Chicago Press, 1993], p. 65).
21. Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
22. John Winkler, “Double Consciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics,” in H. Abelove, M. Barale, and D. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 577–594.
23. Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Represen- tation,” PMLA 102, 5 (October 1987), p. 812.
24. Simon Gaunt, alludes to some of these issues in an extraordinary article, “Bel Acueil and the Improper Allegory of the Romance of the Rose,” New Medieval Literatures
2 (1998), pp. 65–98.
25. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
26. It was Boswell’s contention that the rise of urban centers, especially in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, also saw the rise of a visible gay culture and a relative tolerance of gay sexuality on the part of the Catholic hierarchy (Christianity). Paris, the major intellectual center of the twelfth century, was widely associated by authors with sodomy and sexual transgression, as was London. See also Conrad Leyser, “Cities of the Plain: The Rhetoric of Sodomy in Peter Damian’s
‘Book of Gomorrah’,” Romanic Review 86, 2 (March 1995), pp. 195–196.
27. Ibid., pp. 71–73.
28. Haidu, “Althusser,” p. 71.
29. H. Marshall Leicester associates this gap with “despair” and Judith Butler sees it as the prerequisite to mourning and the incorporation of the lost ideal, both essential to the taking up of gender. H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1990), and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
30. Haidu, “Althusser,” p. 73.
31. James Creech (Closet Writing, p. 22) uses this formulation in discussing the role of what he calls “gay reading” in reinstating “what nineteenth-century surveillance labored so successfully to prohibit” in the works of Herman Melville.
32. In this respect it seems particularly disingenuous to claim the silence of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics on issues of sexuality as proof that today’s queer readings are reductionist, that they bring to the text localized concerns, and are simply reading into and finding in the supposedly limpid surface of the manuscript the reflected images the critic hopes to find. As this argument goes, if queer valences were not noted in the text by scholars since the Enlightenment, then they simply are not there. This argument shows enormous faith in the past and astounding naivete´ as to the blinders with which we all read.
33. As Carolyn Dinshaw asserts in the context of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
a heterosexual act can serve a homosexual/homosocial function, thus implyingthat such passages, in that or any other romance, must always be read (and were likely read even then) as potentially ironic. See Dinshaw, “A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” diacritics
24, 2–3 (Summer–Fall 1994), pp. 205–226.
34. David Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexu- ality,” Representations 63 (Summer 1998), pp. 93–120.
35. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post- modern (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999).
1 l ocating sodomy
1. This particular reference to the sodomites from Jacobus da Voragine’s Legenda aurea (1290) (The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], p. 41) is itself a restatement of Peter Cantor’s fantasy according to which (supposedly), in the versions of Saints Jerome and Augustine, Christ postponed repeatedly his incarnation, unwilling to enter into a human nature so defiled by vice. It was therefore only fitting that the sodomites should die at the moment of incarnation: “Iustum erat, ut auctore naturae nascente morerentur hostes naturae, non valentes sustinere adventum et splendorem ipsius” (in the Dominican compilation of scriptural glosses of the 1230s, Hugonis Sancto Charo ... in epistolis Pauli [Venice, 1703], u, fol. 209rb, cited in John Baldwin, The Language of Sex [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], pp. 44, 283 n.5). See also Warren Johansson and William A. Percy, “Homosexuality,” in Vern Bullough and James Brundage, eds., Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland,
1996), p. 173.
2. McGuire, Friendship, p. 209.
3. Particularly relevant to this study is Simon Gaunt’s point in Gender and Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) that efforts to refigure gender were played out and resisted within the fluid literary genres of the twelfth century and that consideration of gender is crucial to any understanding of the development of those genres’ reception in the following centuries.
4. According to Raymond Cormier and Harry J. Kuster, “Old Views and New Trends: Observations on the Problem of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 25, 2 (1984), p. 595, it was alleged both that sodomy was an epidemic (inferring lack of control) and a confirmed habit (implying responsibility on the part of the participant) picked up during the Crusades.
5. See any number of historical surveys of the history of homosexuality where liter- ary texts are cited (sometimes problematically) as part of the historical record of homosexual practices across the centuries, e.g. Boswell, Christianity and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994); David A. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr, eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, 1990). A much earlier outbreak of moral concern over sexual matters occurred in thelate sixth century, under the pontificate of Gregory the Great. The issue then was celibacy rather than sodomy, but, as Conrad Leyser argues (“Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emission and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages,” in Dawn M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe [London and New York: Longman,
1999], p. 119), comparing the earlier reformists and those of the eleventh century: “the age of Gregory VII in many ways brought an end to the epoch of his earlier namesake. . . . A lurid rhetoric of sexual danger was used by the new Gregorians to demand, notoriously, that the ranks of the priesthood be uncontaminated by any kind of association with their lay brethren.” The upshot, as Robert Swanson (“Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reforma- tion,” in Hadley, ed., Masculinity, p. 166) argues, may have been to mark out the celibate clergy as a “third gender,” an ambivalent position somewhere between the role played by men in sexual and property transactions and an asexual, emasculine aspiration to angelic status.
