Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature
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Monastic Traditions
The history of attitudes within monastic communities toward same-sex desire is rich and contradictory and cannot be covered here in any but the most schematic terms. As might be expected in a same-sex environ- ment in which men spent their entire lives, often from the earliest years of childhood, affective and emotional bonds were frequently at issue, both personally and institutionally. It was, therefore, inevitable from their inception that monastic communities would have to address how affection can be expressed, in what forms, between which categories of individuals, and according to what rules. As V. A. Kolve asserts: “homoeroticism – particularly, though not exclusively, across genera- tions, between the monks and the boys – was the form of carnal desire most dangerous within the cloister walls, as the rules, the customaries, and the penitentials all make unmistakably clear.”79 Christianity in gen- eral had to (and has yet to) account for the celibacy of Christ, his selection of exclusively male disciples, his integration of women into his emotional circle, and the passionate, idealized expressions of male bonds found in the Old (David and Jonathan) and New Testaments (John the Evange- list and Christ).80 David’s lament upon the death of Jonathan stands as one of the most moving models of love in the Western tradition and it continued to echo throughout the Middle Ages in the planh,a genre in which a poet expresses his sorrow in a musical encomium to the defunct leader or patron.81 It also served as a model for expressions of deep emo- tional attachment in letters exchanged by monks and in expressions of grief (e.g. Bernard of Clairvaux).82
The differences between the openness with which Eastern monastic traditions dealt with such emotional bonds and the reticence of the Western tradition is striking. Amongst the desert fathers of the East itwas openly acknowledged that living in close proximity to other men might encourage physical attraction. It was considered common sense that “beautiful boys were to be kept out of the desert, for in both village and upper class life, boys could be considered sexually desirable.”83
Despite this acknowledgement, same-sex desire is not considered as large a threat to holiness as kinship, and is never treated as an isolated phenomenon. It, like any number of other temptations, occasions the loss of continentia, or self-restraint, a flaw which goes to the core of the monastic experience in ways in which a mere sexual act might not.84
Pachomius (290–346) and Basil (330–379) were equally frank about the dangers of sexual attraction within the monastic community, not so much for its own sake as for the havoc it could wreak on that central monastic precept: within the community all men are as one and God alone must be the focus of their collective attention. Pachomius, in his Precepts, counsels his brothers:
not to hitch up their garments too high and expose their legs while they washed clothes. They were not to ride on the same animal . . . for physical contact, it is implied, might occasion temptation . . . he was concerned (having allowed young boys into his monastery) that older monks might have “friendships with those of tender years.”85
Basil is quite explicit in warning against the occasion of sin that young men represent:
If you are youthful in body or mind, fly from intimate association with comrades of your own age and run away from them as from fire. The Enemy has, indeed, set many aflame through such means and consigned them to the eternal fire, casting them down . . . on the pretext of spiritual love. . . . At meals take a seat far away from your young brother; in lying down to rest, let not your garments be neighbor to his; rather, have an elderly brother lying between you. When a young brother converses with you or is opposite you in choir, make your response with your head bowed, lest, perchance, by gazing fixedly into his face, the seed of desire be implanted in you by the wicked sower. (An Ascetical Discourse and Exhortation)86
The candor with which same-sex desire is both accepted as an expected occurrence and condemned as overwhelmingly powerful and divisive is matched in the Western tradition only when dealing withthe effects of women on men, and then in largely misogynistic terms: temptation follows from the inherent wickedness of women as well as from the effect of beauty on the beholder. Same-sex attraction is never addressed so openly amongst the desert fathers of the West. When men- tioned at all, it is subsumed under the broader topic of amicitia, and it is in that more general form that same-sex bonds are addressed as poten- tially dangerous to the sanctity of the individual and the community.87
As McGuire admits: “It can hardly be accidental that almost all the apophthegmata or ‘sayings of the fathers’ in the Greek Alphabetical Col- lection that touch upon homosexuality are not included in the Latin Systematic Collection.”88 From that he concludes that what operates in this instance is censorship and extreme anathema rather than relaxed tolerance and in this he is probably correct.89
