In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura-against nature-to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

A Note on Translation  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. Archiving the Unnatural  1
1. Viscerality in the Archives: Consuming Desires  25
2. Impulses of the Archive: Misinscription and Voyeurism  46
3. Archiving the Signs of Sodomy: Bodies and Gestures  84
4. To Deaden the Memory: Bestiality and Animal Erasure  124
5. Archives of Negligence: Solicitation in the Confessional  161
6. Desiring the Divine: Pollution and Pleasure  197
Conclusion. Accessing Absence, Surveying Seduction  233
Appendix  255
List of Archives  261
Notes  263
Bibliography  297
Index  309