Masculinity in the Reformation Era

The Reform of Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland

A Case Study

Helmut Puff

The notion that masculinity underwent a profound change in the sixteenth century is almost as old as the history of masculinities. R. W. Connell, one of the field’s pioneers, approaches the period between 1450 and 1620 as a time of new beginnings. Novel concepts of sexuality and selfhood surfaced, he contends, in the context of nascent colonialism, the emergence of capitalism, and religious reforms: reformers of various persuasions actively advocated “marital heterosexuality,” playing into a “growing cultural emphasis on the conjugal household.”¹ In Connell’s vision, this advocacy was linked to the rise of so-called “hegemonic masculinities,” masculinities that occupy “the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations.”² As Scott Hendrix has shown, Protestantism in fact assigned to the male sex the role of social, political, and religious leadership.³ The burgeoning literature on marriage and the household in Reformation Europe provided guidance for patriarchs confronted with the daunting task of leading spouses, households, and communities.⁴ Other researchers have chosen still other points of departure. In Wolfgang Schmale’s history of modern masculinity, the fifteenth century saw the appearance of a novel figure that triumphed in Christian anthropology and the arts, the “new Adam”: an ideal man with a flawless body whose religious, social, and artistic meanings oscillated between the earthly and the spiritual.⁵

Despite these intriguing approaches, there also have been cautionary notes against taking the rise of innovative masculinities after 1500 at face value. Periodizing thus reiterates well-rehearsed ideas of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and humanism as historical ruptures. Lyndal Roper marshals evidence from everyday life in early modern cities to shed critical light on histories of gender and masculinity that rely primarily on constructs, norms, and ideals.⁶ The vir gravis et honestus, to quote an educational topos,⁷ was appealing to particular social groups, she argues. His sobriety was a norm that did not, or was not meant to, encompass all men. While Norbert Elias famously argued that the early modern period saw the extension of bodily discipline from the elites to the populace, it remains a matter of debate how this shift toward restraint reached and affected different social groups.⁸ Roper’s urban archives indeed abound with men who caused trouble, through their outward appearance as well as through their comportment. They drank, fought, and “whored” excessively. In their infatuation with excess, these males seem to have come alive from the pages of Rabelais’s Gargantua. Roper has therefore issued the call to conceptualize the relation between two figures that seemingly stood apart from one another in early modern societies: the well-disciplined man and the unruly man.

Marc Breitenberg has delved into a different, though related, dialectic of masculinity. Analyzing a range of literary texts and early modern discourses, this critic focuses on “anxious masculinity.” The imbrication of desire and anxiety proves an apt lens to grasp the multiform tensions constitutive of historical genders.⁹ In Renaissance England, the object of Breitenberg’s study, masculinity figured in manifold and often contradictory ways. In a culture defined by various demands on men and ideals of manhood, the supposedly strong male subject appears again and again as vulnerable, wounded, or fragile. Paradoxically, it is precisely this contradictoriness, Breitenberg finds, that shores up a patriarchal system in which men held a privileged place: “Anxiety is an inevitable product of patriarchy at the same time as it contributes to the reproduction of patriarchy.”¹⁰

Exploring one man’s biography provides a welcome antidote to streamlining the history of masculinity into chronologies or typologies and helps us to confront the experiential vagaries of early modern men. Lived masculinity will open a window, or at least a crack, onto the scenarios of masculinity that sixteenth-century men enacted and traversed. Individual portraits rely on an abundance of sources available mostly for the elites. Werner Steiner (1492–1542), the subject of this story, belonged to several such elites. He was a wealthy citizen from the town of Zug, a descendant of a prominent Swiss family, and an educated cleric. The title of a papal protonotarius and the fact that he went on a pilgrimage to Palestine testify to his considerable stature and social prominence. This man became one of the earliest followers of the reform cause in Switzerland, as evidenced by his marriage and his prolific writings. As somebody who sided with the reformers, Steiner lived through a transitional period: the introduction of religious reforms with their new focus on heterosexual desire. This essay will approach this biography retrospectively, from the point of its failure; one can understand this vita’s dénouement as an echo of a life lived at the intersection of different masculinities.

In 1541, the council of Zurich arrested and incarcerated Werner Steiner, a follower of Huldrych Zwingli (1487–1531) and a friend of Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75).¹¹ “Under great tears and sighs,” the suspect asked “the councilors fervently and most respectfully to do the best and to show him mercy.”¹² Professed with the utmost vigor, Steiner’s plea for clemency followed a logic that is well-known from the criminal investigations before the council of Zurich.¹³ Suspects sought to demonstrate their remorse for their alleged crimes, and they begged the authorities to do what befitted them, namely, to temper justice with mercy. According to the incriminating evidence that had come to light during the interrogation, Steiner’s deeds were of a kind that clemency alone could save him, a former Catholic priest turned Protestant, from a stricter sentence. Though the delict in question was not mentioned, the protocol of the interrogation leaves no doubt that the transgression at stake was sodomy, that is, sexual activities between men.

