Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  (5) What was meant by a “sodomite?” Is this a class of individuals or an occasional sinner? Would any individuals actually have identi- fied themselves as “sodomites” or recognized themselves in the image propagated by reforming moralists?

  (6) What is the relation between the sodomitical and the feminine? Are women sodomites when engaging in sodomitical acts with other women? With men? What relations can be traced between celibacy and sodomy or between heresy and sodomy?

  (7) To what degree can the unrelentingly negative picture presented by medieval clerks and clergy of non-procreative sexual practices, including those between same-sex partners, be an effect of the fear that such acts were immensely attractive? If it was believed that the existence of these acts had to be hidden lest everyone start performing them, then does the institution of that “open secret” (we all know it goes on but can only refer to it in coded language) explain what we read today as a shadow that haunts twelfth-century literature across generic and disciplinary boundaries?

  (8) Did disciplinary and fictional texts ever serve as lures to “sodomites” within the clergy, the monasteries and convents? Did they provide the conduit through which authorities could address such individuals directly by encouraging them to identify with the portraits sketched in the texts? If so, should this double-speak and constant monitoring of the self be seen as a continuation of classical thought (Foucault’s “souci de soi”) or, rather, as the institution and early manifestation of what he called the “repressive hypothesis?”10

  (9) If, indeed, the twelfth century can be identified with what R. I.

  Moore called the birth of a persecuting society, and if a form of compulsory heterosexuality, rather than compulsory reproduction, was then being erected as an essential component of that society, what forces were behind these discursive shifts and their very real consequences?11 Who had what to gain from this linking of rigid gender definition and policed sexual behavior?

  (10) Could courtly love texts, which have so often been read as the bedrock of monolithic, monologic heterosexuality, not be read instead as laboratory texts, a failed ideological experiment in imposing seamless models of (hetero)sexuality and gender?

  (11) To what extent might “sodomy” be seen as primarily discursive – more a collection of stories and stances than a collection of acts? Do these stories, as transmitted from place to place and generation to generation, change in relation to other social practices? Are these stories shaped primarily by apparatuses of power or by popular oral transmission?

  Knight Out

  Most of what I will be talking about in the following chapters concerns men, at least in the sense that the protagonists are male or the texts are addressed to men. It is they who are generally the butt of these accusations of sodomy, and it is their behavior that is at stake in the ensuing trials and calls to repentance. Of course, when I say “knight” I mean young males in general: not only those inducted into special military forces, but also the sons of the nobility or the new urban rich who trained for service at courts and strove through public spectacles to make their reputations and fortunes. Knighthood as an institution probably does not pre-date the end of the eleventh century and in its first manifestation it continued many of the traditional practices of earlier warrior castes, including extensive training in horsemanship and arms, usually at a castle other than the father’s. Etienne de Fouge`re’s 1170 account of knighthood in the Livre des mani`eres is one of the earliest known accounts of chivalry and it also contains, probably not coincidentally, a diatribe against homoerotic behavior (“whosoever is awakened by the ‘vile sin’ / is striving against nature. / He must be pursued with dogs, / throwing stones and sticks; / one should give him blows / and kill him like a cur”).12 Etienne is decrying female same- sex acts, a rather exceptional condemnation of sodomitical acts between women in the twelfth century, but the terms in which he condemns such behavior can easily be extended to males as well.13 By 1170, chivalry was already thought of, at least in some quarters, as an estate or order, and had taken on an ethical cast. Knights had to be noble but also generous, and their investiture, perhaps under the influence of the holy orders of knighthood necessitated by the Crusades, took on more and more of the color of a religious mission. Yet the essential criterion remained throughout, military might. When William Marshall rose from the ranks of the minor nobility (c. 1167) to the position of regent of England (c. 1195) it was clearly by virtue of his military accomplishments and success at court.14 Romance portraits of knights never really lost sight of this essential element while progressively emphasizing the hero’s quasi- sacred mission.15 The pure, devoted, and exceptionally brave knight became the figure of elite masculinity to which all young men were to aspire. The ancient Christian moniker of milites Christi took on new force under the impetus of sacred knighthood, culminating by the century’s end in Robert de Boron’s fusion of monastic and chivalric ideals. Idealized figures of knighthood – Perceval, Galahad, even the fin’amans of troubadour poetry – served to interpellate young men into ideological gender formations that made them, not coincidentally, more serviceable to institutional interests.

