Sixteenth Century Journal XLVI/3 (2015) ISSN 0361-0160 629 his article was made possible by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the IAP Program phase VII/26 “City and Society in the Low Countries (ca. 1200–ca. 1850): he Condition Urbaine; Between Resilience and Vulnerability” (Belgian Science Policy Oice), and portions of this paper were irst presented at the Koinonia Forum entitled “Sex: Religious and heological Perspectives” held at Princeton University (New Jersey, US) in March 2013. From Slurs to Silence? Sodomy and Mendicants in the Writings of Catholic Laymen in Early Modern Ghent Jonas Roelens Ghent University his article analyzes the reactions of Catholic laymen to a 1578 sodomy trial held in Ghent. he recently established Calvinist city council had accused a number of mendicants of the crime to slander their religious opponents. he lack of oicial response from the clergy has led to the assumption that the laity also remained silent in the face of the slurs. Remarkably, a considerable number of Catholic laymen passionately attempted to rehabilitate the friars through the popular narrative genre of city chronicles, the Memorieboeken, even though sodomy was an unmentionable sin. Furthermore, chroniclers were still writing about the trial more than a century ater the fall of the Calvinist regime. Clearly, the Catholic restoration of Ghent was accompanied by the stigmatization of old enemies. his particular sodomy trial not only shows how religious polemics could inluence responses to deviant sexuality but also relects the formation of an urban historical consciousness. On 28 June 1578, at noon, three mendicant friars were carried on a cart towards the town hall of Ghent, the largest city of the County of Flanders. A huge crowd had gathered to see the hangman burn of their hair and whip them with rods until they bled before they were banned from the county for ity years. A few hours later, the public witnessed ive other monks tied on a scafold and burned alive. heir charred remains were tied to fresh stakes at the gallows outside the city for public display. he monks in question had been sentenced by the city council of the recently established Calvinist government. In a politically moti- vated, anticlerical show trial, the new Protestant regime had accused the mendi- cant friars of rampant sodomy. 1 Early modern reformers routinely represented their religious opponents as sodomites to validate Protestantism, yet most Catholic oicials ignored these accusations altogether. Instead, they chose to direct their energies inwards, prais- ing Catholicism in Latin texts intended for clerical consumption. he deliberate exclusion of the laity from this internal dialogue has led to the assumption that 1 For the purposes of this article, sodomy refers only to same-sex acts, unless otherwise speci ied.