This is not to say that same-sex affectivity and acts were accepted in the East: witness John Chrysostom’s evident fear of all forms of sexual- ity and his distaste for expressions of affection between men. But there does seem to have been an open admission that same-sex attraction will inevitably occur in same-sex environments, that all men are potentially open to that temptation, and that the will is essentially powerless against its force. This much of the Eastern message did make its way into the Benedictine Rule, where one finds explicit regulations intended to ward off occasions for sexual activity.90 Chapter 22, for example, specifies that monks must sleep clothed, one to a bed, all in one place, under supervi- sion, with a lamp lit; and it specifically states that younger monks should not have their beds next to one another.91 The Second Council of Tours (576) ratified these regulations. We again find such sentiments and warn- ings reiterated in the tenth-century English Regularis concordia, but with particular attention paid to the relations between monks and oblates:
In the monastery moreover let neither monks nor abbot embrace or kiss, as it were, youths or children [adolescentes uel puerulos]; let their affection for them be spiritual, let them keep from words of flattery, and let them love the children reverently and with the greatest circumspection. Not even on the excuse of some spiritual matter shall any monk presume to take with him a young boy alone for any private purpose but, as the Rule commands, let the children always remain under the care of their master. Nor shall the master himself be allowed to be in company with a boy without a third person as witness.92As to actual practices within monasteries – how strictly such rules were enforced – not much is known. It is, however, by now acknowledged that a great flowering of Latin (at least potentially) homoerotic poetry took place in learned circles, including monasteries, during the reign of Charlemagne and that authors continued to compose texts on those models right through to the twelfth century. Are such texts a sign of the relative tolerance for homoeroticism on the part of the Church hierarchy, as John Boswell argued in 1980, or are they the signs of a renewed emphasis on friendship, in the classical and Neoplatonic senses of the word, within monastic communities and Christian communities in general, as Brian McGuire maintains? Unfortunately, the answer that readers arrive at will probably depend largely on their own experiences and willingness to entertain the idea of condoned transgression within religious communities.
If we take just one example of this outpouring of rhetoric, readily available to scholars throughout the Middle Ages, we are struck by the illusion of intense feeling that the author conveys with his vocabulary and imagery. Alcuin, abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of Tours in 796, was one of the most famous and respected scholars of his day, closely associated with the power of the Carolingian empire.93 Alcuin wrote hundreds of letters, and it is in his letters to men that his mastery of the rhetoric of love and affection is most evident. Especially when writing to close friends like Arno, Bishop of Salzburg, Alcuin’s language exudes a richly sensual quality meant to simulate the depth of his feelings. The following excerpt is from a letter in which Alcuin refers to Arno as his “most beloved eagle,” in terms borrowed from the Song of Songs (aquila carissime):
Et utina
m veniat volando aquila mea orare apud Sanctum Martinum: ut ibi amplecter alas illius suavissimas, et teneam, quem diligit anima mea, nec dimittam eum, donec introducam ilum in domum matris meae, et osculatur me osculo oris sui, et gaudeamus ordinata caritate invicem.94
[Would that my eagle come to pray at Saint Martin, so that there I could embrace those gentlest wings and hold him whom my heart loves nor let him go until I could bring him into the house of my mother and he kiss me with the kiss of his mouth, and we rejoice together in ordered charity.]Now, the eagle would surely have signified to any learned Christian the figure of John the Evangelist (“the disciple Christ loves”) but also, of course, Ovid’s version of the tale of Ganymede, in which Jove, disguised as an eagle, carries away the beautiful Trojan boy for service at table and in bed. Most learned readers would have recognized the evocation of both of these figures, and perhaps others. In another letter to Arno, Alcuin expressed the wish that he might be taken up by the hair like the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk and delivered to his friend, another indirect evocation of Ganymede’s fate. Once there, he declares:
et quam compressis labris non solum oculos aurea et os, sed etiam manuum vel pedum singulos digitorum articulos, non semel, sed multoties oscularer.95
[With my lips pressed not only on your eyes and ears and mouth, but also on each of your fingers and toes, I would kiss them not once but many times.]