  The question of what categories these knights might then be “out of ” is apposite. No one claims for the twelfth century a public gay iden- tity with its attendant political agenda, somehow identical to current notions. Nor do I want to suggest that “the closet,” that very useful psy- chic metaphor out of which one steps, or within which one finds oneself revealed, was identical in 1130 to the post-Sedgwick definition.16 YetI do want to retain a heuristic notion of such hidden spaces, spaces in which sinners withheld their transgressions from confessors, for example, as a way of imagining the different subject positions that a twelfth-century monk might inhabit in relation to his interlocutors, his confessor, and the rules of his order. While it does not follow that either that space or those subject positions are entirely coterminous with a post-Freudian notion of the closet or of gay identity, these earlier formulations, espe- cially as we find them drawn in Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus, are closer than many want to acknowledge. If individuals only accede to subjectivity through interaction with the Law – ideological forces that are attempting to harness and dominate them – then it is logical to assume that the medieval clerks and monks who wrote these (largely homophobic) texts were subjects in this modern sense, even if, given the different forms that those ideological forces took, the subject posi- tions available to them were not identical to our own.17 Secrecy, in Glenn Burger’s elegant formulation, is “the spiritual exercise by which the subject is allowed to conceive of himself as a resistance: a friction in the smooth functioning of the social order, a margin to which its far-reaching discourse does not reach.”18 It is clear that from within these spaces of non-disclosure the twelfth-century subject could speak, act, and perform, without necessarily ever being “outed,” and that these operations of secrecy and divulgence are very much at play in the texts that I will be discussing.19

  How can rhetorical formulations, cliche´s even, act as signs of pro- scribed desire while also maintaining their function as cover?20 To what degree could a medieval author write in double-speak with some con- sciousness of writing for and against, within and without, established discursive conventions? If the closet is the most ready term for the psychic space that allows for games of hiding and revealing, the irony and camp so associated with the “gay canon” since Oscar Wilde, it is not the only heuristic we might use. As Allen Frantzen rightly observes, the term “closet” can have the effect of flattening variants from differ- ent eras, genres, genders, and disciplines, resulting in another falsified record of the past designed to please the present.21 I therefore fall back on John Winkler’s more malleable concept of “double-consciousness” in pre-modern authors as a way of circumventing charges of anachro- nism, all the while fully conscious of my own role in the construction of these texts.22 In Ed Cohen’s estimation, Winkler’s formulation has the advantage of allowing that �
�a marginalized poet can speak and write in the dominant discourse but subvert its monolithic truth claims by recasting them in the light of personal, subculture experience.”23 This definition allies double-consciousness with camp while avoiding the messy closet, out of, or in, which one can only be, at any rate, until the next encounter. Double-consciousness, often in a less political form, is also a fixture of allegory, and is therefore fully consonant with medieval aesthetics.24 Even so, there are many questions. Were self-conscious sub- cultures pervasive or were they tolerated only in major urban centers of learning, as John Boswell has argued?25 To what degree did individual consciousness of sexual identity depend on such cultures?26 Finally, is double-consciousness a step toward individual subjectivity or a deeper burrowing into the proscriptions of the Law? Any answer to these ques- tions has to begin with what appears to me to be an open invitation on the part of many twelfth-century authors to read their texts actively, to revel in their word play, ambiguity, and deliberate obscurity.

