Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  Z izek maintains that “an ideological identification exerts a true hold

  on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: “‘not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person’ is the very form of ideology, of its ‘practical efficiency’.”141 Alain, seen in this light, would be a model of ideological self-delusion, thoroughly interpellated. His failure to admit to his identification, his claim to supplement the lack in the Other, haunts the text and limits its ideo- logical force. The inability of the universe’s creators to maintain order within creation is paralleled by the impotence of the writer to write truth. The more Alain denounces sodomy, the more he merges with Nature and finally dissolves, like a reflection. His dream of plenitude is acontradiction in terms, framed, as it is, as a reflection within a vision, within a mirror.

  Even the demonization of sodomy, the supposed raison d’ˆetre of the text, turns on something other than love of men. When sodomy is asso- ciated almost exclusively with youth, beauty, prostitution, promiscuity and lucre, then it is easy to make distinctions between what others do (sell themselves [72]) and what I do (love my friend).142 Condemning through metaphors of grammar, commercial transactions, and castra- tion, is, in effect, a method of deferral from which the traditional arena of warrior friendships, reciprocity, and masculine bonds easily escapes censure. Listen to Alain in his Anticlaudianus, where masculinity serves as the standard for perfection, beauty, and fidelity. Nature’s perfect body rivals those of Narcissus and Adonis; the perfect couples, those whose “chaste love, uncomplicated friendship, unclouded trust, true affection have joined together and in whose case an association of purified love has made one out of two” (73) are all male. David and Jonathan “are two but yet are one” (73); Theseus “can have no life by himself unless he has life in Pirithous” (73); Tydeus feels that he is seeking kingship for himself “when he wishes his second self (alter ego) to be king” (73); “another Nisus appears in Euryalus and another Euryalus flourishes in Nisus” (73); Pylades submits to danger “to save his alter ego from the same fate” (74).143 Leo Bersani once defined the “straight mind” as one which valorizes difference, while same-sex desire “presupposes a desir- ing subject for whom the antagonism between the different and the same no longer exists.”144 Alain teeters between these two poles in the De planctu but veers toward the latter in this final citation. At the close of this listing of exemplary couples in the Anticlaudianus, he issues what could be seen as a “closet” warning, written some twenty years after the composition of the De planctu: paintings hide secrets, they enclose things in the shadow of things and beguile our eyes with artifice (74), an extraordinary admission from a man who so insistently exposed the imbrication of artifice and orthodoxy, who shows even his own self to be a rhetorical construction, Master Alain, stupendi artificii artificiosus artifex.145

  Conclusion

  When a modified Athusserian paradigm is brought into an intimate connection with psychoanalysis and anthropology, it provides the basis for elaborating the relation between a society’s mode of produc- tion and its symbolic order. This . . . opens the possibility for under- standing how the subject is sexually, as well as economically, “captated.” 1

  Saint Anselm defended his reluctance to prosecute sodomy in 1102 with the argument that it was already so commonly practiced that people would have difficulty recognizing it, or themselves within that category. Such a statement could not have been made by the end of that century, when sodomy had become a matter of discourse and persecution. In the intervening years, increased attention to celibacy, monastic rules, marriage practices, and the status of knighthood had the effect of calling attention to the performative nature of masculinity, to its ritualization and theatricalization. Institutions responded by setting up ever more rigorous criteria by which men earned, or failed to earn, their masculine status; and accusations of sodomy began to feature in these attempts to discipline masculine subjects by controlling and patrolling gender barriers. The accusations one finds in the texts discussed here had the effect of outlining acceptable parameters of behavior and establishing an outside to masculinity such that some males make it in and others clearly do not. But they also had the undeniable if unwitting effect of calling such parameters into question. The open acknowledgment of illicit sexualities and sexual acts chipped away at the notion of a single created norm and had the effect of making normative heterosexuality and masculinity, both of which took on new contours in the twelfth century, appear fragile and constructed. The more sodomy is talkedabout, the more difficult to pin it down; the more an author insists on its polluting and corrupting influence, the more the normative and the disruptive seem intertwined.

  Hegemonic, heroic masculinity thus became an ever more contested category, one which attracted a great deal of attention in literary, the- ological, and monastic texts. Systematic exclusion and denigration of the feminine was one of its cornerstones, and enhanced competitive- ness between males for power and prestige was a direct effect. John of Salisbury’s association of masculinity with a veneer of control and a sus- picion of pleasure is one that pertained to chivalric knights as much as to monks and clergy. Signs of failure to maintain this veneer, through dress, performance, demeanor, or inappropriate sexual activity, leads inevitably to accusations of gender slippage, to humiliation, and often to the accusation of sodomy as well. Thus any knight or monk who shows less than complete regard for the established order, or who is led by personal ambition more than institutional allegiance, is liable to be ostracized, excluded, and, in many cases, sacrificed. Attacks on any class of individuals within a culture always point to deeper, perhaps unacknowledged, cultural conflicts that feed into a climate of sacrificial violence. Such a climate is attested to in the somewhat obsessive asso- ciations made between sodomy, heresy, foreign mores, and infidels that one finds throughout the century.

