Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  38. Georges Duby notes that after 1100 the Church begins actively to combat both (1) the doctrine of Nicolaism, a justification for priestly marriage that claimed as its defense that marriage helped the priest avoid fornication; and (2) exaggerated asceticism, which led to the radical rejection of marriage characteristic of the Cathar heresy (Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. J. Dunnett [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], pp. 15–16. Originally published as Maˆle moyen age [Paris: Flammarion, 1988]). Jo Ann McNamara’s discussion of such issues, what she calls the Herrenfrage, is essential reading (“The Herrenfrage”) as is Robert Swanson’s “Angels Incarnate.”

  39. In the early twelfth century, ceremonies of initiation were usually conducted by a lord in whose court the young man had served and been trained. Even women could induct knights in the absence of the lord. During the eleventh century an ecclesiastical element was introduced into the ceremony in the form of blessings of accoutrements, but the use of a complete written Church ritual remained rare before the thirteenth century. Marjorie Chibnall, ed., The World of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 142–143.

  40. So named because Pope Gregory VII was the most vociferous in asserting the supreme authority of the Papacy over secular authorities in all matters pertaining to the governance of spiritual and civic matters. Clerical marriages were declared invalid by the first Lateran Council of 1123. See Conrad Leyser, “Cities of the Plain,” pp. 191–211.

  41. Leyser, in fact, argues that the Liber Gomorrhianus should more rightly be seen as an attack on simony and on the disintegration of monastic traditions, an attack which uses sodomites as a lightning-rod figure atop a much larger pile of abuses. Sodomites were apparently a safer target to attack than those influential Church figures guilty of simony and avarice; but in attacking anonymous sodomites, Peter could then address a host of other corruptions. Conjoining the biblical accountof the destruction of Sodom with Peter Damian’s own opening salvo in his attack on the sodomites, Leyser says that: “The field now lay clear for the founding of sodomy, a discursive institution of beguiling moral clarity” (“Cities of the Plain,” p. 211).

  42. Frank Barlow, William Rufus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 373. Michael Goodich (Other Middle Ages) situates the real turn from passive condemnation of sodomy to active prosecution in regional activities such as this one, inspired by the Gregorian reforms. The impetus came from priests and monastic institutions but it was soon taken up by the reforming laity.

  43. Anselm was seeking King William Rufus’s support in condemning sodomy as well as simony, long hair on men, the hereditary succession to benefices, and incestuous marriages (Barlow, William Rufus, p. 373). When William declined to help, Anselm called the Council of London in 1102, which took up the practice of tonsure, permissible types of shoes, and the celibacy of the clergy. Claire Fennell, “The Degenerate Morals and Fashions of Anglo-Norman Clerical and Lay Society at the Turn of the Eleventh Century: Interpreting the Sources,” unpublished paper,

  1998.

  44. Barlow, William Rufus, p. 329.

  45. As an example of the widespread reputation of the monasteries as dens of vice, see Gerald of Wales’ anecdote about Richard Lionheart. The King is accused by outsiders of having three daughters that he cannot marry off: Superbia, Lux- uria, and Cupiditas. The King answers on the spot that those daughters have already been given in marriage: Covetousness (Cupiditas) to the White Monks or Cistercians, Pride (Superbia) to the Templars, and Lechery (Luxuria) to the Black Monks/Benedictines (Journey through Wales, p. 105). The anecdote itself is interest- ing in its choice of Richard as father since it was rather common knowledge that Richard spent almost no time with his wife and left no heirs other than a reputed bastard child. See further discussion at the end of chapter 2.

  46. “Considerandum etiam est quia hactenus ita fuit publicum hoc peccatum, ut vix aliquis pro eo erubesceret; et ideo multi magnitudinem ejus nescientes, in illud se praecipitabant” (Patrologia Latina 159: col. 95, cited in Derrick S. Bailey, Homosex- uality and the Western Christian Tradition [London: Longmans, Green, 1955; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1975], pp. 124–125, and in Boswell, Christianity, p. 215 n.26). John Boswell (p. 216), however, asserts that this London edict was probably never published since John of Salisbury, writing fifty years later, seems to have had no knowledge of its recommendations.

  47. Most of the legislation dealing with sodomy was directed against the clergy rather than the civilian population. Boswell (Christianity, pp. 160, 188) points out that both Saint Benedict and Saint Basil recognized the danger of homosexual attraction within monastic communities. The Third Lateran Council (1179) adopted a canon specifically prohibiting “that incontinence which is against nature” and decreed that clerics guilty of unnatural vice must either forfeit clerical status or be confined indefinitely to a monastery. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 399; Baldwin, Language of Sex, p. 44.48. Brian McGuire (Friendship, p. 211), for example, argues that “Anselm had one great love in his life, the young monk Osbern at Bec in Normandy. . . . The exact nature of Anselm’s bond with Osbern cannot be determined but it seems possible and even likely that . . . [he] did become strongly emotionally attached to this attractive and spirited young man” (p. 212). See also Boswell, Christianity; Julian P. Haseldine, “Love, Separation and Male Friendship: Words and Actions in Saint Anselm’s Letters to his Friends,” in Hadley, ed., Masculinity, pp. 238–255; and R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  49. Gaunt offers this brief summation of the differences between traditional feudal models of marriage and the Church’s new model: “the three elements of the ‘feudal’ model of marriage were: endogamy..., repudiation at will on the part of men, and family control of the choice of marriage partner. The key features of the Church’s model were: strict exogamy... indissolubility, and the need for the consent of both partners for the marriage to be valid” (Gender and Genre, p. 74).

