Orderic, like William of Malmesbury, also objects to these fashions, particularly the long trains and wide sleeves which prevent one from doing anything useful or important, the “serpent’s tails” or curling extremities added to shoes, and the long and carefully coiffed hair.16
Despite his association of all this finery with effeminacy, he notes curi- ously that such extravagance actually helps courtiers to woo women, presumably assuming that the more a man is like a woman, the more she will like him.17 Thus a taste for sodomy is a manifestation of artifice, only one affectation among many which are thought to demasculinize and denaturalize.
William Rufus himself is said by several chroniclers to have been an open sodomite and in the chroniclers’ characterizations we find invaluable evidence of just how such a category was imagined. Henry of Huntingdon sets up the binary opposition, God/William: “In sum, whatever was displeasing to God and to those who loved God, was pleas- ing to this King and to those who loved the King. They did not practice
‘luxuriae’ [sexual sins] in secret, but shamelessly and ostentatiously.”18
Reports of his wild sex life and tolerance of sodomy circulated even during his reign, but it was after his death, in the reign of his brother, Henry I, that he was censured repeatedly in the chronicles. According to Eadmer of Canterbury, Anselm, while still the Abbot of Bec, felt compelled in 1092 to address his concerns for the King’s reputationto William himself.19 His appeal was unsuccessful. Two years later, in
1094, Anselm berated the assembled court during Ash Wednesday ser- vices, forcing many of the courtiers to have their hair cut before receiving the holy ashes. Anselm then made another private appeal to the King to join forces with the Church against sodomy, the spread of which, he claimed, risked turning the whole land into the biblical city of the plain.20 Again, William refused to help, using the interesting argument that questions pertaining to sodomy, dress, hairstyles, incestuous mar- riages and the like were under the purview of the King, not the Church. Hugh of Flavigny (b. 1065), an abbot who had come to William’s court in 1096, reported that the King was an impressive man physically but one addicted to worldliness and carnal pleasures. In one of the anec- dotes of his stay at the royal court, he tells of a royal chaplain who confessed publicly that he had been impregnated by a man and was carrying his child. Needless to say, the unfortunate chaplain died of the internal growth that was devouring him and was not allowed burial in sacred ground. This sad tale of misunderstanding is noteworthy in that it supports the chroniclers’ assertions that sodomy was openly discussed at the royal court, even if in the most derogatory of terms.21
Orderic Vitalis, in addition to the critiques of the King offered above, was without pity when reporting on William Rufus’s death. Struck by an arrow, apparently as an accident, during a hunting expedition (Orderic says he was in the company of his “parasites,” usually glossed as male prostitutes), William was mourned only by the “mercenary soldiers and prostitutes, both male and female, who had lost their paymaster.”22 Wace (c. 1100–?1170) recounts in his Roman de Rou, a history of the dukes of Normandy, that during one of William Rufus’s army expeditions from Alenc¸on to Le Mans, the King came upon the two rivers, Cul and Con (ass and cunt), and insisted upon entering both of them.23 The fact that William never married and seems never to have fathered any children leads historians to take these accounts more seriously than they might otherwise.24 Were these criticisms to be dismissed as simple political slander, as is sometimes asserted, one would have to answer satisfactorily why they are directed only at certain of the stigmatized kings and not others. There is, after all, no such accusation against his father, William the Conqueror, or his brother, Henry I. His other brother, Robert, Duke of Normandy, is also castigated by the same chroniclers for his manyexcesses, some of them sexual, but it is made quite clear that his sins are committed with women. At any rate, what concerns us is not whether William engaged in sexual acts with men but rather what made the charge of sodomy so readily available, comprehensible, believable, and effective in 1130.
John Boswell was not at all convinced that William Rufus was “gay,” claiming that Orderic is the only chronicler to specify his sin as sodomy rather than just general sexual excess.25 Furthermore, he claimed that Orderic was “obsessed with homosexuality and imputed it to most prominent Normans.”26 In support of this contention, he cites Orderic’s rather hysterical claims that when the son of William Rufus’s brother, the future King Henry I, William Atheling (or “Audelin”), drowned in
1120, along with most of those aboard his ship, Blanche-Nef, it was a sign of God’s hatred of lasciviousness. Orderic asserts that the ship went down because it was loaded with sodomites and fashionable courtiers, using the same language that he had used to denounce the court of William Rufus at his death twenty years earlier.27 We could dismiss this charge as just a sign that Orderic was vindictive, or a political enemy, but we should not overlook the possibility that most of the prominent Normans who had been to the royal court probably did seem to him effeminate. Though Orderic was born near Shrewsbury, in England, he had been sent as a child to the monastery of Saint-Evroul, in Normandy, where he spent the rest of his life. He was a middle-aged monk when he wrote these attacks and he may have found that any worldly affectation smacked of artifice and lasciviousness, traits he associated exclusively with the vanity of women and transgression against the Law.