  Despite the massive ideological investment in the link between mas- culinity and knighthood, they were never successfully staged as fully overlapping spectacles. Heroic masculinity, no less than knighthood, seems to have been under construction, not fully concomitant with the evolving social, political, and linguistic discourses which stressed the sacrificial nature of the masculine. While historians of the twelfth cen- tury have often over-emphasized the discovery of the individual at the expense of the evolution of communities, most of the texts I will be exam- ining in the second part of this book are concerned with just that: (1) how the individual fits “into” or is situated “outside of” the social group; and (2) how that fit determines perceptions of gender and sexuality. Marie de France’s Lais, the Conte du graal and its Continuations, and the De planctu naturae, owe as much to the well-documented innovations and tensions of the twelfth century (Latin vs. vernacular, individual vs. col- lective, aristocratic vs. royal power, dialectic vs. rhetoric, etc.) and the discourses that they engendered as they do to any notion of individual consciousness. Peter Haidu may assert (questionably) that “in the tenth and eleventh centuries, then, there were no secular subjects,”27 but he also admits that “the subjectification of knight and peasant begins dur- ing the twelfth century, when a wave of disciplinary power persecutes all classes and engulfs the continent of Europe, with formation of the state as its leading edge.”28 Haidu claims that ecclesiastical authority acted as the substitute for the Althusserian state during this period, i.e., as the ideological apparatus through which subjectivity was instituted, and while I agree that they overlap, I see the two fields as coterminous, not identical. It is quite clear that medieval subjects could envisage an order of the Real (all that cannot be symbolized within the Law) beyond the confines of the Church and that their subjectivity was just as often formed within the gaps between secular and ecclesiastical mech- anisms as within an air-tight notion of the Law, no matter how stren- uously the Church claimed a universal and totalizing explanation of experience.

  The various authors I will be discussing, composing at the brink of what has been called a new episteme of modernity, surely operated within discursive restrictions but they also resisted and rewrote these discourses through a set of double references that exposed fissures as well as links between the past and the present, institutional norms and the demands of patronage, gender and sex, and especially the socially constructed subject and the private, interior spaces in which that sub- jectivity can, however briefly, be cast off. This space is both more and less than a closet: it is the very gap out of which subjectivity arises in the split subject, a gap the subject tries to conceal even from himself rather than one in which he can ever successfully hide.29 It is no coincidence that the texts in which masculinity and the Law that subtends it are most clearly problematized through the deployment of accusations of sodomy, are also texts that refigure this gap as an alternate space in which to situate action: the long-lost other-space of Celtic legends (Marie de France), Greek foundation myth (Eneas), dream narratives (De planctu naturae), or the gap between the “real” terrain of Perceval’s wasteland and the apparitional status of the Fisher King’s castle in the Conte du graal. In this respect, twelfth-century texts are explicitly ideological in that they do exist, in Haidu’s formulation, to “cover over social self- contradiction . . . wrap[s] band aids on the abyssal wounds of psychic constitutions.”30 The anachronisms of twelfth-century literature might well reflect a willed ignorance of history and an insensitivity to cultural difference, but they attest, more importantly, to an attempt to refig- ure the present through that past – to rewrite the present not only as demanded by patronage but also as a contested site of knowledge. Fur- thermore, these fissures between past and present, Latin and vernacular, masculine and feminine, sleep and waking, also provide for authorial “escape hatches” from which we, the readers, can glimpse, or imagine that we glimpse, some resistance on the part of authors to the signifying practices and disciplinary forces that patrolled them. Without going so far as to suggest a fully articulated and superhistorical individual author, I believe we can read resistance into the interstices of the competing dis- courses to which the author was subject, even when such resistance was unconscious or unacknowledged.

  To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, then: is there a sodomite or is he/she/it simply a brand deployed by one who controls discourse? And if there is, can he/she/it speak, or speak out? Even if we admit that the infamously hegemonic force of homophobic texts such as the Liber Gomorrhianus or the De planctu naturae might be accurate reflections of the deep and abiding moral beliefs of their authors, can we not also detect within them resistance and counter-discourse, even in the most orthodox of quasi-theological and philosophical arguments? How important is it, after all, to know whether a prolific theologian like Alain de Lille truly believed in the epistemological critique of sodomy he outlines in the De planctu naturae? Though it appears to be written with monologic pretensions, we can never really establish Alain’s intentions, and must therefore be ever attentive to the texts’ failure to contain slippage of meaning and to Alain’s not always subtle highlighting of those leaks. In sum, what violation is done in “queering” these texts? None at all. Most readers of what we would now consider twelfth-century canonical texts would agree that they are already very queer indeed and that it is precisely that queerness, or alterity, that continues to attract us. First- time younger readers, increasingly untouched by any familiarity with canonical literature or traditional justifications for the study of medieval literature, are even more likely, in my experience, to remark on the queer, unexpected, and illogical elements in the texts and to express consterna- tion over the unconvincing heterosexual narratives that they purvey – unconvincing only in the very narrow terms within which heterosex- uality is constrained. One classic justification for literary criticism is that it allows us to recapture lost meaning and in some cases “render audible what was forcibly silenced,” either by contemporary mores or by subsequent criticism.31 In the case of twelfth-century texts, the hazy distinction between what has been lost and what might never have been very clear in the first place makes the goal of recovery of some essential meaning particularly illusory and untenable. Such, I suspect, was also the case in 1160.