6. J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950), p. 355.
7. The Investiture Controversy was the most public attempt on the part of the Church to wrest control not only over the conferring of spiritual offices, but also over a host of other responsibilities attendant upon the clergy. See I. S. Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest: The Polemical Literature of the Late Eleventh Century (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1978) and Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–
1150,” in Clare Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
8. J. McNamara and S. Wemple, “The Power of Women through the Family in
Medieval Europe, 500–1100,” Feminist Studies 1 (1973), pp. 126–141.
9. See R. I. Moore (Form
ation of a Persecuting Society) on heresies in general and on persecution and exclusion. See also: on the question of heretics, Alain de Lille, De fide catholica contra haereticos, Patrologiae Latinae cols. 210: 307c–430a (Turnholt: Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1855, 1976), on the Welsh and the Trojans, Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales/The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London and New York: Penguin, 1978), pp. 264–265; on sodomy, Muhammad, and the Arab world, Jacques de Vitry in James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 399; and on sodomy and the Jew, Steven Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” in K. Lochrie, P. McCracken, and J. Schultz, eds., Constructing, pp. 158–179; idem, “The Spectral Jew,” New Medieval Literatures
2 (1998), pp. 9–35.
10. There are modern parallels to these same categories, typified by: (a) the association of sodomy with political movements such as the hippie or anti-war movements of the late 1960s; (b) the charge that political enemies condone homosexuality and are thereby guilty of moral decline; (c) the persistent charges that Jews, gays, and Com- munists are virtually interchangeable terms; the replacement of Soviet communists by gays and lesbians in political commentary from the religious right in the USafter 1990; (d) Tanya Luhrmann’s claim that the Parsi community in India expresses its own pessimism and dissatisfaction with its status within the larger community in a sort of “urban legend” that most of its young men are gay; (e) the destruction of the Sodom and Gomorrah topos which arises frequently in conjunction with the AIDS epidemic; (f ) the ubiquitous derogatory epithet “faggot” directed at even very young boys whose behavior challenges gender parameters; (g) the US Marine Corps’ public relations campaign: “We’re looking for a few good men!”; “hazing” and the recruitment for college fraternities, men’s clubs etc.; (h) charges that chil- dren of working mothers, feminists, gay families, and one-parent households are likely to be gay as an effect of deprivation of appropriate parental models; (i) attacks on government arts agencies as effete, gay-controlled mafia which represent only a small minority and are intent on destruction of the family, a secular humanist and “homosexual agenda.”
11. Tatlock, Legendary History; Boswell, Christianity; and Thomas Stehling, Medieval
Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship (New York and London: Garland, 1984).
12. On the Greeks, see David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), as well as Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homo- sexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), and Bernard Ser- gent, L’homosexualit´e initiatique dans l’Europe ancienne (Paris: Payot, 1986). On the Romans, see David Greenberg, Construction, pp. 152–160; and on the Celts, see Erick Pontalley, “La Pe´de´rastie celtique dans la Gaulle pre´-romaine,” trans. Leo G. Adamson, Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia 2, 2 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 32–39.
13. Cited in Michael Goodich, ed., Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of
Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 135.
14. Ibid., p. 136.
15. John Benton, ed., Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 87.
16. Stehling’s anthology, Medieval Latin Poems, provides abundant examples from a wide range of texts.
17. Examples abound in Boswell, Christianity; Stehling, Medieval Latin Poems; and V. A. Kolve, “Ganymede, Son of Getron: Medieval Monasticism and the Drama of Same-Sex Drive,” Speculum 73, 4 (October 1998), pp. 1014–1066.
18. Salverda de Grave, Eneas: Roman du XIIe si`ecle, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1985),
9133–9136.
19. John of Salisbury, The Frivolity of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, trans.
J. B. Pike (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938), p. 206.
20. Dante Alighieri, Purgatory, The Portable Dante, trans. M. Musa (New York and
London: Penguin, 1995), Canto 26, ll. 76–78.
