Thus I want to imagine the medieval texts discussed in the following chapters as outside of the disciplinary frameworks of their own age as well as our own rigid classificatory schemes; “out” of the grip of the homo/hetero distinction. If, in the first section, I insist on history, I hope that the second section responds more to Carolyn Dinshaw’s call to transcend historical barriers through affective alliances and imagined queer communities.35 To these ends, I will be taking up a wide range of questions, guided largely by Foucault’s meditations on discipline, Althusser’s notion of interpellation, and the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and Z izek, all of which in one way or another question the boundaries between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. And inevitably it is the construction and the conflict with Law that shapes our categories and identities, a Law that is imagined as upholding all categories, the ideology and symbolic placement from which one speaks. Even today, sodomy presents one of the most effective challenges to the quidditas of institutions, in that it reveals just how fragile the social structures and subject positions founded on this fantastical notion of Law really are. This challenge raises one final question: no matter how successful the attack on Law, or how overtly transgression is celebrated, can one ever truly be outside of the Law? Will it not simply morph, absorb, and regroup? In the following chapters, we will watch authors struggle with these questions, sometimes knowingly, sometimes in spite of themselves. But as they sideline the sodomite, banish and condemn him, they also, paradoxically, give him a voice.
Part I - Locating sodomy
Locating Sodomy
And even the sodomites gave witness by being exterminated wherever they were in the world on that night, as Jerome says: “A light rose over them so bright that all who practiced this vice were wiped out; and Christ did this in order that no such uncleanness might be found in the nature he had assumed.” For, as Augustine says, “God, seeing that a vice contrary to nature was rife in human nature, hesitated to become incarnate.”1
In the fruitful chaos of the eleventh century, a consistent church code for human behavior did not yet exist. Before Damian could condemn homosexuality, he had to define what it was and, even more importantly, to ask the central question about what it is that attracts one man to another.2
What anyone knew or did not know about sexual relations, or same-sex attraction, in 1049 or 1230 is quite impossible to ascertain, especially insofar as our only sources of information are texts which may well have been written on command, as intellectual exercises, or by authors writ- ing in the name and persona of another. There is nothing to indicate that any of the opinions and arguments deployed in these texts were generally held in the wider culture or even that the texts themselves were widely known or disseminated. It is, nonetheless, worthwhile to consider some of the discourses on sexuality that might have been available to the schol- ars I will be discussing in this and the following chapter: Peter Damian (1007–72), Alain de Lille (1128–1203) or the chroniclers of early Norman England and the court of Henry II Plantagenet (1133–89). Without some discussion of historical antecedents and physiological theory, we would be discussing sodomy in a vacuum, as if practice and theory never intersected. The references to sodomy in literary texts andchronicle occur within a climate that has been informed by earlier mod- els of sexuality and historical antecedents. This chapter provides a rapid survey of some of this material, presented not as original historical research but in relation to the portrait of the sodomite and the con- demnation, and sometimes celebration, of his behavior in the period
1149–1230.
Let me begin by saying that, unlike some scholars, I certainly do not believe that the catalogue of sexual acts open to humans expanded in the twelfth century. Nor do I believe that people were then suddenly more active sexually, or that previously unheard-of acts, once discovered, swept the land. Despite what the chroniclers say, the twelfth century cannot have been appreciably more licentious than any other; any more than the mid-nineteenth century saw an explosion of homoeroticism and mas- turbation. Because people talk about something they used not to talk about sometimes reflects only the fact that they now can. The hypothesis that the morals of the twelfth century had changed radically and that these changes demanded textual representation assumes, erroneously, that texts are unproblematic reflections of a prior social reality. Little of what we know about the textual production of the twelfth century would support such a conclusion. Resolutely anti-realistic, for the most part, authors of the mid-twelfth century constructed one of the Western world’s most elaborate and influential models of an alternate fictional reality. With recourse to Celtic and classical myth (romans d’antiquit´e, Arthurian material) they built allegorical monuments, political fantasies, and erotically inflected romances that pretend to divert attention from serious matters only to refocus it onto other ideologically sensitive areas.3
Authors whose works were more directly implicated in courtly politics (chronicles, gesta, treatises) tempered their realism with frequent bibli- cal references, the inclusion of folk narratives and personal commentary, and, especially, conventionalized flattery (as in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium). Few historians today would accept as fact that King Arthur never died, that the Grail appeared to Perceval, that Henry II was his- tory’s greatest king, or that devils, dragons, and fairies routinely visited men and occasionally had sex with them. Mention sodomy in the same texts in which these fictional topoi appear, however, and critics jump to the conclusion that this “vice” had arrived at the Anglo-Norman courts (probably imported from the East or Paris), and that it had precisely thedeleterious effects imputed to it in the Eneas, in Orderic Vitalis, or in
John of Salisbury.4
