Gender and gendered characteristics were thought to be determined largely by placement of the fetus in the womb. As the theory goes, the uterus is divided into seven cubicles, three on each side and one in the center. Since males are hotter and females cooler, the left side of the uterus, the cooler side, houses the female fetus. The male fetus takes up residence on the right side while the occupant of the center cubicle becomes a hermaphrodite. The force of the female sperm complicates further this paradigm. If more of the female sperm settles on the right side of the womb the result, quite logically, is a manly woman (or virago). Conversely, if the female seed settles on the left side of the womb but the male seed still outnumbers it, the result is an effeminate man. Only when equal amounts of seeds from both partners settle in the middle chamber would the result be a hermaphrodite. Thus we have a tempered essentialist paradigm in which both placement and seed quantity deter- mine the sex and gender of the fetus. This model implies that there are at least five naturally occurring gender permutations available: women, manly women, men, feminine men, and hermaphrodites, though it is not at all clear what the gender characteristics of the sexual category of hermaphrodite might entail.110 Joan Cadden notes that despite this theory, and the tolerant attitudes it might seem to encourage, medieval societies generally contained experience and expression within a very rigid binary of masculine and feminine, with little or no cross-over allowed. Limited, therefore, in how it could be applied, this theory nonetheless allowed within nature for ambiguously gendered individ- uals who either reject marriage outright (as in saints of both sexes, or some knights), express and perhaps feel no sexual desire (Guigemar orNarcissus in chapter 5), or find their primary emotional bonds with members of the same sex.111
Cadden’s invaluable study also notes Aristotelian dichotomies between males and females across species: males are larger, stronger, more active, easily roused to anger, generous, studious, and controlled by virtue; while females are smaller, more prone to tears, envy, lying, and easier to train. Feminine men are thus “tender-hearted, envious, easily giving in to passions, intolerant of physical work, bitter, deceitful and timid.” They have less body hair, straight eyebrows, hairlines high on the neck and “[unspecified] female behaviors.”112 Cross-gendering was a crucial metaphor in alchemy as well. The Philosopher’s Stone, the symbol of the union of opposites, is sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite or Hermetic androgyne, or even as a father giving birth to a son. The romance of Aucassin et Nicolette (1200) offers a delightful depiction of some of these inversions: the active, generous, physical, vir- tuous, and rational woman, Nicolette, is counterbalanced by the tender, passionate, indolent, timid and weepy Aucassin, her male lover. Their visit to the land of Torelore includes a more explicit staging of these gendered inversions. In that kingdom, as part of a general overturning of norms, women act as warriors, men give birth to children, physical harm of any kind is antithetical to war, etc. This certainly does not reflect any generalized tolerance of gender fluidity; probably quite the opposite, since the binaries are still, in fact, reinforced, though inverted. It does indicate, however, that even outside of learned medical and philosophical communities such models were in circulation.
Even what we might call sexual orientation received some attention in medical commentaries. Greek medicine, transmitted back to the West through the Arabs, often explained in physiological terms conditions which, since the nineteenth century, have been seen in the West as psychologically based. Avicenna (980–1037), modifying, in his Liber canonis, the position of Aristotle, states that there are men “who are accustomed to having other men throw themselves on them.” He says that it is pointless to seek a cure for such men (he calls them al-liwat or, in Latin transliteration: halubuathi, halubnathi, or alguagi ) since “the origin of their disease is meditative, not natural.”113 This dichotomy is interesting. “Meditative” is later glossed by Western commentators as “sodomite/evil/lustful,” effects of a defective will, and paired in a binaryconstruction with the “natural” or physiological. Paul of Hungary (writ- ing between 1219 and 1221), sticking closer to the “natural/physiological” explanation, claims that sodomites have a disordered reproductive drive because of liver dysfunction. Since the liver was thought to be the principal organ through which generative powers were filtered, sodomites naturally showed signs of susceptibility in this area and there- fore showed inevitable signs of enervation, a condition associated with women.114
Cadden’s studies of Peter of Abano’s Commentary on the Pseudo- Aristotelian Problems show how Peter bridged the abyss between these two poles by suggesting that there are two reasons why men are sus- ceptible to anal stimulation: “in some men, the pores and passages and the resultant susceptibility to anal stimulation occur naturally, in the sense that they are innate; in others, the inclination is instilled by habitual practices that create what is a kind of acquired nature . . .” In Cadden’s formulation: “He (Peter) distinguishes two types – not the tra- ditional active and passive, but rather the anatomical and psychological – but then he dismantles or at least blurs the distinction by reducing habit to nature.”115 Peter’s commentary is hardly a neutral acceptance of such types or behaviors, but it is, depending upon one’s assessment of his intentions, a wily performance that walks a narrow line between a defense of “natural” behavior and a condemnation of the deformed will.116 Where Avicenna recommended “sadness, hunger, vigils, impris- onment, beating” as remedies for what he understood as a physio- logical itch that is otherwise only relieved through anal intercourse, Peter recommended a special diet and medicine for what he also calls a disorder.117
