ABSTRACT
In Florence between the mid-1340s and mid-1350s there was a rise in prosecuted crime, while in Venice the number of theft trials remained high, and included some cases of looting during plague emergencies. Gauvard has argued that it was fear of crime that established the image of greater lawlessness, with stereotypical connections to plague and warfare. Greater fear of crime also made stereotypical associations of lawlessness with travelling foreigners, whether soldiers or vagabonds. As causes of crime, governments often targeted three offensive behaviours: prostitution, gambling and blasphemy. Like blasphemy, sodomy was proclaimed a sin that endangered the whole of society. Sodomy was linked to the most serious of errors, heresy, and charges of sexual deviance were levelled against heretics. The idea of 'an army of crime, a confraternity or realm of criminals, an anti-society' aiming to destroy the normal social world likewise grew in fifteenth-century France. Most of the sodomy, and historiographical discussion of it, comes from late medieval Italy.