  When it comes to dealing with an emotionally charged issue like sodomy, medieval texts can even seem more phantasmatically familiar to us today than many post-Enlightenment texts in which the subject of dissident sexual practices is completely occluded.32 But this sense of proximity can also be illusory. What we sometimes imagine to have recovered is less easily classifiable than we would expect, not surprising given the very different ways in which subjects experienced their selves through the medium of interpretive communities. That is, there were interpretive filters or screens then operating that may go unrecognized today, including extensive use of irony.33 We should be careful about making facile generalizations about our “gay” predecessors, but no more careful than when dealing w
ith other issues that should be flagged for era- specific connotations (freedom, power, dreams, imagination, opposite- sex eroticism, love, etc.). Not that we need a Foucauldian blessing, but David Halperin, in response to numerous critiques about the restrictive- ness of some social constructionist theories, claims that Foucault never intended caution to be interpreted as proscription. We should not feel constrained simply to map “the shifts in categories and classifications of an otherwise unchanging ‘sexuality’” or insist too strictly on “a his- torical distinction between pre-modern sexual acts and modern sexual identities” in the name of fidelity to Foucault:

  Nothing Foucault says about the differences between two historically distant, and operationally distinct, discursive strategies for regulating and delegitimating forms of male same-sex sexual contacts prohibits us from inquiring into the connections that pre-modern people may have made between specific sexual acts and the particular ethos, or sexual style, or sexual subjectivity, of those who performed them.34

  If no continuities can be perceived over the course of almost nine hundred years (1120–2004) in sexual behaviors or the ways in which sexuality was configured as a part of identity, then it must be equally impossible to claim understanding of any other of the political, social, and philosophical formulations within which sex acts were framed. In other words, to privilege sexuality as the one unfathomable formation, isolated from other equally powerful components of identity, is to per- petuate the nineteenth century’s over-emphasis on sexuality as the truth of the self. Certainly some of the semiotics of medieval sexuality are now impossible to read (the role of gestures, choice of clothing, tone of voice, word choice, occupation, education, religious affiliation, cultural iden- tity) and though we know something about attempts to regulate sexual behavior, we know next to nothing about their effectiveness. Which techniques were more productive and not just more easily recorded in writing – self-discipline (as in internal policing through examination of conscience, public or private confession, penance, monitoring of dream content, conformity to institutional standards); or legal, social, and institutional controls (self as judged by others, subject to external review but internal regulation to conform to non-negotiable community standards)? Were these controls seen primarily as customary (cultural, temporally bound through ritual and tradition), rhetorical (subject to manipulation), and/or divinely inspired? Writers trained in exploiting rhetorical figures as part of their clerical training might well have seen identities, including sexual identities, as similarly figural, to be evoked and cast off as best suited the ends of the texts they were writing or some more personal agenda. Sexuality, in other words, need not be so allied with strictly defined categories of preference and licit/illicit behavior, but could be more an effect of adherence or non-adherence to gendered standards, more performative, in effect. This does not mean that sexual preference is in itself performative, quite the opposite, but that the pos- sibilities of acting on those preferences in the Middle Ages are numerous and fluid. What is objected to in most of the homophobic diatribes is not sexual acts per se but non-adherence to the gender roles, themselves allied with disciplinary discourses, from which sexuality was thought to emerge.