In his book The Boundaries of Eros, Guido Ruggiero tells a history of increasing government intervention in sexual matters during the Renaissance, in response to the alarming growth of a culture of illicit sexuality. Using the records of several Venetian courts in the period from 1348 to 1500, Ruggiero examines five main sexual crimes, namely fornication, adultery, sacrilegious sex, rape and sodomy. He gives shape to his narrative in three different ways: by examining language, penalties and prosecutions. First, he looks at judicial language, that is, how cases are described and reported in the court records. One aspect of this is the perceived nature and scope of the injury. Here he finds an evolution from a simple concern with damage or dishonour to the father or family of the victim (characteristic of the mid-fourteenth century) to more heightened alarm at contempt for God, law and justice, which grows by stages in the later fourteenth century, and comes to eclipse family honour. The language used regarding some crimes, however, was special: sex with nuns was sacrilegious, as the injured party was God; and sodomy was condemned as likely to provoke God's destructive anger on the city. Another aspect of judicial language is the descriptive vocabulary: Ruggiero contrasts the ‘distant and antiseptic’ language of heterosexual rape cases with the abundant physical detail of sodomy cases. This contrast is used to suggest the significance attached to each type of offence.