The concerted petitions—Steiner’s own as well as those of his wife, children, and relatives—did not fail to sway the councilors, or so the scribe stated.¹⁴ After all, the fateful “confession” of 1541 must have reminded the councilors that, however severe his transgressions, Steiner was one of them. Scion of one of the most distinguished families from Zug,¹⁵ Steiner had left his hometown when the rising tide of religious conflict had made it opportune to seek refuge elsewhere. After a short stay in Berne, he settled in neighboring Zurich. There, he acquired a magnificent house and became a citizen in the year of his move, 1529. In Zurich, an urban center that provided shelter for many a Protestant émigré, he befriended some of the city’s most outstanding citizens and scholars.¹⁶ Steiner’s sentence, permanent house arrest, thus reflected his high social standing and the respect he commanded among members of Zurich’s ruling class. Clearly the councilors had options when assessing Steiner’s sentence. Our protocol notes that instead of house arrest, one could have imposed a “secular, great punishment,” namely, the death sentence.¹⁷ The juxtaposition of these two punishments, both said to have been within the range of justice, bespeaks a glaring tension. On the one hand, Steiner’s relatives seized the opportunity to exploit the situation. Not long after the sentence had been issued, they were successful in achieving its mitigation. In 1542, the council permitted Werner Steiner to leave his house in order to attend church service or to visit family members. Emboldened by this turn of events, his advocates wanted to reverse the sentence entirely. This time, the council refused to comply.¹⁸ Soon thereafter, Steiner passed away, carried off by the plague in 1542. On the other hand, reformers in Zurich and beyond were in a state of shock that one of their own faced a criminal investigation.¹⁹

What was the nature of Steiner’s transgressions? In 1541, he confessed to desiring to have sex with other males on various occasions. In 1518, for instance, while waiting for a church benefice, he was working as a steward to a priest in Schwyz, when Hans Kern, a farm laborer, passed through. During the night that followed, the two, though of widely different social status, shared the same bed upon Steiner’s invitation. As both men stated separately, Steiner volunteered “to teach” his bedfellow the pleasures of mutual self-enjoyment on this occasion. The future priest, it emerged, had not only questioned the uneducated lower-class man about his amorous pursuits but had also, at least according to Kern, coaxed him to confess to Steiner. By giving Kern small gifts of money and clothes, Steiner further urged Kern to consent to mutual masturbation—a lesson the latter seems to have refused.²⁰ Should Steiner’s transgression be captured by the incriminating term sodomy? While he admitted to actual sex acts only obliquely, it became clear that he would have engaged in sexual intercourse if the objects of his desire had consented. At any rate, the various episodes unearthed during the interrogation testified to Steiner’s lifelong entanglement with homosociality’s erotic side.

The council’s ambiguous sentence refers to the ambiguous nexus of “homosocial desire,” to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation.²¹ The boundary between legitimate contacts and illegitimate eroticism was anything but unequivocal. This insecurity leads into the heart of all-male milieus in early modern Europe. Alan Bray has carved out the cultural anxieties that manifested themselves around the question of what separated sodomy from friendship in Renaissance England.²² This uneasiness does not seem to have crystallized into a phobia. As a source of anxiety, however, it proved powerful at times. To be sure, male sociability lay at the foundation of the early modern political order. Whether in monarchies, aristocratic regimes, or republics, governance relied on associations among men. As a result, politics was deeply enmeshed with male companionship.²³ Sodomy was imagined to stand in stark opposition to the lawful bonds between males. Same-sex eroticism was viewed as defying order as well as religion. Those said to be sodomites stood outside Christianity; the sodomite was a lawless nonperson.

A particular anxiety may have caused the council to lean toward a mild sentence: fear of the term heretic. In sixteenth-century Zurich, heresy, heretic, or to heresy connected several semantic layers.²⁴ One was religious. Derived from the word for Cathars, ketzer designated dissenters from Christianity, people who had fallen from what was considered the one and only religious truth. Yet the semantics of heresy also included sexual activities. Heresy referred to so-called unnatural intercourse, that is, sex between men, between man and beast, and, rarely, heterosexual sodomy—the kind of sex acts church polemicists pictured dissenters as having perpetrated. If heresy appeared in a primarily religious context, the word may have carried sexual connotations only occasionally. Yet if heresy was used in legal proceedings or defamations, it frequently designated sexual activities exclusively, especially male-male intercourse. In these latter contexts, the term could still retain religious connotations: Sexual heresy referred to the divinely ordained sexual order that supposedly had been violated by religious dissenters. By the late medieval period, these semantic layers operated independently of one another. In Steiner’s case, however, heresy’s semantic components threatened to collapse. If publicly sentenced, Steiner would have proved to Catholic believers the utter depravity of Zwinglians. For them, his unorthodox sexual practices would have aptly marked his religion as an error. The Zurich council thus had to be wary that Swiss Protestants not be made the butt of a cruel invective.

