Gossip, defamation and sodomy in the early modern Southern Netherlands Jonas Roelens INTRODUCTION One early morning in 1494, Corneille Vander Poorten sent a shockwave through the city of Bruges. Under the cover of darkness, he posted an anony- mous pamphlet on the doors of Bruges’ stock exchange in which he accused the entire city of rampant sodomy. Corneille was a jack of all trades, master of none. Although a native of Brussels, Corneille had moved to Rome, where he worked as a cook for over a decade. Upon his return to the Netherlands, he found a new employer in Antwerp; yet shortly afterwards, Corneille was fired for thieving. He left Antwerp and decided to try his luck in Bruges, serving in the household of Corneille Pieters. Barely six weeks later, however, Corneille abandoned Pieters because he only gave him ‘crap’ to drink. His new master, Rolland de Vos, then dismissed him after two months without salary. Luckily, Corneille found a new job in the tavern of Jehan Camelle. Yet only a few days later he was accused of theft and imprisoned. Due to his time in jail and the fact that his former employers had apparently spread the word that Corneille was a dishonest man, he failed to find another job. At that point, it seems that Cor- neille decided to revenge himself upon the inhospitable citizens of Bruges. In three handwritten letters, attached to the entrance of the commercial heart of the city, he accused several public officers and notables along with ‘le commun peuple de ladite ville de Bruges’ of the ‘villain pechie et criesme de zodomye’. 1 Corneille’s defaming message caused a ‘grand perturbacion’. Corneille not only insulted his former employers, he also implicated all citizens in his written indictment by claiming that sodomy predominated in Bruges, both clandes- tinely and openly. Naturally, the civic authorities were furious, but Corneille had anticipated their anger by fleeing for Tournai, a French enclave nearby the County of Flanders. The aldermen of Bruges notified their French colleagues, * This article was financed by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) and was presented at the annual Sixteenth Century Society Conference (Bruges, 2016) and the 13 th International Conference on Urban His- tory (Helsinki, 2016). My heartfelt thanks to Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Susie Speakman Sutch, Thomas Jacobs, Lisa Demets, Ruben Suykerbuyk and Guy Dupont. 1 Bruges, City Archives (CAB), Series 192 no. 1 (Verluydboek 1490–1537), fol. 10r; Marc Boone, ‘State Power and Illicit Sexuality: The Persecution of Sodomy in Late Medieval Bruges’, Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996), 137–8. V C 2017 The Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd Renaissance Studies Vol. 00 No. 00 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12286