In the TV show Borgia: Faith and Fear which is set in Rome circa 1493, there is a scene in which a man convicted of sodomy is publically tortured to death using the Pear of Anguish. Was this really the standard punishment for sodomites during that time period?
Not at all. In fact there is no contemporary account of a Pear of Anguish, nor is there any surviving Pear that has been dated back that far. Like a lot of medieval torture devices the idea of the Pear of Anguish seems to have been invented in the 19th century. Basically it's a story invented to show, "how much more civilized we are than our forbearers."
That's not to say that torture didn't exist in the medieval period. It's just that knives, tongs, and red-hot pokers are cheaper, readily available, and multipurpose. There was little need for bizzare mechanical devices. When the Bishop of Münster had Jan van Leiden and his compatriots tortured to death he didn't Rube Goldberg him to death. He instead gave his executioner a brazier and tongs. He had their skin torn from them with red-hot tongs for an hour each.
Sodomy was on the books as a crime across most of Christian Europe, and punishment varied from time to place, as did how aggressive prosecution might be. That said it tended to be straight forward; fines, beating/scourging, castration, disfigurement, dismemberment, burning were all commonly listed punishments.
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