  How does any of this relate to the essentialism/constructionism debate that plagued gender and queer theory in the 1990s? Most of these authors, including the early Church Fathers surveyed in this book, would concur, even in spite of themselves, that whatever it is that they are calling sodomy is pre-discursive, assimilable to original sin, something that lurks within us all, against which we must be vigilant, ready as it is to surface in any same-sex environment. Allied with the active/passive dichotomy on which so much medieval gender theory seems to rely, nor- mative and perverse sexualities are caught up in games of perspective, in which foreground and background veer in and out of focus. Active and passive, like and unlike, emerge as variable and contingent categories which rely for their recognition upon subjective judgment. The gram- matical and rhetorical metaphors for sexual union and proper gender favored by many of these authors purport to underwrite normative asso- ciations of masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity, butjust as often they undo these associations by suggesting that gender is performative and manipulable, an attribute of outside evaluation more than the emanation of an inner, subjective truth.

  Such games of social perception are, nonetheless, the very stuff from which identities and identifications take shape, especially as they are underwritten by symbolic Law. Challenges to that Law can of course be fatal but they are also unavoidable in a sacrificial climate, as most of these authors show. Even in explicit defenses of Law such challenges surface – sometimes inadvertently, often deliberately. I am no mind reader and have no interest in making pronouncements about the autho- rial intentions or proclivities of medieval authors. I will, nevertheless, maintain that much of the form, and even some of the substance, of the attacks on the sodomite during this period folds back in on itself, such that these games of perspective appear necessarily ironic. It is in the gaps between authors’ intentions and readers’ responses that I sense the double-consciousness of these writers and the undeniable presence of a homoerotic subject. Such a subject may or may not defy (hyper)masculine par
adigms; at any rate, rigid ties between acts, desires, and gender roles are nothing more than the last refuge of Law. This sub- ject can best be intuited “not by discrete sexual acts . . . but by the enduring processes of sexual loss, longing, anticipation, and union that shape his sense of self ”.2 In the authors I have been discussing, even the most homophobic, masculinist, and normative, we can often detect what Dinshaw called “the touch of the queer”; and in such moments of imagined communion the so-called sodomite speaks back.3

  Notes

  intr oduction

  1. See Ernst Curtius’ short survey of “sodomy as topos” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1953), pp. 113–117.

  2. Mark Jordan traces this development beautifully in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 29. Pre-eleventh- century silence on sodomy does not, however, translate to a lack of textual homo- eroticism. See, for example, the letters of Alcuin and other scholars at the Carolingian court and the discussion in Brian McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monas- tic Experience 350–1250, Cistercian Studies Series 95 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988).

  3. Glenn Burger, “Kissing the Pardoner,” PMLA 107 (1992), p. 1152.

  4. Jordan argues that it is Peter Damian who first coined the term sodomia, though he notes that adjectival forms of the word can be found in earlier documents: “The central terms used by medieval Christian theologians to describe what we call ‘sexual activity’ cannot be translated into modern English. They condense in themselves different and in some ways briefer histories of category formation. Consider the terms luxuria, vitium sodomiticum, and peccatum contra naturam as they figure in Scholastic texts. It might be permissible to transliterate the last two as ‘Sodomitic vice’ and

  ‘sin (or vice) against nature,’ with appropriate warnings. But luxuria, the root term, cannot even be transliterated as ‘luxury’ without provoking misunderstandings each time” (Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, p. 29).

  5. Jordan says it was inevitable that the resultant category would be anything but con- crete or discrete: “The essential thing to notice in the processes by which ‘Sodomy’ was produced is that they first abolish details, qualifications, restrictions in order to enable an excessive simplification of thought. Then they condense a number of these simplifications into a category that looks concrete but that has in fact nothing more concrete about it than the grammatical form of a general noun” (Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, p. 29).

  6. One of these diatribes is reproduced in the Prologue to this book; see also my article, “Knighting the Classical Hero: Homo/Hetero Affectivity in Eneas,” Exemplaria 5, 1 (March 1993), pp. 1–43, and Simon Gaunt, “From Epic to Romance: Gender and Sexuality in the Roman d’Eneas,” Romanic Review 83, 1 (January 1992), pp. 1–27.7. James A. Schultz, “Bodies that Don’t Matter: Heterosexuality before Heterosexual- ity in Gottfried’s Tristan,” in K. Lochrie, P. McCracken, and J. A. Schultz, eds., Con- structing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 91–110. Schultz rings the right note of caution regarding the claim that heterosexuality was invented in the twelfth century when he says: “Gottfried (of Strasbourg) was writing before heterosexuality. I mean this not in the trivial sense that the term had not yet been invented, but in the more important sense that the cross-sexual relation between the desiring subject and the desirable object does not constitute either the identity of the subject or the morphology of the object in the profound way it is assumed to under a regime of compulsory heterosexuality” (Schultz, “Bodies,” p. 95).