Whether Alcuin had had, or wanted to have, a sexual relationship with Arno is not really at issue in these letters (Alcuin, in fact, rarely saw Arno and their relationship is largely epistolary – not, of course, necessarily a proof of lack of sexual involvement). Alcuin shows no evident interest in sexual matters: sexual imagery is simply an inevitable element of the vocabulary of affection and is appropriately directed to the men he loves. On the other hand, he cannot be using such imagery entirely innocently. He surely knows from his studies the contexts within which it is generally used, but refuses to limit his vocabulary and imagery to any one register, human or divine, sensual or spiritual. I am afraid Heinrich Fichtenau misses the point entirely when he complains that Alcuin “mixed up varieties of love and failed to distinguish between human and divine loves.”96 It would appear that that was precisely his intention.
The poetry and letters of the twelfth-century monk, Baudri of Bourgueil, offer strong proof that the rhetoric of the Carolingian period was known and still imitated three hundred years later. Baudri was the Abbot of Bourgueil from 1107 until his death in 1130. When historians claim that the homophobia expressed in this period was a reaction to widespread homoerotic practices in monasteries, Baudri is often cited, both for the openly homoerotic nature of some of his verse and for thedisapproval of sodomitical acts that he evinces in other writings. That he would seem to contradict himself in such a manner is not at all sur- prising or, for that matter, a sign that his testimony cannot be trusted and should be dismissed out of hand. What looks like a contradiction at the heart of his work is, in fact, the most telling sign that he is a man of his age, capable of mastering several registers of language, each appropriate to a different occasion. Baudri can speak as a theologian, as a proselytizer, and as a friend. All intersect, but no one of them can or should be taken as the faithful transcription of his private sentiments.97
The full glorification of friendship as an accepted part of monastic or knightly experience and the attempt to codify it in a theological sense are two sometimes contrary directions characteristic of twelfth- century writing. As Boswell noted, the optimism and open-mindedness that inspired those writers was short-lived.98 This is not to say that friendship ceased to be important, an outlandish claim that certainly would not bear up under examination. Chivalric friendships continue to play a major role in romance into and well beyond the thirteenth century, even if they rarely attain the emotional force of male bonds in the chansons de geste.99 This is not surprising. Homosocial bonds played a major role throughout the Middle Ages in the transfer of power and prestige between men at court, in the military, and in routine marriage transactions; and these bonds were often most potently expressed in the passionate rhetoric of poems and letters addressed to single men and monastic communities.100 In literary texts, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the representation of such friendships, even when they are meant to function as negative exempla, still seem redolent of earlier erotic colorings.
