Expurgating Martial: Erasing Homosexuality from Anglophone Editions and Commentaries, 1800–2017

Abstract

Although Martial’s Epigrams underwent a revival in nineteenth-century Britain, they were heavily censored and expurgated to remove sexual obscenity, and same-sex desire and sexual acts. Recent scholarship has considered obscenity in the ancient world and its expurgation, and we have seen specific analyses of Martial’s expurgation by T.J. Leary, Deborah Roberts and Craig Williams. However, hindered by the size of the corpus and number of receptive works, no one has yet performed a comprehensive survey of the expurgation of Martial’s obscenity. In this thesis, I address this gap in the scholarship by presenting the first systematic account of the expurgation, based on my comprehensive data from all the editions and commentaries first published since 1800 for the anglophone world. I used both quantitative and qualitative analyses and applied digital humanities techniques. In chapter 1, I conclude that eight editions published between 1875 and 1908 had been expurgated to remove poems with same-sex themes, especially those with sexually obscene language in the Latin. There was a high degree of consistency of omission and emendation across the expurgated editions. The impact of the expurgation was most pronounced for the school pupil, but still significant for the undergraduate student, the scholar and the homosexual reader. In chapter 2, I conclude that the commentaries published since 1981 bore no evidence of expurgation, while those published between 1875 and 1908 showed strong signs of expurgation on three structural levels: the lemma, the entry, and the whole-book level. The commentators strongly expurgated the tribas and cinaedus figures using a number of strategies unique to each figure. The expurgation was consistent with the wider social, political, historical and literary trends of the period. This thesis and the project overall will enhance further scholarship on Martial’s reception since 1800. I will publish and maintain the dataset online so that other researchers have access to full and accurate data. Furthermore, I hope that the methodology and tools of analysis that I have developed may be of use in studying other texts, so that eventually it will be possible to perform a meta-study of expurgation across multiple authors, genres, time periods and formats.