Albertus Magnus’ thinking was along the same lines: he prescribed packing an intriguing topical application made in part from the fur of a hyena on the anus of “passive” males.118 Thomas Aquinas, while condemning sodomy as the result of a defective will, still suggests that external stimuli play their part. Following Aristotle’s association of sodomy with a disposition toward war and fighting, Thomas sug- gests that sodomitical desire can be exacerbated by too much horseback riding!119 These theories, however farfetched, still seem audacious today in that they dare to transfer the responsibility for desire from the weak will of the sinner to his/her imperfect body. This does not, however,mean that the sinner is actually acquitted. Acting to satisfy that itch, however bodily it might be, would no doubt still be seen as sinful within theological discourse. So would refusing to seek out the efficacious treat- ment, as this would be the equivalent of perpetuating, deliberately, an occasion of sin. Though still quite far from announcing a “homosex- ual identity,” these theories represent a step, however tentative, toward normalization through a medical discourse.120
Thus, for Cadden, these medical treatments “were clearly not aimed at changing the patient’s essence but rather at changing his behavior.”121 It is tempting still to imagine how the treatment of a “feminine male” who indulged in anal intercourse might have differed from that administered to a “masculine-appearing male” (i.e. strong, not emotional, unremark- able hairline) who felt this same itch. To what degree was it expected that the treatment itself might also remedy gender-specific traits which could theoretically be explained away as due to placement and seed quantities in the womb?122 If this medicalized form of gender theory was as deterministic as astrology,123 and the similarities are actually quite striking, then we must wonder how much the gendered behavior of the “patient” was also seen as subject to modification, either as a result of a topical medical treatment that relieved inappropriate sexual desires, or as an effect of a diet that might conceivably reconfigure the composition of humors with which he was born.124
Peter’s explanation for deviant sexuality had antecedents in Ptolemy’s second-century astrological speculations, the Tetrabiblos. In that work, Ptolemy attributes a number of personality traits to groups of men depending upon the climatic and astrological conditions to which they are subject. The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from Ptolemy’s spe
c- ulations is that a whole range of behaviors and desires are natural because men are the product of natural geographical and astrological influences. Most noteworthy for our purposes are his comments on those who are born and raised under the westernmost zone of Jupiter and Mars. Because:
the first zones of this area have a masculine character and the last a feminine character, men’s passion with regard to women is weakened, making them disdainful of the pleasure of love-making and more inclined and desirous of masculine partners. But since this behavioris not looked upon as shameful, nor this disposition perverse, it does not make them soft and lascivious. They retain a virile spirit, a lively sense of community; they are loyal, generous and prone to close family ties.125
Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we will see repeat- edly, authors having recourse to this same dichotomy of soft/wanton/ feminine men and their active/industrious/loyal and virile masculine counterparts. Peter of Abano might have taken the lead from Ptolemy and Arabic scholars in adducing natural causes for natural behavior but his example would remain an enlightened exception. Though homo- erotic relations continued to be perceived everywhere, elusive and decep- tive, throughout the Middle Ages, the vast majority of voices we will examine in the next chapter seek to corral the inclinations that lead to such behavior and publicly stigmatize its practitioners. Only thus can they instantiate an arena purified of desire which might accommodate, though never without difficulty, both the celibate love of the religious man or women for his male savior, and the noble and selfless love of Christian marriage and chivalric devotion.
It is thus paradoxically through the study of the text’s misrepresen- tation of reality that we can seize its ideological dimension as the “indispensable mapping fantasy or narrative by which the individ- ual subject invents a ‘lived’ relationship with collective systems,” as Jameson put it. In this way we can construct the text as a map of its own ideological and psychological investments, its fears, hopes and desires. The fact that the map never coincides with the terrain does not mean that there never was a terrain at all.1
Michael Nerlich has called the knight-errant, an emblematic figure of the twelfth century, the most important contribution made by that century to the legacy of Europe. As the forerunner of the merchant/ adventurer, the knight seeks revelation and reward at the end of his journey; then, through recounting his travels, seeks to shore up his own prestige.2 This knight/adventurer nonetheless posed several basic ide- ological problems to a society which valued strong male bonds and a spirit of collective responsibility. The many studies on the individual in the literature of the period emphasize the gradual emergence of the knight as a super-star, the sinner as directly answerable to God rather than the community, and the lady as having a voice as well as a place within patriarchal exchange. All of these changes proved challenging to conventional mores and resentment against them surfaces repeatedly in texts produced at the French and Anglo-Norman courts. Sodomy is explicitly associated with challenges to Law and begins to feature promi- nently in litanies of fault-finding. As in most persecution narratives, the charge is aligned with things new or imported: pagan religions and heresy, newly acquired learning and the growth of intellectual centers, new sources of wealth and a more influential urban class, the corruptcounselors of political figures.3 One might gain in prestige, knowledge, and wealth by traveling beyond the confines of a community but the chroniclers are mostly eager to reassert the primacy of the known.