In this period, tensions were rampant between cantons like Zug in the Confederation that resisted religious reforms and those few like Zurich that embraced them. Not surprisingly, these conflicts breathed new life into heretic and similar insults.²⁵ Zwingli himself was targeted.²⁶ And so was Steiner in Zug, where protesters paraded their discontent. In 1523, 1525, and 1527 “malicious fellows” (mutwillige gesellen) made a clamor in front of his house. They yelled “Lutheran heretic” (lütterrsch ketzer). They left a dead cat on the house’s threshold, a sure sign that they were accusing this cleric, who lived with a woman, of being a religious heretic (note the resonance between katze for cat and ketzer, heretic, as well as the animal’s erotic associations with women’s genitals). They spread excrement on the family mansion. They smashed windows. Finally, they broke into the house while its owner was absent. Despite Steiner’s repeated protests, the council did not bring these disruptions of the urban peace to a halt.²⁷

The intricacies of the term heretic are a reminder that categories like homosexuals with their suggestion of a group defined by a particular sexual outlook had little resonance in early modern Europe. If one needed proof for this statement, one could very well cite Werner Steiner’s deposition before the council. Even though the interrogation focused almost exclusively on sex between men, the protocol does not treat Steiner’s erotic predilections as a specific sexuality. Rather, homoeroticism appears on a continuum of desires and practices. This continuum encompassed a wide range: masturbation, which Steiner claimed to have learned while in France as a student, and mutual masturbation with his companions, which he picked up also from French men. Probably in response to a question put before him, he stated that sexual intercourse with women did not stop him from desiring to engage in the aforementioned pleasures with men. The erotic continuum as suggested by the document followed an emotional logic as well as a logic of doing. Steiner described the effects of masturbation on his being and body, for instance, as beneficial. It “always did him good” (wellichs allwägen wal than), he is reported to have said.²⁸ Accordingly, sexual activity with women could at least on one occasion satisfy desires that had been kindled by males.

Steiner was not acting uniquely when his actions were inscribed into what he presented as habitual codes. The protocols of sodomy investigations are replete with similar statements, calculated to placate the interrogators and, ultimately, the judges. Like other suspects, Steiner attempted to increase the impact of this self-presentation by offering a counterpoint to his own desires and actions. He suggested drawing a line between the desires he harbored and those of others that, he implied, were deserving of greater punishment. He professed that he had never “florenced” nor thought of it.²⁹ He thus offered to restrict the manifold meanings of vicium sodomiticum to what he claimed not to have committed, namely, anal intercourse. By comparison to this latter sin, his own were negligible and should, so the implication, remain free of sanction. Such an understanding of sodomy was not only Steiner’s. Anal intercourse occasionally featured in judicial terms as the “true sodomy.”³⁰ Possibly, this narrow notion reflected how some sexual actors conceived of their doings and, what is more, how they defended them when interrogated by the authorities. Steiner may have hoped to find allies among the councilors, men who shared a similar understanding of what constituted sodomy. In this instance, the narrow definition of sodomy came from an unlikely source, a highly educated cleric who had a degree in theology from the Sorbonne.

Among other incidents, the protocol reports an encounter Steiner had in a bathhouse, those erotically charged institutions for care of the body.³¹ That time his “lusts” (glust) to have sex with the house’s male servant were so strong that he succeeded in controlling his urge only with great effort. The overwhelming sensation he experienced had him belch, and “made him feel like throwing up.” But he “resisted the temptation” (anfechtung), so the wording. The protocol specifies the suspect’s utter passivity; Steiner neither sought to relieve himself nor accosted the servant. In suggesting a landscape of erotic impulses, physical reactions, and mental processes, this passage is extraordinary not only among the sources concerning Werner Steiner. During the investigation the suspect repeatedly sought to defuse potential accusations. In this instance, he presented a different self, a self in the snares of sinful entanglement. It is therefore important to remind ourselves that his deposition on this point was not voluntary. Remarkably, he had related the incident to Hans Kern. The Kern brothers’ arrest had caused the whole investigation of Steiner to unravel. Hans Kern’s deposition brought Steiner’s previous revelation to the surface and led the Zurich authorities to look into the matter.

