Fora time then, under threat of imminent death, Richard kept his vow to change his ways, stayed at Mass until it was over, gave alms to the poor, and maintained his chastity. None of the chroniclers specifies how long that resolve lasted. The only subsequent allusion to Richard’s “vice” is his strange deathbed admission of his obsessive hatred for Philippe- Auguste. The best one can surmise from such “evidence” is that Richard’s conduct, whatever it consisted of, was thought shameful by himself and others and that sex with his wife was seen as an appropriate tonic.
Final judgments on Richard as king are mixed. Ralph of Coggeshall claims that when Richard mounted the throne there was great hope that his “nobility of soul and the force of his military genius” would make of him “the model and mirror of all kings of the Norman dynasty.”116
Instead, Richard never gave credit to God for his good fortune, and never “took care to correct the skewed morals he had acquired in the prime of his youth.”117 Despite his cruelty, avarice, and lust, Ralph does admit that Richard was a great military hero, supported several religious institutions, and repented at the moment of death. Gerald of Wales says that Richard possessed three of the ideal qualities of a king: extraordinary energy and courage; extreme generosity and munificence; and strength of character and word. Richard was no doubt a great leader, and would have been the greatest of his age but for three more “contradictions in his character,” unnamable according to Gerald.118 In calling him a “new Caesar,” Gerald suggests a double vision of Richard. References to Caesar in the twelfth century operated like references to Trojans, an encouragement to double readings. In the Policraticus, written some forty years earlier, John of Salisbury cites a comic song supposedly known to soldiers at the time of the Roman victory over the Gauls: “Twas Caesar subdued Gaul, Nichomedes his Caesar, but Nichomedes did not enjoy a triumph for this subjugation.”119 Dante also uses Julius Caesar as the figure of the warrior sodomite who conquers his enemy in war but is willingly conquered by him in bed (Purgatorio 26). Richard as lord and master who can be wooed with kisses is also an image that comes upseveral times in troubadour poems.120 If the reference is to Augustus, rather than Julius, the Policraticus offers a scurrilous anecdote about him as well:
Among the discreditable things attributed to Augustus by a certain individual was that of having won his adoption by submitting to the desires of his uncle. This was based on a rumor that Julius had admitted him on terms of great intimacy, and there was even mention of a violation of chastity. Another . . . reproached him saying that it was his custom to singe his legs with a torch to make the hair grow more downy.121
Though the chroniclers couched their comments in vague formulae such as “contradictions in character,” it is certainly within the range of “reasonable doubt” to assume that they are suggesting unmentionable sexual desires for, and relations with, other men. Accusations of sodomy directed at political leaders had some currency during this period, and several modern historians have read these chroniclers’ comments only as signs of political slander. Nevertheless, as in the case of earlier rulers, such accusations were used selectively. Richard is the only member of his family to be subjected to these charges: no one accuses Henry II or any of Richard’s brothers of sodomy, after all, and they were far from popular. As in the case of his great-uncle, King William Rufus, Richard became a target of such innuendo because he flaunted his disregard for cultural norms and expectations. Neither Richard nor William Rufus was heterosexual in the way that was expected of them, then or now; yet, interestingly, neither falls into that other despised category, the effeminate male. Richard married at age thirty-four, rarely saw his wife, slept with her as part of his penance after confessing to “peccatum illud” (that sin) and showed no visible concern over lack of an heir. Worse yet, William Rufus never married at all, despite the practical necessity of a dowry, political alliance, children, household management, etc. If, then, we are asked to discount the chroniclers’ suggestions of sodomy among Richard’s sins, and the hermit’s penitential discourse, then by the same token we should also disregard the accusations of profligate sexual activity with women that abound in accounts of other contemporary figures. According to the Church, lack of desire is an ideal state that leads to sanctity; chastity, even in marriage, is what all should aspireto. But celibacy and lack of desire are, on the other hand, associated almost immediately with the open secret of sodomy, especially when the subjects are kings who have also been linked to excess, in the form of vanity, learning, music, or hunting.
The curious convergence of Richard as a “man’s man” – a figure of hypermasculinity who excels at military arts – and of Richard as a sodomite – one who is indifferent to sexual relations with women but not effeminate – makes him a pivotal figure in twelfth-century thought. In all of the contemporary attacks on sodomites that we have reviewed there is incessant slippage from issues of sexuality to issues of gender. Richard, in fact, flirted with such associations in composing troubadour verse, in deliberately associating himself and his reign with the exploits of the Arthurian courts celebrated in romance, and in flaunting the conventions of domesticity.122 It is not unlikely that his shadow, and that of his scandalous family, can be detected in descriptions of contemporary literary figures: knights such as Lanval, Guigemar, and Perceval and that doubly marked hero, the indirect founder of the Plantagenet dynasty, Eneas.123 Like Alexis, Roland, Tristan, Perceval, and countless other heroic military and religious figures, Richard left no heir; like them, he seems to have been very aware of, and concerned about, his literary legacy.