While the sudden appearance of sodomy in moral treatises and as a plot element in vernacular literature is not a sign of some new phe- nomenon or a contagion of same-sex desire, it should not, on the other hand, be read only as rhetorical flourish or political calumny. Homo- erotic acts and bonds were present before, during and after the ages in which these mentions of sodomy occur.5 It is not a change in the shape or frequency of such acts and desires that explains the eruption of homophobic discourse in the first half of the twelfth century, it is rather that they become more representable – as Tatlock would have it, “more fashionable in 1120 and later.”6 Such discourse is more produc- tively viewed as part of a larger move to gain or reassert power over the individual within textual communities, as well as in the secular realm. For who could better claim authority to speak on such matters than the Church; and the Church, at that historical moment, was seeking to broaden its realm of influence by obliging secular authorities to submit to its control on a much wider spectrum of moral and ethical questions.7
Thus the appearance and disappearance of sodomy as a literary topic is surely linked to a whole range of social phenomena, including the preaching of the first Crusades, papal reform, and the imposition of clerical celibacy. As Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple argued almost thirty years ago, the eleventh and twelfth centuries were key to the construction of Western notions of gender.8 What we today call homophobia could be viewed as just another discourse whose purpose is, and has been, to strengthen collective bonds and diminish individ- ual control over a once-private sexual realm. This attempt to colonize every vestige of private conscience in the aim of producing a new subject who has internalized institutionalized disciplinary techniques would, of course, have served the needs of the clergy and crusading kings. Along with the heretic, the Jew, and the Welshman, among other minority communities, the sodomite became a social type, if not necessarily a psychological one.9 Instead of raising the issue of sodomy solely within a category of sinful sexual acts requiring contrition and penance – i.e., in terms of what is natural or unnatural, variety of positions, pleasure vs. utility, age of partner, frequency and permissible time periods, etc. – the sodomite becomes a type whose actions are explicitly social, a dangerto others as much as to himself. Sodomites pollute collecti
ve entities and can themselves represent a collective threat in that entire ethnic communities can be marked as sodomitical. The rise of what is essen- tially a political and social, rather than theological, category in the early twelfth century had the paradoxical effect of reifying and naturalizing sodomitical behavior. It was finally judged to be of practical necessity to acknowledge that there are men who sleep with younger men, disdain sexual relations with women, and hide this behavior from the world, so as to teach how to recognize it and avoid it. These warnings and the virulent criticism directed against such behaviors also call attention to them. They might even have had the (perhaps quite deliberate) effect of instantiating a kind of interpellation in which men began to recog- nize themselves and their desires in these denunciations and to define themselves in relation to such categories.
Though control, in a general sense, seems to have been behind this move into discourse, more specific reasons could account for the dif- ferent manifestations of the sodomy topos during the period. Some of these might include:
(a) the need to reform morals in a period of supposed moral decline (seen in the rise of cathedral schools, the importation of Arabic learning, the revival of Platonic and later Aristotelian thought);
(b) the desire to demonize enemies – or foreigners who might not other- wise be recognized as sufficiently dangerous – in the hope of gaining popular support for a campaign of eradication (Muslims, Cathars, etc.);
(c) to claim that any perceived weakening of the control of the majority over its economy, its military, its education is a result of the presence of sodomites within that enemy (as in the charges, common in twelfth- century England, that sodomy is a vice imported from France largely by intellectuals);
(d) to register widespread dissatisfaction on the part of members of a social or ethnic group that has suffered loss of wealth, independence, or prestige by either evoking sodomy as the cause of that loss or the result of such a weakening (Gerald of Wales’ claims that the Welsh lost their lands through the practice of sodomy);
(e) to target scapegoats in times of crisis (especially during periods of contagious disease, social unrest, natural disasters);(f ) to establish or reinforce compulsory heterosexuality;
(g) to attract men to service in all-male arenas such as the military, the monastery, and the clergy by reassuring them of the rigid discipline and exclusionary policies designed to limit the chosen to an elite (on the basis of class, learning, sexual orientation, physical strength, or a combination of several; as in Cistercian legislation barring sodomites from the communities in the early thirteenth century);
(h) to attack women and combat increased respect for their contributions to society by claiming that their challenge to patriarchy has resulted in degeneration of the male population (Orderic Vitalis’ consistent complaint that men are being feminized and his equation of such gender ambiguity with sodomy);
(i) to attack the secular as an enemy of the religious, especially as the Church lost direct control of the arts and learning over the course of the thirteenth century.10
In sum, there is every reason to believe that it was a complex of cul- tural changes that helped move sodomy to the center of a disciplinary discourse, joining a number of other categories liable to be seen as under- mining the Law, rather than the sudden appearance of “contaminated” morals imported from elsewhere and propagated by an elite. Literary texts were, needless to say, just as responsible for producing these models of sodomy as they were the passive receptacles of some pre-discursive reality.
