It may break or branch off or circle back. To an extent, the first three centuries of monolingual English lexicography play up the notion of buggery and sodomy as confused and confusing categories, acts whose physicality is inexpressible and whose actors are often unclear. Same-sex intercourse is cast beyond the edicts of religion, nature, and humankind, or mired in paradox and rendered a contradiction in terms. Yet definitional hesitancies and incoherencies can provide the dictionary-user with a space for alternative forms of reading. Edicts can be reinterpreted or disobeyed. The social pressures exerted by dictionaries may be backed by such powerful institutions as the courts and the church, but lexicographers cannot ultimately predict or dictate how their models for self-regulation will be taken up by readers in private. While the codification of sexual acts forecloses certain queer possibilities, it nonetheless enables others.