Male friendships are explicitly censured when they appear not to respect the monastic ideal of bridled, chaste, non-affective, commu- nal bonds, or when they appear to have interfered with the process of interpellation into heterosexuality, a process in which romance plays an important part. The twelfth-century Neoplatonic conception of monas- tic friendship, that of Aelred of Rievaulx, in which personal perfection, sanctity, and oneness with God are attained through the mediation of the beloved friend, disappears definitively from monastic discourse in the thirteenth century and is replaced with legalistic statutes prescrib- ing punishment against same-sex affection.101 In 1195, for example, wefind a provision in the Cistercian statutes on how to deal with monks caught in manifesto contagio carnis, i.e., any type of sexual activity. By the 1220s sodomy is listed as a crime and it is recommended that the guilty party be expelled from the order, never to be readmitted. Though statutes dealing with sex in general were added in 1202, 1237, and 1252, the statute dealing specifically with sodomy did not appear until 1237 or later.102 Convents were not immune either. In 1212 the Council of Paris extended the provision of the Benedictine Rule that a lamp burn all night in dormitories to all convents, and also forbade nuns from sharing a bed.103
Sex is not, of course, the real culprit – it acts as the smoke and attracts the attention, but the fire is fed not on sexual acts but on more fundamental reorganizations in the ways that power was exerted within the monasteries, among orders, and in the Church’s ever-increasing need to centralize and codify. Brian McGuire lays the blame on a problem much broader than “fear of homosexuality”:
a loss of confidence in the possibility that a community’s rich interior life could provide a sheltered and fertile ground for friendship . . . new social realities challenged friendship: the growth of formalized centers of learning, the establishment in them of rules and statutes, an end to the long period of monastic expansion, a proliferation of disputes over monastic privileges and property, an insistence on discipline in the “old orders,” Benedictines and Cistercians. . . . Such changes in the mental, social and spiritual climate made it more difficult for men in the church to take the risk of showing frankness and honesty with each other.104
The attacks of John of Salisbury, Walter Map, and Orderic Vitalis on sodomy and corruption among the aristocracy, discussed in chapter 2, are signs of these changes. The lack of confidence in one’s fellow man seems to have been an inevitable outcome of the Church’s efforts to reg- ulate private behavior through internalized self-disciplinary measures, abandoning in the process traditional reliance on a sense of responsibil- ity to the group and public atonement. The gradual turn from public to private confession over the course of the twelfth century hastened the transformation of a shame culture (status determined collectively) to a guilt culture (regulation of the self by the self ); and official campaignsagainst demonized “Others” (heretics, Jews, pagans), sanctioned in high places, had repercussions in the mentalit´es even of the smallest community.
Physiological Explanations of Gender and Sexuality
Physiological theory, inherited largely from antiquity and indirectly from Arabic sources, was available to scholars by the thirteenth century in the form of Latin treatises used by medical students and practitioners. In such texts it is taken for granted that the male body is superior to the female, that the female body is an imperfect creation, an inferior copy of use value only (i.e., for reproduction). As Thomas Aquinas states:
With respect to her particular nature, woman is somewhat deficient and misbegotten. For the active power in the male seed tends to produce a per
fect male like itself while when a female is produced it is because of a weakness of active power or some material indisposition or some external change such as a moist south wind, as appears in the Generation of Animals [Aristotle].105
In the higher, unchanging, metaphysical realms of creation (as depicted in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia or Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus), there would have been no need for sexual differentia- tion or menstruation among humans, as all beings would revert, as they approached paradise, to the one, original model of perfection, the male form.106 Pursuant to the biases of such a position, mortal coitus could be theorized and justified largely as a means of maintaining male health and strength through the ejaculation of seed. Woman’s body, in this (Aristotelian) light, was seen as the passive receptacle of this male seed; but the womb, often seen as equivalent to the inverted penis, was also responsible for women’s insatiable sexual appetite, a commonplace of misogyny.107 Aristotle, the Old Testament, and Augustine all presented models in which only the male produces seeds, whereas Hippocrates and Galen had argued that women also produced seed (though of inferior value to men’s) through the activation of physical pleasure.108 This latter school of thought also recommended regular intercourse for both sexes as a way of maintaining good health and balance between the humors. Thetwo-seed doctrine, in which both parents contributed to the form and matter of the fetus, was generally preferred over Aristotle’s one-seed the- ory by the thirteenth century, and those who accepted the validity of this theory had also to admit to some degree of reciprocity between the two sexes’ contributions and needs (both desires and pleasure).109 Aristotle’s theory of form and matter was otherwise largely accepted, even if not recognized as Aristotelian. According to this theory, it is the male who confers “form” on female “matter.” From the acceptance of this concept come the myriad metaphors for sexual reproduction found throughout the Middle Ages: woman as the passive tablet on which the male phallus inscribes, the fallow field in which the male phallus plows, etc.