In the context of Steiner’s deposition, the narration of the encounter with a nameless servant had a detectable function. The episode illustrated that he was capable of mastering his urges. The story’s plotline, victory over temptation, staged a mature Steiner for all the councilors to see, a man who successfully tamed the lusts that threatened to control him. After all, Steiner’s line of defense rested, among others, on arguing that his deeds and desires ought to be dismissed as youthful transgressions. To apply this legal principle to Steiner’s actions, however, would have meant to stretch the definition of youth considerably. Surely he had picked up erotic habits while he was a young student in a foreign country, or so he said. Yet when Steiner met Kern in Schwyz in 1518, he was in his midtwenties. When they met again in the 1520s and 1530s, Steiner was considerably older and was living with a woman. His interest in a male companion does not seem to have abated despite his advanced age. The episode in the bathhouse therefore revolved around a man’s finally being able to restrain his physical impulses—impulses that Steiner’s case showed were hard to rein in.³² Significantly, in the bathhouse scene his self became the site of conflict.

The episode may provide at least fragmentary insight into that which writings in the vein of psychohistory all too often have lacked, concrete evidence of the mechanisms of sexual self-repression.³³ A shift to more repressiveness in modern times has been something of a credo in this psychoanalytically inspired literature, and Protestants have qualified as precursors of modern repression in sexualibus. Indeed, the passage’s wording evokes an imaginary scheme of upper and lower, of hierarchies and juxtapositions. These verbal images imply a split between mind and body. They conjure up a hydraulic notion of sexuality: natural bodily urges are said to be set in opposition to the workings of the mind. The German phrase for “to belch” in this context literally translates as “to push upward.” He “overcame” (überhept) his “lusts,” the phrasing goes. In addition, the document also deploys a quasi-military idiom. It speaks of temptation, or rather “impugnation” (anfechtung), which Steiner fought on the battleground of his body. To the modern reader, these formulations are reminiscent of those proposed by Sigmund Freud, the theorist of sexual drives and of the superego. They also resonate with the theories of Norbert Elias, the sociologist who claimed a link between state formation and the emergence of individual control mechanisms around matters of the body.

One word complicates our reading of this passage as introspective in character: temptation (anfechtung).³⁴ The term was a key concept in the vernacular religious literature disseminated during the late Middle Ages. Publications of this kind originated in the thirteenth century and became an ever more popular instrument of religious instruction on the eve of the Reformation. In this literature, anfechtung (impugnatio) had a particular inflection relevant to our episode. Impugnatio signifies a danger to the spiritual self. Frequently, the word appears in phrases that ascribe agency to man’s fiend—as if temptation were a demonic agent.³⁵ When evil forces threaten to penetrate, both mind and body are at risk; sensuality merely counts as one temptation, though a particularly strong one, against which a man needs strong defenses. The term impugnatio is therefore emblematic of a mind-set in which a person is seen as beleaguered by evil forces. A true Christian will be capable of extricating himself, all the more so if he is equipped with the spiritual fortification offered by religious instruction. This verbal scenario, one may add, is indicative of a vast emotional landscape whose contours can only be sketched here. For our context, it is decisive that the term deflects the origin of temptation from the self, placing homoerotic impulses in the outer, not the inner world.³⁶ In this sense, Steiner’s notion of temptation is consistent with his strategies of defense before the council (though one cannot be sure whether the wording is his).³⁷ He proved victorious over temptation by waiting out a devilish attack. This word and its exegesis give a cue to look to the outer world when delving into Steiner’s affective household, inverting a suggestion of introspection into something better called extrospection. A particular state of mind is of interest in this episode: vacillation and hesitation. Markedly, Steiner remained inactive. In this momentary inertia, one may detect a faint echo of the various value systems that shaped this life. Viewed thus, the scene in the bathhouse appears linked to other noteworthy moments in Steiner’s vita.

Werner Steiner was anything but a martyr of the Reformation, although early historians of Protestantism have tried to portray him precisely as that.³⁸ To be sure, in his embrace of reform ideas he took courageous steps at times, but his true talent lay elsewhere. Steiner was something of a vacillator. He maneuvered before his family and friends, the authorities, and (one suspects) God. These maneuvers bring to the fore the many codes among which Steiner moved, sometimes with more, sometimes with less skill. To give an example: Steiner married Anna Rüst only in 1529. While the children that sprang from this union were immediately legitimized before the council, as the laws in his hometown permitted, he, a priest, papal secretary, pilgrim-to-the-Holy-Land Steiner—not to mention the reader of Luther’s The Estate of Marriage who later authored a treatise on matrimony—had been living in a marriagelike relationship since 1522. Only in 1527, after the death of a close relative and mayor (Ammann) of Zug, Leonhard Steiner, did Werner Steiner embrace the reforms more overtly. When he left his hometown in 1529 to escape increasing pressure to conform to the old creed, he did so as an honorable citizen without having to forfeit his family’s considerable possessions. When, in a later year, a relative deprived him of a wine harvest (for reasons that are unclear), he actively sought compensation. When he returned to Zug for a short visit in 1537, he was even honored with a traditional welcoming ritual, as he proudly noted in his ledgers.³⁹ In other words, Steiner continued to collect his dues, pensions, and interests—an income that afforded him a comfortable life in Zurich. Given the increasing tension between the emerging confessions, this was a remarkable feat. The city of Zug did not have to break with Werner Steiner nor Werner Steiner with Zug.

