Papers by Seth S LeJacq
International Journal of Maritime History, 2021
This article reassesses the sailing Royal Navy’s treatment of homoerotic crimes. Historians have ... more This article reassesses the sailing Royal Navy’s treatment of homoerotic crimes. Historians have argued that same-gender sexual contact was rare and loathed on naval vessels, and that trials were consequently uncommon but produced exceedingly harsh outcomes. Drawing on new archival research, this paper reveals that naval actors had more varied and complex attitudes towards the homoerotic and that courts treated these crimes more moderately on average than has long been assumed. Court martial trials also represented only one – extreme – outcome of an elaborate system that naval actors used to ‘resolve’ detected sex crimes. Summary punishment, flight, dismissal and a range of other routes served as common non-judicial alternatives. Detailed exploration of a protracted late-Georgian dismissal case, that of Lt. Arthur Walter Adair, shows that it is essential to attend to the full range of naval reactions to the homoerotic if we are to fully understand its place in naval history.
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Eighteenth-Century Life, 2021
Essay review of Craig Spence, Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London: 1650-1750
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Reading Early Medicine, 2019
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Journal for Maritime Research, 2015
Historians have long seen the navy as isolated from major developments in the history of homosexu... more Historians have long seen the navy as isolated from major developments in the history of homosexuality during the long eighteenth century. Indeed, some have argued that there was little discussion of the topic in naval circles altogether. This article shows that there was in fact deep engagement with, and a great deal of naval discourse about, contemporary thought regarding homoerotic practices and the men who engaged in them. It focuses on three sites in order to explore the dynamics of the circulation of sexual knowledge between naval and non-naval spaces. The naval courtroom reveals that men were conversant with stereotypes about sodomites and ideas that men could have homoerotic ‘inclinations’ or ‘propensities’. The navy's ongoing commitment to prosecuting men for such sexual contact, meanwhile, required its legal actors to develop a robust body of knowledge and discourse about this topic, and connected them to the broader world of legal thought and practice regarding sodomy. Finally, the periodical press not only represented naval sodomy to readers and acted as a virtual witness for the public, but could also enter into more complex relationships with naval justice. Analysis of these sites shows that bringing naval history and the history of homosexuality into closer conversation enriches both fields.
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Social History of Medicine, 2013
This paper investigates ways in which early modern English recipe collections constructed domesti... more This paper investigates ways in which early modern English recipe collections constructed domestic medicine as broader and more powerful than is often appreciated. It shows that their compilers frequently selected recipes that promised to allow them to address a wide range of surgical ailments, to heal serious surgical conditions medicinally, and to avoid invasive interventions. Claims of remedies' virtues and stories of their successes imagined domestic medicine not only as a ‘first port of call’, but also as a potent counterpart to the work of practitioners; a last resort when practitioners had failed; and as an alternative to the knife. Using the writings of the surgeon John Woodall, it argues that surgeons were sensitive to the attitudes and preferences that motivated this collection. In seeking to discipline surgery, Woodall invoked the stereotypical gentleness of women's and domestic medicine in an effort to inculcate greater discernment in the use of violence.
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Teaching Documents by Seth S LeJacq
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Johns Hopkins University Dean's Teaching Fellowship course. Fall 2014 - AS.140.371
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Talks by Seth S LeJacq
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A capital offence until 1861, British observers often described sodomy as “the worst of crimes,” ... more A capital offence until 1861, British observers often described sodomy as “the worst of crimes,” regarding it as a heinous foreign scourge that threatened the populace and perhaps even civilization itself. However great a threat sex between men itself was, however, legal actors and powerful men were equally fearful of false sodomy accusations and sexual blackmail. Accusations were, famously, “easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent.” Blackmail and false accusations were seen as a particular threat to elite men, and the specter of social inferiors and subordinates attacking their leaders and betters with claims of sexual misbehavior haunted many Britons. Drawing on published medical and legal texts as well as a wide variety of manuscript legal records from different court systems, this paper examines the ways in which courts attempted to deploy forensic medicine to distinguish false accusations. Forensic medicine promised to offer the simplest and surest way to deal with a crime that had perennially been nearly impossible to investigate. While continental medico-legal thinkers had a long history of robust engagement with the topic, though, British medical men remained leery of it and willing to deal with sodomy in print and in court only infrequently. I argue that the weak foundation and state of British legal medicine in comparison to those of the same field in continental nations dissuaded British medical men from taking up this culturally hazardous subject, even as legal actors repeatedly raised it as an area begging for forensic activity. In the absence of any concentrated medico-legal work on the topic, courts, participants, and outside actors fell back on traditional methods of weighing accusations, and were unable to generate any broadly-accepted methods for effectively dealing with the perceived scourge of false accusations and blackmail.
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