Research

Dr. Berco’s research program focuses on the body and society in the early modern Hispanic world. Though he has published widely on a variety of topics, including the decriminalization of sodomy in nineteenth-century Argentina and gender identity and self discipline in Baroque Spain, his main interests entail the following:

1. The Body, Sexuality and Society,  specifically male homosexual behavior, its reliance on gendered constructs, and its uneasy relationship to social status in early modern societies.  Gleaned from Spanish trial records, this research focuses on the border between the hierarchies constructed through the sexed body and those available from public understandings of status. Dr. Berco’s book on the subject, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Golden Age Spain argues that, though homosexual behavior was widespread due to a penetrative conceptualization of masculinity, public anger was mobilized into trials when these sexual relationships violated normalized power relations, as in the case of Muslim slaves sodomizing Christian adolescents. At the same time, because of the diffuse nature of an inquisitorial trial, magistrates did not always follow through on the public intent to punish, effectively shielding some groups like the clergy from harsh sentences. Dr. Berco has also published separately on the intimate connection between patriarchal forms of power and sodomy, both in practice and in terms of the constructs informing them.
2. The Body, Disease and Society. This research focuses on syphilis and its sociocultural implications as a lived illness. Funded by a three-year SSHRC research grant, this project relies on hospital and notarial records from Toledo, Spain. Dr. Berco investigates how those suffering from this illness understood and reacted to the implications of this disease. Patients offer a rare opportunity as subjects of study, because becoming ill involved renegotiating social spaces such as work, family, and community. Also, illness often placed early modern individuals in a liminal, borderline state: between poverty and self sufficiency, between discrimination and communal acceptance, between dishonor and reputation. For instance, women struck with syphilis had to face communal gendered perceptions that constructed the female body as the source of venereal disease and thus find new ways of maintaining personal reputation. It is increasingly clear that the implications of syphilis went well beyond hospital treatment and care to encompass local socio-economic structures and identities. By following patients once they left the hospital through other types of records, a better understanding of the way they lived with venereal disease can be reached. As a side project stemming from this main line of research, Dr. Berco has also published on early modern medical treatises and their silence regarding same-sex transmission of venereal disease. 
3. The Body, Race and Gender.  When most people think of social differences, categories such as male and female, gay and straight and black and white come to mind. Although these categories do not reflect the complexities of daily life, they still shape our social worlds. These categories are validated through the way we interpret bodily appearances and mannerisms. Consider, for instance, current debates on reasonable accommodation: from the appearance of Muslim women wearing headscarves, to the mannerisms of Haitian youths as indicative of criminality. Our views of people’s bodies crystallize our anxieties about differences. As Canada Research Chair in Social and Cultural Difference, Dr. Berco is analyzing the persistence of social differences in early modern Spanish society by focusing on female sorcerers and people of colour. Why do social categories maintain their hold over how people imagine and live their social worlds, despite social complexities? What is the relationship between views and assumptions about bodies and the daily maintenance of identity categories? Through an archival examination of inquisitorial trials and notarial sources, this work is uncovering body scripts—the interpretive schemes historical actors used to read others’ bodies—that were applied to marginalized peoples and the way social categories were lived daily.