Shortly after his move to Zurich, Steiner authored an apology whose autograph still exists.⁴⁰ As an apologist, he had a twofold mission. First, he explained why he left Zug, the city of his ancestors. Second, his justification revolved around the question of what compelled him to break with the religion that these same ancestors had held dear. This “autobiography,” as the text has been termed somewhat ineptly, harnessed a plethora of explanations in order to expound his move and metamorphosis. On his apology’s first page, for instance, Steiner presented various biblical excerpts as a testimony to his unwavering faith.⁴¹ Yet what this document reveals most prominently is the distance that separated an early Protestant like Steiner from an unconditional proponent of the evangelical truth such as Bullinger.⁴² Steiner’s truth was patient. It was a truth that did not exclude practical considerations.

Steiner was also economical in revealing the truth when his blackmailers were arrested. When Uli Kern, brother of Hans, was apprehended for disruptive behavior, his cash funds raised the authorities’ suspicions. Hans Kern attempted to flee but was seized shortly thereafter in Schwyz. Once imprisoned, the brothers Kern were forced to reveal the name of their benefactor. They also stated the reasons why they were successful with their demands: according to them, Steiner had attempted to have sexual intercourse with Hans several times.⁴³ By having given in to their demands, Steiner validated his blackmailers’ story—a collusion that threatened to overshadow his later life. The Kerns continued to extort money from him over many years. After their arrest, Steiner was called before the council to testify (and so were others, including his friends Konrad Pelikan and Heinrich Bullinger). But he chose not to reveal the reason for his payments until he broke down and made his final deposition in 1541.

Usually, a member of the elite who was under suspicion was protected from an accusation or a court trial. Who would believe the deposition of farm laborers and peasants if a Steiner, an influential, wealthy, well-educated citizen, contradicted their version of what had happened? Events, however, unfolded otherwise. For one thing, the Kerns were under arrest in cantons that, unlike Zurich, opposed religious change. This fact added the spice of confessional strife to the whole affair when these cantons asked the authorities in Zurich for legal assistance, a common practice among Swiss authorities. If the matter had been about words only, Steiner might still have gotten away with his evasiveness. Yet his payments spoke eloquently. This monetary language cast doubts on his claim that his support for the Kerns was charitable in character, meant to relieve indigent peasants. In the 1530s, it seemed as if the Kerns’ financial demands would never end. Steiner finally tried to put a stop to this draining of his resources. He engaged a mediator in the matter, none other than Bullinger, who was indebted to Steiner for the refuge he had taken with Steiner’s family in a time of need. In fact, it was in Steiner’s very house that the call to succeed Zwingli as leader of the Zurich reform had reached him. Bullinger met the Kerns and learned from their allusions that they accused Steiner of sodomy.

In Steiner’s life, different masculinities intersected. What is at stake in formulating this thesis is less a theoretical position, the irreducible plurality of masculinities per se. Rather, it is the claim that Steiner’s life resonated with, was shaped by, and ultimately failed to bring into harmony different masculine codes—codes that were in accord as well as in conflict with one another: military masculinity, the masculinity of academics and clerics, the masculinity of the family patriarch, as well as the masculinity operating in the milieu of humanist and reformed Zurich.⁴⁴ Moving between the communities that clustered around these codes contributed to the difficulties of this life.