Pre-Medieval Traditions
If homoeroticism became fashionable (Tatlock), tolerated (Boswell), cel- ebrated (Stehling) and condemned, all in 1120 or thereabouts, it was not the first time that such contradictions had arisen.11 In the Mediterranean classical tradition, and especially in classical reports of Celtic cultures, homoerotic relations were problematized in somewhat the same manner, often in the same contradictory terms we find in the twelfth century.12
As for classical material from Rome and Greece, it is not clear how much homoerotic material, or even critiques of homoeroticism, were transmitted to the schools of the twelfth century. Ovid’s Metamorphoses were clearly known and exerted a good deal of influence over romance conventions, and Ralph Hexter’s work on the reception of Ovid in theearly Middle Ages suggests that Ovidian tales were widely used in educa- tion and served as a subterfuge within which to discuss homoeroticism. In support of this point, albeit from a later period, the inquisitional records of Arnaud of Verniolle’s trial (1323) contain an interesting anec- dote in which Arnaud, after having engaged in several acts of sodomy with one Guillaume Roux, borrows from him “a book by Ovid, whose title he did not know.”13 He admits that after this occasion “he and Guillaume Roux committed sodomy with each other in the same room and bed . . . two or three times.”14 Guibert de Nogent (1053–1124) also confesses in his Memoirs to having written erotic verse in imitation of Ovid: “By love of it I was doubly taken captive, being snared both by the wantonness of the sweet words I took from the poets and by those which I poured forth myself, and I was caught by the unrestrained stir- ring of my flesh through thinking on these things and the like.”15 Plato’s Symposium, antiquity’s most famous defense of same-sex love as a supe- rior form of love, and the Phaedrus, with its spiritualization of same-sex love as a figure for communion with God, were unknown to medieval scholars. Echoes of the arguments were nonetheless transmitted through Neoplatonic sources and traces can be found in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, or the epic romance, Ami et Amile (1200). Scholars also had at their disposal a wealth of much later mate- rial from the Carolingian court and, nearer in time, eleventh-century poetic missives between educated friends, in which same-sex friendship is both eroticized and satirized.16
Certain classical figures, Ganymede most notably, continued to carry a sodomitical valence through the twelfth century and later. His name served to connote a younger male lover and was used as a marker of same- sex love in a host of chronicles and songs.17 In the romance of Eneas, for example, when Lavine thinks that she has been rejected by Eneas, she recycles her mother’s homophobic accusations, saying that “il voldroit deduit de garc¸on, / n’aime se males putains non. / Son Ganimede a avec soi, / asez li est or po de moi” (he prefers the pleasure of boys; he loves only male whores. He has his Ganymede with him and so cares nothing for me).18 Here Ganymede, the Trojan boy lover, stands in a larger sense as a synecdoche for all Trojans and their reputed taste for homoerotic acts. By extension, he is then associated with Aeneas andhis supposed progeny, the twelfth-century ruling families of England and France. Julius Caesar is another figure who was used as a metonym in the Middle Ages for men who engage in homoerotic relations. John of Salisbury, in his Policraticus, states: “Nichomede, King of Bythinia, was said to have made Caesar submit to his desires, Caesar being con- siderably younger and having been admitted by the King to unusual intimacy.”19 He would later appear in Dante’s Purgatorio with the same connotation.20
Greek and Roman material on the Gauls/Celts was also available to some scholars, though medieval characterizations of Celtic sexuality might have had more to do with folk legend than learned sources. Beginning with Aristotle, who was supposed to have based his account on testimony left by Alexander’s Macedonian soldiers, reports circulated that men from the north enjoyed sexual relations with other men.21
The most famous account of Celtic male sexual behavior is found in Diodorus Siculus’ chronicle from the first century BCE:
Although their wives are comely, they have very little to do with them, but rage with lust, in outlandish fashion, for the embrace of males. It is their practice to sleep upon the ground on the hides of wild beasts, and [to tumble] take their pleasure with two partners [catamites], one on each side. And the most astonishing thing of all is that they feel no concern for their proper dignity, but prostitute to others without a qualm the flower of their bodies; nor do they consider this a disgracef
ul thing to do, but rather, when any one of them is thus approached and refuses the favour offered to him, this they consider an act of dishonor.22
Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature Page 3