Regardless, it again demonstrates that the charge of sodomy was quick to spring to mind and quick to adhere. Just fifty years earlier it might have been enough just to call the same types excessively proud, vain, and impious. Though it has been said that most of the subsequent chroniclers who vilified William did so largely because they took their information from Orderic, the chorus of condemnation of his court in the later years of the reign of Henry I (1100–1135) indicates that sodomy was by then a multivalent charge that covered a wide range of excesses. Though still associated principally with the four same-sex acts outlined by Peter Damian in his Liber Gomorrhianus, it had moved, as a concept, beyond the all-male environments which provided the context for muchof these accounts.28 By 1130 it seems to have become applicable to a larger pool of individuals and to cover a much wider range of behaviors and excesses. Though it does not yet seem to have acquired the force of today’s ubiquitous “faggot,” the charge of sodomy must have carried some of its regulative force.
In the case of William Rufus, but even more so over the course of the century, the sodomite is associated with things “new” and modern: some- times with chivalry, the code of ethics adopted by independent warriors committed to service outside of traditional military outlets, and with the rise of official patronage of the vernacular arts. William Rufus’s frequent association with fashion, changes in mores, hostility to the Church, jongleurs and other marginal types (harlots, parasites, poets, musicians of one kind or another) immediately increased the likelihood that such charges would be deployed. The denunciations do not, however, seem to detract from his warrior status. His biographer, Frank Barlow, notes that even if it were true that William’s sexual tastes ran to men, it would probably have had little effect on his prestige in military circles: “It was common enough and fitted easily into the life of the camp and, in the field, into the comradeship of soldiers-in-arms.”29 The arena in which he is most highly criticized then is his choice of courtiers and his refusal to capitulate to the Church in the wake of the Gregorian reforms. During the thirteenth century, when secular penalties for sodomy were becoming increasingly harsh, politically motivated charges of sodomy were still very effective as propaganda, as the prosecution of the Templars forcefully demonstrated.30 This does not mean that the charges ceased to have anything to do with sexually irregular behavior. It is simply that the same sexual behavior that might once have occasioned only private tittering or the attention of confessors, was becoming an open secret, a discursive category with its own vocabulary, list of charges, applicable biblical citations, and penalties. W
hether or not the individual against whom the charge of sodomite was directed actually fitted the bill, the deployment of the concept itself had consequences. It both enlightened the community as to the existence of such behavior and took on a force of its own as disciplinary tool. It would be useful now to look at some spe- cific cases of clerical and monastic voices in order to trace the conflicted portrait of sodomy we find in their works; then, finally, to look at the emblematic example of Richard Lionheart.
According to Peter Damian, the wave of sodomites afflicting the clergy in the eleventh century was a new phenomenon. He argues in his Liber Gomorrhianus (1049) that the early Church Fathers (Jerome, Augustine) were able to extirpate such behavior in their own day through the force of their condemnations, all the while fretting that those very condem- nations might actually have contributed centuries later to the spread of sodomy, simply by alerting men to the existence of such practices. The only proof he produces that sodomitical acts posed little problem during those intervening centuries is that he knows of no extant con- demnations from that time. Had this behavior been perceived to be a problem, he says, we would “no doubt . . . today . . . possess many lengthy volumes which they wrote against it.”31 This is a risky and some- what tautological argument: firstly because Peter has had to admit that the offending behavior existed almost a millennium earlier, a sign per- haps of its ineradicable or even natural and inevitable presence. Then, by equating the “problem” with the written denunciations, he unwit- tingly suggests that the behavior itself might indeed have persisted in that interim but that it had not been deemed problematic enough to warrant written condemnations. This perverse reading is actually sup- ported by his later observation that the sodomite is always already there, ready to pounce like the devil within the individual psyche. This again suggests that the sodomite is always present and has always been; that he can always survive by “passing,” avoiding detection.