Werner Steiner knew the military sphere through his own eyes. He erected a memorial to generations of Swiss soldiers in authoring a chronicle that covered the period from the origins of the Confederation to Steiner’s own time.⁴⁵ A pastiche of chronicled events, interspersed with songs from the relevant military campaigns, takes up the bulk of the volume. To be sure, songs were an important means of warfare, of propaganda, and of forging a memory of military events. Yet when Steiner composed these annals, Swiss historiography boasted no model for doing so. By monumentalizing the Swiss military experience, Steiner enshrined heroic masculinity as a thing of the past, commemorating the communal life of soldiers while making a contribution to overcoming Swiss entanglements in foreign wars. In fact, Steiner was an eyewitness to one of the most fateful military events in Swiss history. As a young man in his early twenties, Steiner had accompanied his father and his brother Michael during a campaign on Italian soil in 1515, when Swiss aspirations to become a European power peaked. The battle of Marignano during that campaign put an end to those ambitions, however. The Swiss Confederation, this oddity of a state in the midst of Europe, lost the aura of invincibility it had acquired over four decades of victorious warfare. The Steiners suffered great losses: Michael Steiner died of his wounds. His brother Uli fell several years later.⁴⁶

During these years, the “sale” of mercenary soldiers to belligerents was the subject of intense public debate. Mercenary activities had proven lucrative for the Swiss political elite. They benefited tremendously from alliances with foreign powers as well as from the costly permits necessary to recruit Swiss men on Swiss soil for foreign service. Yet as much as the Confederation or its political leaders gained financially, the same Confederation was strained to a breaking point as a result.⁴⁷ In Italy, Steiner heard the preaching of Zwingli, who strictly opposed engagements of Swiss men on foreign soil.⁴⁸

Steiner’s own opposition to “mercenarianism” meant a break with the family’s tradition.⁴⁹ His father, Werner Steiner (1452–1517), was not only an influential Swiss politician; he was also an internationally recognized power broker. Several generations of his family had engaged in warfare. Their allegiance to the French crown made possible their rise to social prominence during the fifteenth century. Their elevated status is evident from the fact that several family members held the position of mayor (Ammann) in Zug. One of the benefits the Steiner family received for their support of French foreign policy was the stipend that paid for the studies pursued by Werner Steiner junior in Paris.⁵⁰

As a foreign student in France, some years before his trip to Lombardy, the adolescent Steiner observed comportment that was overtly male and learned to appreciate male sociability.⁵¹ In inns and in academic circles, he apparently became attracted to male companionship, and he proceeded to expand his horizons by imitating what he saw. His deposition of 1541 claims that it was in France that he first discovered the erotic gain a man could draw from socializing with other men. He saw men caress their genitals. He was pestered by a fellow traveler in an inn where he stayed overnight. He claims to have declined these advances, but years later he would enact a comparable scenario with Hans Kern. In retrospect, therefore, Steiner’s stay in France marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with male-male intimacy—a fascination whose sedimented reflections appear in his “confession.”

Sadly, there is little information about the academic training Steiner received at the Sorbonne. One can gather, however, from what is known about Steiner and about the University of Paris in the early sixteenth century that he received training in scholastic theology. Humanism reached him only late. When it did, it was mostly through the mediation of the Swiss reformers. Yet whatever lessons Steiner received in Paris, he seems to have learned well. Among the educated clerical elite, the young magister apparently moved with exceptional ease. The papal nuncio Antonio Pucci met Steiner in Switzerland. He reported that such an erudite cleric and gifted sermonizer should be won for the future of the church, and he awarded Steiner the dignity of a title, papal secretary or protonotarius apostolicus—a mere title but nonetheless a high distinction for a young theologian.⁵²

In 1517, Steiner stood at the beginning of a distinguished career in church service, or so it seemed. Around 1518, he acted as steward to a priest in Schwyz—the place where he had his fateful encounter with Hans Kern. The following year, Steiner went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a group of Swiss pilgrims. If he traveled to Jerusalem as penance for the sins he had committed or tried to commit with Hans Kern in 1518, this is not known for a fact. It is an interpretation suggested by the sequence of events in Steiner’s life. As such, it is not improbable. The travel guide he bought in Venice bears no trace of such intention, however.⁵³ One can only suspect that he went to see firsthand the locations near the Dead Sea that, according to tradition, testified to God’s wrath over the sexual sins of the inhabitants of Sodom as well as four other cities—sites that merited an extensive description in his guidebook.⁵⁴ Upon his return from Jerusalem, Steiner had his portrait painted to commemorate the pilgrimage. It shows the penitent traveler kneeling in prayer, with rosary in hand and the requisite cross on his robe. His bearded figure is positioned between the family coat of arms and a horse in front of a landscape that allows for Palestinian associations.⁵⁵

After the death of his father in 1517, Steiner became active in church life. He made donations and commissioned the manufacture of liturgical instruments. He supported charities for the poor in his hometown. He was also appointed canon in the nearby abbey of Beromünster.⁵⁶ The heraldic windowpane he ordered in 1520 prominently displays several elements associated with his vita: an erect ibex—symbol of a proud family tradition—beneath the cross of the Jerusalem pilgrim and the ecclesiastical hat of the papal secretary.⁵⁷ Choice was involved in combining these visual components. Obviously, Steiner pictured his own life as a continuation of his family’s stature while adding to it: he gave the family tradition a markedly clerical twist.