The new centers of learning, for example, and particularly Paris, were stigmatized as being nothing more than training grounds for sodomites. Henri de Marcy, Abbot of Clairvaux (1176–79), announced that ancient Sodom had been reborn from its ashes in the school towns of his century.4 His contemporary, Peter of Celle, Abbot of Saint-Re´mi de Reims (1162–81), called Paris, in a letter to his friend, John of Salisbury, the site: “where decadence reigns, there miserably the soul becomes a slave and is afflicted. O Paris, how well suited you are for captur- ing and deceiving souls!”5 Marginal graffiti, collected from twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, indicate something of an obsession with the topic:
Let Chartres and Sens be destroyed, where Adonis prostitutes himself according to the law of the whorehouse: there are acts of sodomy there. Infected with the same vice, the noble and distinguished city of Paris is happy to be married to a soft and delicate master. But more than all these monstrous towns, you, Orleans, are ruined by your reputation for this sin.
Now Chartres and Paris make themselves filthy continually with
Sodom’s vice, and in Sens Paris becomes Io.
The men of Orleans are the best, if you like the custom of men who sleep with boys.6
This association of Paris and the school towns with decadence contin- ues through the thirteenth century with Jacques de Vitry (c. 1165–1240) reporting on the debauchery of students, and culminates in a 1292 scan- dal that led to the expulsion of several scholars from the University of Paris on charges of sodomy.7 The fear of contamination by things foreign and of learning as the means by which the community is threatened sur- faces repeatedly in such scribblings. A more generalized anxiety about sexuality was provoked by the musical innovations at the cathedral of Notre Dame. As Bruce Holsinger has shown, condemnations of musical harmony as eroticized and touched by the sodomitic, in the writings of John of Salisbury, but also Robert de Courson and Gilles de Corbeil, allow us to “begin reconstructing a distinctly medieval homoerotics ofpolyphonic performance and reception, a homoerotics centered around the cathedral of Notre Dame.. .”8
The English chroniclers are particularly insistent on the dangers repre- sented by these continental mores. St. Anselm (1033–1109) and Henry of Huntingdon (1120) make it quite clear that sodomy has been imported into England, either from the Middle East, or, more directly, from France.9 Walter of Chaˆtillon says in one of his satires that all the young noblemen become sodomites as they pursue their medical studies in France: “When they are young, sons of nobility, / Are sent to France to become scholars; / Corrupters of youth recruit them with coaxing or cash / And thus they bring obscene habits back to Artaxata.”10 What most bothers the Benedictine historian, William of Malmesbury, and Orderic[us] Vitalis, a monk from Saint-Evroul in Normandy (1075–
1141), is the taint of femininity they detect in those who have associated with the French. As Claire Fennell put it: “for Ordericus human beings are not divided into two genders, each with its own code of dress and behavior . . . there is one gender, and one non-gender, which he admires when it manages to emulate the real one.”11 This assimilation of fem- ininity with Otherness and of masculinity as a preserve untainted by contact with the feminine is part of a larger pattern that insistently links femininity with something foreign to the enclave of masculine purity, something which also threatens and against which the Law is erected. Misogyny, as has often been remarked, is almost invariably the support of homophobia.12
Many of these attacks on English youth corrupted by contact with the foreign “Other” were directed against the young men of the court of William Rufus (1087–1100), a full generation after his demise. William of Malmesbury (1095–1143), writing in 1125 or thereabouts, equates the court fashions of William’s court with the effeminacy of the men who frequented it: “It was in those days that the fashion for flowing locks, luxurious clothes, the wearing of shoes with curved points was launched: to rival women in soft living, to mince with foppish gestures and to flaunt naked flesh, was the example set to young men.”13 Frank Barlow, summarizing William’s critique, says that “a band of effeminates and a flock of harlots [ganeae] followed the court, so that the court of the King of England was more a brothel of catamites than a house of majesty.”14
Orderic Vitalis, probably the most vocal critic of William Rufus and hismen, follows William of Malmesbury’s impetus in blurring gender and sexuality, implying that effeminacy is synonymous with the non-natural. Writing somewhere around 1130, when William Rufus had already been dead for
thirty years, he acknowledges the King’s prowess as a warrior but deplores his indifference to the Church and his moral depravity. It is the physical manifestations of what he interprets as moral decay under William’s rule that most offend him:
In times such as these, wanton seduction walked abroad with impunity, and sodomitic lust foully corrupted effeminates destined to the fires of Hell, adultery openly defiled the marriage bed. . . . In those days effeminates ruled the world, unrestrainedly pursued their revels, and foul catamites, doomed to burn in Hell, subjected themselves to the filth of sodomy... they ridiculed the exhortations of priests, and persisted in their barbarous behavior and dress.15
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