Just to put the case of Richard in some perspective, let us compare the accounts of Richard’s life with those of another contemporary his- torical figure, William of Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, 1190–96. William was already a trusted aide when Richard was Count of Poitiers and con- tinued to serve as a close friend after his coronation. When Richard left for the Third Crusade in 1190, it was only mildly surprising that he would leave William, rather than his brother, John, in charge of the kingdom. The results were disastrous. William, already an unpopular figure in England, was unable to maintain order with brother John plot- ting to upset it. By 1194, when William’s forces attacked the priory of St. Martin’s and dragged Geoffrey, Richard’s illegitimate half-brother and sometime pretender to the throne, from the altar, his stock had fallen so low that he was obliged to flee the country.124 He had not always been so hated, or perhaps he was simply tolerated as a close associate of Richard before his departure and captivity. In 1189, Gerald of Wales dedicated his Journey Through Wales to William of Longchamp but afew years later he could write in his Life of Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, that William is the “belua multiformis” (the monster of many forms [or of all iniquities, according to Thorpe]).125 In that same work, Gerald accuses William of being a lover of boys and presiding over a court at which heterosexuals were ridiculed for being different: “Si ea quae sunt curiae non agis, quid in curia quaeris” (If you don’t do what courtiers do, then why are you at court?”).126 In one anecdote, a mother has brought to him her attractive son for his pleasure but, after having undressed the boy and found him to be a she, William will have nothing to do with her. Benedict of Peterborough’s long account of his disgrace also returns to the issue of sexual ambiguity. After enumerating William’s many sins as tyrant, bigot, oppressor, and hypocrite, he tells the following anec- dote: In attempting to flee the country, William had had to disguise himself as a woman, “that sex he had always abhorred.”127 Sitting on the beach at Dover, awaiting transport to the Continent, he was spotted by a “half-naked fisherman” who mistook him for a prostitute. With one arm around William’s neck, he put the other up his dress until he came to his breeches and incontrovertible proof that he was a male. “Come see, everyone, I’ve found a man in this woman!” cried the fish- erman. The bishops’ servants were able to get him out of that situation but he was not so lucky the second time around. Approached by two English-speaking women, he was una
ble to respond to their questions since he spoke only French. Suspicious of who this stranger might be, the women ripped off his veil and cried out to all bystanders when they saw his freshly shaved face: “Get over here! Let’s stone this monster who has dishonored both of our sexes!”128 What follows is the total humili- ation of William at the hands of a mob. He is thrown against the rock, dragged through the streets so the crowds could spit on him and hurl their insults and scorn. He is finally thrown into a dark jail cell where Benedict exults over his fall:
He who once dragged others is now dragged; taken by force is he who used to take; bound and tied is he who used to do the tying; imprisoned he who used to imprison. . . . He became the shame of his neighbors, the terror of his friends, an object of derision for the entire population. If only he had sullied just his own name as a priest rather than the whole state of the priesthood.129Several features of the story draw our attention. First, it is unclear to what degree the Bishop allowed or even invited the fisherman’s atten- tions. Though Benedict never says that this attention would have pleased William, he also never implies a struggle until after the fisherman has called out his discovery to the crowd. It is also interesting to note that William is loathed for having dishonored the priesthood and the two sexes rather than for his political crimes against the people and the Church. Earlier in his telling of the story, Benedict says that William abused his power, bankrupted the kingdom, broke the spirit of the peo- ple, lived for pleasure, disdained the English, shamed the Church, and brought from France singers and poets to spread his fame and glory. No mention is made of these crimes, however, during the mob’s attack. It suffices to have cross-dressed to raise such ire and deserve such abuse.
The case of Richard, his treatment at the hands of his contemporaries and of medieval historians today, is much more than an arcane footnote or subject for specialists’ squabbling. Richard, and William Rufus before him, both challenged their age’s insistence on heterosexual pairing (one female or woman-like man and one male) and reinforce it (since neither is ever associated with the feminine, they cannot therefore have been sodomites). As Lavinia’s mother warns her daughter in the contemporary romance of Eneas, just because a man marries does not mean that he is not a sodomite. The worst kind marry, then cheat, sometimes using the wives as bait. Her words go unheeded at the romance’s end and do not seem to have penetrated even today’s uneasy insistence on clear demarcations between the homo and heterosexual.