In part, Steiner’s vita followed a familial logic. As the only surviving male descendant of Werner Steiner père, he presided over the family’s fortunes after 1517. The patriarchal-familial dimension of his biography becomes manifest in his attempts to secure the family name for the future. He offered a sum of money for the yet unborn sons of a relative who had no male successors from his first marriage but planned to remarry.⁵⁸ It is anything but accidental in this context that the debate around clerical celibacy reached Steiner early. In 1522 he attended a meeting where this matter appeared on the agenda.⁵⁹ In 1523 Steiner read a momentous treatise that had just seen the light of day, The Estate of Marriage (1522)—Martin Luther’s passionate sermo to embrace matrimony as a divinely ordained mode of life. Steiner’s copy, preserved at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, reveals how systematically he read.⁶⁰ He focused on doctrinal issues, underlined certain passages, added notes on the pamphlet’s margins, and signed the title page of his copy as follows: “I read this treatise on matrimony in the year 1523.” He seems to have used that material for one of his sermons.⁶¹ A cleric by this time, he had started to live openly with Anna Rüst.⁶²

It is likely that Steiner had not always lived chastely. One may think of Steiner’s encounter with Hans Kern in Schwyz in 1518. Even though the two men did not engage in what Steiner offered to teach this farm laborer, that same night Kern fetched a known prostitute to take his place (the deposition of 1541 is so focused on the question of male-male sodomy that it fails to report what happened that night). As soon as it was propagated by the reformers, clerical marriage offered itself as a welcome opportunity to the thirty-year-old Steiner. Marriage permitted him to combine the life of the cleric with that of the head of family. In this instance, Steiner does not seem to have hesitated. He entered into a union with Anna Rüst and, in quick succession, they had no fewer than thirteen children.⁶³

By his marriage, Steiner pioneered a mode of life that would help to transform the world traditionally inhabited by clerics, scholars, and academics.⁶⁴ In subsequent years, marriage became a feature of Reformation masculinity. Living a domestic life demarcated the old from the new clergy. Marital life thus became an important rallying point for the reformers. Through his union with Rüst, Steiner created public awareness about his religious inclinations. No wonder that agitated crowds in his hometown expressed their discontent with behavior they considered unbecoming to a cleric. Later in life, on the occasion of the marriage festivities of his oldest daughter in 1537,⁶⁵ Steiner even treated the subject of matrimony in a sermon that, though never published, contributed to the growing body of literature on marriage. It was a short treatise that featured precepts on three topics: entry into matrimony, the couple’s legal affairs, and matrimony as a divinely ordained mode of life.⁶⁶

Biblical education was another component of the particular brand of masculinity that characterized the Reformation in Zurich. In this regard, Steiner had much catching up to do. In 1519, waiting for passage to the Holy Land, he acquired a printed Bible (he paid barely more for it than the amount he paid for his pilgrim’s guide).⁶⁷ Yet the Bible he bought to take on his pilgrimage was not an edition that conformed to humanist editorial standards. It was probably a secondhand volume printed more than twenty years earlier—an edition that has left barely a trace in the venerable annals of Bible printing around 1500.⁶⁸ Eager to improve himself and make up for the deficits of his erudition, Steiner, once in Zurich, became a student of biblical exegesis. He attended lectures on the Old Testament given by the eminent Huldrych Zwingli and Theodor Bibliander (1506–62).⁶⁹ The marginalia in the Bible he owned are lecture notes for the most part. Based on this training, he even ventured into authoring a German commentary on the first five books of the Bible.

Steiner’s will to educate himself in biblical humanism predated his move to Zurich. Bullinger, though younger, took Steiner, this able-minded follower of the gospels, under his wing. He dedicated to him a pedagogical treatise written in 1528 with one purpose in mind: to wed the studia humanitatis to the new theology in the spirit of Zwingli and other reformers like him. This studiorum ratio encapsulates the pedagogical project of Protestant humanism. According to Bullinger, all study, whether of ancient languages, ancient literatures, or the sciences, fed into what amounted to the center of all learning, the Bible, God’s conversation with humanity.⁷⁰ In the preface Steiner comes across as the perfect recipient of this treatise: a student most willing to improve himself. Indeed, Steiner supposedly urged Bullinger to compose this manual on how to organize his studies, but Bullinger also intended to encourage Steiner and others like him.⁷¹

The Zurich reform was more than a purely academic affair, however. Humanist reformers were called upon personally to embody the religiously inspired morality they advocated. They strove to bring into harmony inner beliefs and outer appearance, religious tenets and civic community. They fashioned themselves into exemplars of virtue capable of guiding others to follow in their footsteps. In other words, they carried the light of the gospels into all spheres of life. Not surprisingly, the capstone to the edifice of Bullinger’s argument is the point that a virtuous life takes precedence over philosophical and rhetorical expertise. This message is reiterated in two concluding poems, one of which is a rejection of voluptuousness and an exhortation to lead a pure life:

. . . guard your senses day and night,

as one guards breakable windows at the sentry.