  8. Simon Gaunt, “Straight Minds/‘Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine,” in L. Fradenburg and C. Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 158.

  9. See, for example, Geoffrey’s description of a tournament from the 1130s in his

  History of the Kings of Britain (trans. Lewis Thorpe [London: Penguin Books,

  1966]), Part 6, chapter 15, p. 230: “The knights planned an imitation battle and competed together on horseback, while their womenfolk watched from the top of the city walls and aroused them to passionate excitement by their flirtatious behaviour.”

  10. See Michel Foucault’s La Volont´e de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) and Le Souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualit´e 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

  11. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western

  Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1987).

  12. “De bel pechie´ n’est pas merveille, / des que Nature le conseille, / mes qui de lei pechie´ s’esveille / encontre Nature teseille. / Celui deit l’en a chiens hu er, / pieres et bastons estru er; / torchons li devriet [l’en] ru er / et con autres gueignons tu er. / Ces dames ont trove´ i jeu: / o dos turtennes funt un eu, / sarqueu hurtent contre sarqueu, / sanz focil escoent lor feu. / Ne joent pas a piquenpance, / a pleins escuz joignent sanz lance. / N’ont soign de lange en lor balance, / ne en lor mole point de mance. / Hors d’aigue peschent au torbout / et n’i quierent point de ribot. / N’ont sain de pilete en lor pot / ne en lor branle de pivot. / Dus et dus jostent lor tripout / et se meinent plus que le trot; / a l’escremie del jambot / s’entrepaient vilment l’escot. / Il ne sunt pas totes d’un molle: / l’un[e] s’esteit et l’autre crosle, / l’un[e] fet coc et l’autre polle / et chascune meine son rossle.” (ll. 1097–1124)

  [There is nothing surprising about the “beautiful sin” / when nature prompts it, / but whosoever is awakened by the “vile sin” / is striving against nature. / He must be pursued with dogs, / throwing stones and sticks; / one should give him blows / and kill him like a cur. / These ladies have made up a game: /With two “trutennes” they make an “eu,”/ they bang coffin against coffin, / without a poker to stir up their fire. / They do not play at jousting / but join shield to shield without a lance. / They do not need a pointer in their scales, / nor a handle in their mold. / Out of water they fish for turbot / and they have no need for a rod. / They do notbother with a pestle in their mortar / nor a fulcrum for their see-saw. / They do their jousting act in couples / and go at it full tilt; / at the game of thigh-fencing / they lewdly share their expenses. / They are not all made from the same mold: / one lies still and the other makes busy, / one plays the cock and the other the hen / and each one plays her role.]

  Translation by Robert L. A. Clark; cited in J. Murray and K. Eisenbichler, eds., Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 210.

  13. See Francesca Canade´ Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn’s collection, Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Palgrave,

  2000) fora long-overdue survey of the topic.

  14. Georges Duby, Guillaume le Mar´echal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984).

  15. The northern French Ordene de chevalerie contains a fascinating account of the knighting of Saladin in which are outlined the ritualized and symbolic steps which had to be followed: a bath (signifying baptism), repose (Paradise), white robe (cleanliness), a scarlet cloak (blood shed in defense of God), brown stockings (burial in earth), a white belt (virginity), a double-edged sword (justice and loyalty, defense of the poor), and a dubbing or light blow from the master (presumably respect for hierarchy, humility, and obedience). This link between religious and military orders is reinforced by the four rules the new knight must obey: never consent to false judgment or be a party to treason; honor all women and aid them; hear Mass every day; and fast on Fridays in remembrance of Christ’s Passion. This and other very useful examples can be found in Maurice Keen’s Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984).

  16. E. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

  California Press, 1990).

  17. The definition is from Pau
l Smith, Discerning the Subject, Theory and History of Literature 55 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988): “the sub- ject, opposed to the ‘individual,’ is not to be understood as ‘the source and agent of conscious action or meaning,’ but rather ‘is immediately cast into con- flict with forces that dominate it in some way or another – social formations, language, political apparatuses, and so on’” (pp. xxxiii–xxxiv). The model of competing and historically contingent ideologies that I am evoking is consis- tent with Althusserian models of subjectivity which stress multiple, competing ideologies rather than any one, oppressive, transhistorical force. (See also Peter Haidu, “Althusser Anonymous in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria 7, 1 (Spring 1995), p. 69.

  18. Burger, “Kissing,” p. 1154 n.10.

  19. For more on secrecy, see K. Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy

  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

  20. James Creech poses these questions in relation to the letters of Herman Melville: “one must be careful not to mistake for mere rhetoric the intensely sexual longing which can be smuggled into expression using the very same language as a cover”(Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre [Chicago: University of