21. Aristotle’s comments are found in the Politics II, 9, 1269b23, trans. Peter L. Phillips Simpson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 60, where he says that men from soldiering and warlike nations are easily overcome by women “excepting the Celts and any others who have manifestly honored sexual intercourse among males.” A bit later in the same work he claims that sexual relations among men were “instituted” in Sparta so as to prevent women from havingtoo many children (1272a12, p. 67). Elsewhere in the Politics, Aristotle denounces incest between fathers, sons, and brothers, and homosexual rape (1311b6, p. 234). A ruler, says Aristotle, “should engage in sexual relations with youths for reasons of love, not because he has the power to” (1315a14, p. 242). Such relationships are dangerous because they can cause jealousy and the formation of factions within the community, though the same could be said for any relationship, including those with women (1303b17, p. 214). Ptolemy (Tetrabiblos II, 3, 61–62, in Claudio Tolomeo, Le Previsioni astrologiche [Verona: Mondadori, 1985], p. 111) also reported that among peoples of the north, men were more inclined to same-sex relations. Their geographical placement with relation to Jupiter and Mars would supposedly produce men little inclined to lovemaking with women, and more inclined to take male lovers.
22. C. H. Oldfather, Diodorus Siculus [of Sicily], 12 vols., vol. V: 32, 7–33.3, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 185.I have modified Oldfather and Jones’ translations slightly after consulting other published translations. Their original word choices are included in square brackets.
23. The Geography of Strabo, trans. Howard Leonard Jones, 8 vols. vol. IV, 4, 6, Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 251.
24. Cited in Pontalley, “La Pe´de´rastie celtique,” pp. 32–39.
25. Greenberg, Construction, cites the following studies: Lily Weiser-Aall, Altgerman- ische Ju nglingsweihen und Mannerbu nde (Baden (Bu hl): Konkordia, 1927); Otto Ho fler, Kultische Geheimbu nde der Germanen (Frankfurt am Main: M. Diesterwey,
1934); Jean Przyluski, “Les confre´ries de loups-garous dans les socie´te´s indo- europe´ennes,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 121 (1940), pp. 128–145; Geo Widengren, Der Feudalismus in alten Iran: Mannerbund, Gefolgswesen, Feudalis- mus in der iranischen Gesellschaft im Hinblick auf die indogermanischen Verhaltnisse (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969), p. 52. Jan Bremmer (“An Enigmatic Indo- European Rite: Paederasty,” Arethusa 13 [1980], pp. 279–298) notes that the Irish had similar practices, though there is no evidence that they included a sexual element (Greenberg, Construction, pp. 243, 111).
26. Greenberg, Construction, 246.
27. Ibid., 246 n.24.
28. Sergent, L’homosexualit´e initiatique, pp. 177–191.
29. Sergent says that the priesthood in Persian and Indian societies tried for cen- turies to eradicate pederastic rituals from their initiation ceremonies whereas these rituals went largely unchallenged in cultures where the warriors dominated (L’homosexualit´e, initiatique, pp. 222–231).
30. Gerald W. Creed, “Sexual Subordination,” in Goldberg, ed., Reclaiming, pp. 66–94.
31. Susan Faludi wrote a fascinating expose´ of just this type of ritualized, all-male environment, as it still operates at the military academy, the Citadel. The inti- mate bonds encouraged between cadets are described by officials as “like a true marriage,” replete, as one would imagine, with homosocial/homoerotic currents. See the September 5, 1994, issue of New Yorker magazine for a full account (pp. 62–81).32. See Creed, “Sexual Subordination.”
33. See Jan Bremmer, ed., Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London: Croom Helm,
1987; repr. London and New York: Routledge, 1988) and Fritz Graf, “Orpheus: A Poet Among Men,” in the same volume, pp. 80–106.
34. Greenberg (Construction, p. 107) cites Dover (Greek Homosexuality, pp. 189–190) on this matt
er and he, in turn, is citing Ephoros, a fourth-century BCE historian, and Strabo (The Geography of Strabo, trans. Jones, p. 155).
35. “illi qui ante pubertatem supponuntur, dicens quod si huiusmodi turpis luxuria accidat tempore quo mollis et tenera est natura ipsorum qui supponuntur ut quando non possunt sperma emittere omnia predictorum istis cito adveniunt” (Problemata, fol. [75]ra), cited in Joan Cadden, “Sciences/Silences: The Natures and Languages of ‘Sodomy’ in Peter of Abano’s Problemata Commentary,” in Lochrie, McCracken, and Schultz, eds., Constructing, p. 56 n.44.
36. Cadden, “Sciences/Silences,” p. 48.
37. Joan Cadden, “‘Nothing Natural is Shameful’: Vestiges of a Debate about Sex and Science in a Group of Late-Medieval Manuscripts,” Speculum 76, 1 (January 2001), p. 68.
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