To take just one example from our own chronicles of actuality, con- temporary cinema: Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in The Fight Club.130 Brad plays the Richard Lionheart type – the super man, the warrior, the charismatic leader; Edward is Philippe Auguste – the wimp with ambitions. They live together, think as one, go from being reluctant allies to dark enemies in a screenplay that the Nouvel Observateur called a fascistic gay fantasy.131 But the film attempts to stem the association with homoeroticism by claiming Brad/Richard cannot be gay because he has sex with women, albeit only when Edward/Philippe is listen- ing at the door. And Edward cannot be gay because he takes up with a woman himself once Brad/Richard has disappeared, albeit the same woman whom he shared (as voyeur) with Brad/Richard.This labyrinth, in which all paths lead to Brad/Richard, is supposed to convince us that this is a heterosexual narrative; that only the pervert will see in Edward/Philippe’s personality schism an element of homophobic self-hatred. No “evidence” therefore: not “effeminate”; violent sex with women; an ennobling commitment to a higher cause. Can these boys be anything but heterosexual with these credentials? This kind of thinking unfortunately turns the history of sexuality into the pseudo-history of heterosexuality and Richard Lionheart becomes just another role model for paramilitary youth. The fatal association between effeminacy and sodomy continues to serve as a blinder to historical inquiry and fosters a model of masculinity based on paranoia and, paradoxically, exclusively male bonding. Claiming Richard as a heterosexual is like claiming that there are no gays in the US military because they do not “tell.” Lack of evidence can be a cover for not knowing how, rather than where, to look behind the blinders of ideological fantasies, with monolithic heterosexuality as the inevitable default setting.
Part II – Confronting Sodomy
Making Perceval: Double-binding and Si`eges Perilleux
The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society,... [their] detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat . . . their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures.1
The community . . . can only maintain itself by suppressing this spirit of individualism, and, because it is an essential moment, all the same creates it and, moreover, creates it by its repressive atti- tude towards it as a hostile principle. However, this principle, being merely evil and futile in its separation from the universal end, would be quite ineffectual if the community itself did not recognize the power of youth (the manhood which, while immature, still stands within the sphere of individuality), as the power of the whole. For the community is a nation, is itself an individuality, and essen- tially is only such for itself by other individualities being for it, by excluding them from itself and knowing itself to be independent of them.2
When and why do men obey? Upon what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest?3
At a key moment in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation de Perceval, it is announced to King Arthur that his court sits atop an infernal abyss in which knights who love “young men more than young ladies” are consumed by flames. His first reaction to this news is to turn and address his assembled court in the following terms:
Cil qui sont entechie´ / De si tres orrible pechie´ / Pueent estre tot esmari, / Je meismes m’en esmari / Quant j’en oi ore parler. / Honissera au par aler / qui en tel pechie´ sera pris, / De mal fu soit ses cors espris.4 (ll. 1589–1596)
[Those who are stained with such a horrible sin might well be stunned. I myself was when I just heard about it. Anyone who dies in such a state of sin will be disgraced when he meets his end. Let the body of anyone who cares about such pleasures be devoured by an evil flame.]
Arthur’s discourse falls into the distinct category that Curtius called over fifty years ago the “sodomy topos” and which involves an accu- sation of sodomy directed against an otherwise respected knight by a woman seeking revenge.5 Gerbert de Montreuil’s variation on this topos is notable in that it does not conform to the earlier, influential models of the Roman d’Eneas (1160) and Marie de France’s Lanval, or the later appearances of the topos in the Histoire de Gille de Chyn and the Roman de Silence.6 The accusation is not made by a woman, stricken in her pride, whose word cannot be trusted, but by a king; and the charges do not necessarily turn out to be unfounded, as they do invariably in the other examples. The words are not addressed to just one individual but to a group of knights; even, one could argue, to the institution of Arthurian knighthood itself. And, lastly, the text actually straddles two highly charged topoi that were both instrumental, at least in romance texts, in separating the men from the boys, the heroically masculine from its unworthy admirers – women, Jews, sodomites, and knights who do not make the grade. In Gerbert’s text the accusation of sodomy is linked with the topos of the si`ege p´erilleux, or perilous seat. In this chapter I will examine just how astute and logical that linking is and how, once conjoined, these two means of operating exclusion under- wrote a discourse of elite masculinity that was, and continues to be, the linchpin of patriarchy. I will first discuss Perceval as a masculine icon as a way of establishing the close connection between the inculcation of a sacrificial masculine identity within social persecutory mechanisms, then return to the link with Gerbert’s si`ege p´erilleux.
Perceval: Making Men
In his first appearance in Chre´tien de Troyes’s Conte du graal, Perceval instantly became the unwitting emblem of Christian knighthood.7Har
dly a likely candidate to embody such an impossibly vague and some- what pretentious concept, it took a series of different authors another
60,000 lines to round out the tale and impose some sort of sense. The First Continuation, which was composed very shortly after Chre´tien’s romance was abandoned, takes up the adventures of Gauvain right where Chre´tien had left him. In this tale, Gauvain completely dominates the narrative with Perceval himself making only a brief appearance. The Second Continuation of Wauchier and those of Manessier and Gerbert (the latter dating from c. 1220–1230) deal with both knights, though it is clearly Perceval’s quest that remains the focus of both knights’ adven- tures. The Roman du graal, though attributed in the text to Robert de Boron, is in fact a prose rendition of the earlier versified Roman de l’Estoire dou graal. The former is usually attributed to the Pseudo-Robert de Boron and the latter to Robert himself. In these works, the origin of the Grail is traced back to Joseph of Arimathea and, through his progeny, to England. These texts, and the Vulgate cycle which depend upon them, sanctify the Grail (now referred to as the “Holy Grail”) as a Christian icon in a way that Chre´tien and the Continuations do not.8
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