Subject the impermanent body to the rule of the mind

And look for God with a thirsting heart. . . .⁷²

The reformers welcomed Steiner’s arrival. He was independently wealthy, a man in no need of financial support, unlike many other Protestant immigrants who flocked to Zurich. Steiner was well integrated into the social networks of the city. Letter writers mentioned him frequently when sending brotherly greetings to other representatives of reformed Zurich. He advanced money on behalf of his friends; he asked for advice in matters of the faith; he received copies of pamphlets that had just appeared in print and became the dedicatee of a number of publications.⁷³

In his pursuit of scholarly interests, Steiner settled on history above all other disciplines.⁷⁴ He composed several chronicles. Insofar as history reflected the inevitable progress of a Christian faith inspired by the gospels, he considered it a valuable field. Bullinger himself ventured into this area when authoring a history of the Reformation (1567).⁷⁵ Yet history stood apart from the center of theological debate, and Steiner’s scholarly activities never came to fruition. His chronicles, compilations, and collections were never printed, even though some seem to have been fully prepared. In fact, it is not certain that the Zurich elite fully trusted Steiner. It is noteworthy that there is no evidence of pastoral activities after Steiner moved to the city.

Several spheres of masculinity noticeably intersected in Steiner’s vita. How, therefore, did Steiner negotiate among these different codes and communities? To be sure, Steiner was not equally invested in all the arenas discussed above: the military, the clergy, the family, reform circles. Some codes of masculinity shaped his life more permanently than others; some communities were more essential than others. He was an outsider to the life of Swiss soldiers, for instance, although he definitely seems to have been an interested observer. Suspended between theological training, love for his fatherland, and the toll military campaigns took on his family, his stance on the “mercenary business” brought him into opposition to his family’s path to social prominence. At the same time, he acted vigorously to preserve the family name. Steiner was a member of a generation that also lived through the formation of a new religious identity—a shift that men like Steiner had to master. His embrace of humanist-reform masculinity does not seem to have been fully successful. Whoever partakes of different codes and communities in times of change is at risk. This is what Steiner’s life bespeaks above all. In certain moments, homoerotic desire brings to the fore the tensions inherent in other arenas of masculinity.

Does homoeroticism circumscribe a distinct code in Steiner’s biography? One could argue that this was the case. It appears that Steiner was aroused by men different from him, not so much in age—Kern was only slightly younger—but in social class. We hear of a farm laborer and a servant. Likely there were others; Steiner only confessed when he had to. To state it differently: he exploited his social status to coax others into having sex. The locations of these scenarios of desire are also telling: an inn, a bedchamber, a bathhouse, all of which indicate a certain transience of sociosexual life. What is known of Steiner’s erotic cathexis conforms to the habits of other upper-class men found guilty of sodomy. In early modern Europe, homoeroticism was tied to social disparity, for instance, differences of age and of class. Whether or not a superior social position was tied to insertive sexual acts, as many researchers have posited, is an assumption Steiner would have contradicted vigorously.⁷⁶ Be that as it may, one could say in his case that homoerotic activity followed distinct patterns of behavior.

Claiming same-sex eroticism as a particular masculinity has a price, however. It means to cordon off sexual activity from the social contexts in which it occurred. In other words, it means to defuse the constructive as well as disruptive force homoeroticism acquired. As a rule, historians of sexuality have therefore taken a different stance. They argue that sodomy was coextensive with hegemonic manhood in early modern Europe, at least as long as the authorities refrained from interference and, as some would claim, as long as the sex acts in question were “active.”⁷⁷ This view is more consistent with what Steiner’s “confession” brought to light. There is little in these records that would suggest that homoeroticism formed a particular code. Strategies like the ones named above were at work in heterosexual liaisons as well. Unlike the homosexual, the sodomite was not a particular type, neither in the imagination nor in social life. In fact, homoeroticism had its place in the different spheres where men socialized. It is reported from the life of mercenaries. It provided a sexual outlet for men in the academic sphere. Clerics engaged in it.⁷⁸ In fact, the history of masculinity and the history of homosexuality complement each other: a history of masculinity that fails to take note of homoeroticism will not do full justice to what it meant to live a man’s life in early modern Europe. In turn, a history of sexuality will have to work toward taking into account the social and gendered contexts of sexual acts more broadly. In this sense, the encounter of these two histories is still at its beginning.

Bibliography