Peter therefore argues that the sodomite is doubly dangerous and must be cast out as a scapegoat, loaded with the unspoken guilt of the community and made to suffer for it:
Therefore, unworthy priest, if after the discharge of semen you became a leper and were forced by the Law to live outside the camp..32 ... once one has fallen into the depths of utter degradation, he becomes an outcast from his heavenly home, is severed from the Body of Christ, is rebuked by the authority of the whole Church, is condemned by the judgment of all the holy fathers, is despised among men on earth, and is rejected from the company of the citizens of heaven.33
Peter made these charges in a letter to Pope Leo IX (Liber Gomorrhi- anus). Though his suggestions were taken seriously by later moralists,the Pope whose help he was invoking in an effort to banish all sodomites from the clergy largely ignored his recommendations.34 Peter had quite graphically outlined, in his letter to the Pope, the four ways in which sodomy operates before recommending appropriate punishments:
There are some who pollute themselves; there are others who befoul one another by mutually handling their genitals; others still who fornicate between the thighs; and others who do so from the rear.35
But Pope Leo, in his response, implies a degree of hypocrisy in Peter’s investment in this critique:
The short book which you have written against the four-fold defile- ment of carnal pollution in becoming prose, but still more becoming reasoning, most dear son, manifests with obvious evidence that the concentration of your mind with loving zeal has arrived at the resplendent bed of sparkling purity. For one like you who has so raised the arm of the spirit against the obscenity of lust, has surely subdued the savagery of the flesh.36
Likewise, he closes his letter with a message of thanks which also includes an implicit criticism:
But, dearest son, I rejoice indescribably that you promote by the example of your life whatever you have taught by your eloquence. For it is greater to teach by action than by words.37
Despite Peter’s overt stance in the Liber Gomorrhianus, however, there are a number of curious ways in which his work intersects with contem- porary queer theory. For Peter wrote not only the first comprehensive guidebook to Christian homophobia, but also a work of incredible dar- ing, the De laude flagellorum, in the last years of his life.38 Both works were clearly written in a defensive mode, as justification for his own versions of the Law and as angry denunciations of those who had other ideas:
a certain abominable and most shameful vice has developed, and unless it be prevented as soon as possible by the severest punishment, it is certain that the sword of divine fury will be unsheathed, leading in its unchecked violence to the destruction of many.39In the De laude flagellorum, he denounces the presumption of those who would forgo this penitential practice:
Tell me, you who in your arrogance mock at Christ’s passion, you who, in refusing to be stripped and scourged with Him, deride His nakedness and all His torments as foolish and vain things like the illusions that come to us in sleep, what will you do when you see Him who was stripped in public and hung on the Cross shining in the glory of His majesty . . . more glorious than all things, visible or invisible? . . . By what rash boldness or presumption do you hope to share in His glory, whose shame and injuries you scorned to bear?40
Peter’s principal claims are that sodomy is institutionalized in the monasteries of his day, that the Church is in imminent danger of destruc- tion, and that the Penitentials are inconsistent in their recommenda- tions because too many of the confessors are themselves sodomites. The rhetoric is fiery and cagey, for example, in the middle of a personal letter, in which Pope Leo is addressed as “you,” Peter launches quite suddenly into a confrontational soliloquy (“But now we meet face to face, you sodomite, whoever you may be”), such that it is not entirely clear how much overlap there might be between one addressee and the other.41
That first apostrophe is followed by a whole string of similar epithets: “my good sodomite” (21), “miserable” or “unhappy soul” (35), implying that Peter holds the sodomite in his gaze, has his attention, knows his tricks better than he knows them himself; and that the sodomite, in an Althusserian moment of prise de conscience will recognize himself in this call.42 Peter’s appropriation of the panoptical seat of vision is at the same time a recuperation of the confessional mode, the object of much of his critique, but this time with Peter as interrogator. The imaginary sodomite is the silent subject for whom Peter speaks, since, of course, we never “hear” anyone but Peter, and the subject whom he judges. This is by any standard an overtly sadistic scenario, with Peter casting the drama, writing the dialogue, directing the action, and enjoying the privileged view afforded of his own work at play.
To effect this surgical intervention to cut from the mystical body of Christ “the befouling cancer of sodomy” (6), he first needs some sodomites to purge. He must therefore induce someone to identify himself as “sodomite,” answer the call; and so he provides the categoryin which the sodomite might recognize himself through identification with those already so identified. Who then is this sodomite, this subject so in control of his subjection that he places himself outside one Law, yet inside another? Like the postcolonial subject, he steps in and out of discourses and registers, able to call on at least three subjective stances (subject to Law, outside of Law, hybrid) in relation to power. Given, in addition, that Peter’s reforms would produce an eremitical, same- sex, monastic community, quite extreme in terms of self-mutilation and theatrical suffering, where behavior is entirely transparent to power, how can we see Peter’s community as anything but “queer”?
Though Peter asserts that no man is allowed to publish canons since the privilege belongs to the Pope alone, he justifies his intervention on humanitarian grounds: how, he says, can I love my neighbor if I “negli- gently allow the wound, of which I am sure he will brutally die, to fester in his heart; if . ..I fail to cure them by the surgery of my words” (50)?43
Peter is obviously used to recuperating the Law, performing it, and rewriting it, just as
when he dared rewrite the rules of Saint Benedict for his order at Fonte Avellana. The God whose word he sees himself enact- ing is similarly vengeful and controlling, exemplified in the passage he cites from Deuteronomy: “My sword shall feed on flesh” (Deut. 32.42,
43). Peter claims that God so detested sodomy that “even when he had not yet curbed other vices, he already kept condemning this one with the precepts of the Law, under pain of the strictest penalty” (8).44 The sodomite, like Onan (Genesis 38.9–10), will be struck with the “sword of divine fury” (5) and killed “because he did a detestable thing.”45 As agent of the Lawgiver, Peter sets out to regulate desire: not by banishing it from the community, as if one could; but by channeling it, creating the performative categories through which it can and cannot be expressed, redefining the transgressive routes through which male desire will travel. As might be expected, these routes are corporeal and focus almost exclu- sively on the individual hermit, subjected to what Peter insistently refers to as “the discipline,” a regime of physical penance, including deprivation of food and comfort and the practice of self-flagellation.
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