  50. Gratian’s Decretum (1140) stressed that consummation was a prerequisite to mar- riage and this view was formalized in the Alexandrian synthesis of 1163. In this document, Pope Alexander III declared that a vow pronounced in the present or future tense, followed by consummation, constitutes a marriage. For more on the implications of consensualism, see R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago and London: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 161–164. As McNamara notes (“The Herrenfrage,” p. 5), by the 1170s the Papacy was already stressing the centricity and necessity of the sacraments, marriage among them, to the ordered life of the Christian and eventual salvation.

  51. See Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society; John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions; Constance Bouchard, “Strong of Body, Brave and Noble”: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 86–98; and Duby, Love and Marriage, esp. pp. 3–21, on marriage practices.

  52. Simon Gaunt argues (in “Marginal Men, Marcabru and Orthodoxy: The Early Troubadours and Adultery,” Medium Aevum 59 [1990], pp. 55–72) that the troubadour phenomenon of fin’amor should be read in light of these attempts on the part of the Church to gain control of aristocratic marriage practices (see also Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 74). By extension, the effects of this incursion are implicit in the literary texts that imitate and adapt fin’amor codes to the northern French and Plantagenet courts. See chapters 3 and 5.

  53. Duby, Love and Marriage, pp. 17–19. Several incidents in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation, dated to about 1220, show that this new thinking on marriage had already evolved from the previous century. Several female characters refuse marriages that are being imposed upon them by withholding consent; and one woman, using legalistic reasoning, claims that she is already married in spirit to a man who seduced her with promises of marriage after sex only to reject her for another: “Li fols, plains d
e desloiaute´, / Me fiancha lue´s de sa main / Qu’il m’espouseroit en loialte´” (ll. 1779–1781). She succeeds in convincing all who hear her, includingPerceval. The lying knight is subsequently forced to honor his word after Perceval disrupts the marriage ceremony to the lady of his choice with a public declaration of his perfidy. The issue of family or feudal control is never raised in the text. The spurned lady self-righteously claims her right to marry based solely on a vow and the touching of the hands. See Gerbert de Montreuil, La continuation de Perceval, Classiques Franc¸ais du Moyen Age, 3 vols., ed. Mary Williams (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1922 [vol. 1 (28)], 1925 [vol. 2 (50)]) and Marguerite Oswald, ed., vol. 3 (101) (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1975).

  54. See Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 75, and Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in

  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), for whom romance as a genre is essentially made possible through this shift of allegiances and the space that is thus created for the expression of male and female desire. Both note, however, that while the historical changes were gradual rather than instantaneous, it would appear that the effects on literature, and perhaps on the real expressions of sexual desire that it inspired, were more sudden and dramatic. See also Bloch, Etymologies.

  55. This development parallels the revival of Roman law in the late eleventh century, largely at the University of Bologna. Both secular and canon law benefited as a result in the twelfth century, Law faculties proliferated, new civil law codes were adopted and Gratian’s Decretum became the standard of canon law and curricula. Naturally, these developments were opposed by those unwilling to abandon tradition, custom, and feudal law.

  56. Official recognition of marriage as a sacrament appeared only at the Council of Florence (1438–45). There it was recorded that the seventh sacrament is matrimony, a sign of the unity of Christ and his Church. This teaching was confirmed at the Council of Trent in 1563 (J. M. Egan, “Matrimony II (Sacrament of ),” New Catholic Encyclopedia [Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967], p. 468). Much earlier, however, marriage was claimed as a sacrament; already in the eleventh century the Church had made provision for an official marriage rite in which the priest played a central role (Martin R. Dudley, “Sacramental Liturgies in the Middle Ages,” in Thomas Heffernan and E. Ann Matter, eds., The Liturgy of the Medieval Church [Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001], p. 234). Peter Lombard expressed faith in the sacramental possibilities of marriage already in 1150 (Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages [London and New York: Routledge, 1991], pp. 24–25) but it was only over the course of the following two centuries that widespread Church-sanctioned marriage ceremonies took hold.

  57. Duby, Love and Marriage, p. 11.

  58. See McNamara, “The Herrenfrage,” and Greenberg, Construction, p. 282.

  59. McNamara, “The Herrenfrage,” p. 23.

  60. Though clerical celibacy had been official Church policy since at least the fifth century, it was not enforced and most clergy continued to marry or maintain concubines. As priests passed their positions and churches on to their sons and many of the faithful turned to heretical movements, the Church reasserted itscontrol over its offices, property, and personnel and took the offensive in wresting from civil authorities some of the duties over which they had exercised control. See the essays collected in Michael Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York and London: Garland,

  1998), especially Megan McLaughlin’s contribution, for more on this topic, and

  McNamara, “The Herrenfrage.”

  61. Duby, Love and Marriage, p. 18.

  62. James Brundage (Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 474) notes that in Norway and Sweden large numbers of priests were themselves the illegitimate sons of priests. This practice of handing down a position and its wealth within families was one of the factors that had motivated the Church’s crackdown in the eleventh century. Brundage cites Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, “Ex fornicatione nati: Studies on the Position of Priests’ Sons from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 2 (1980), pp. 40–41.

  63. Though, as Larry Scanlon notes (“Unmanned Men and Eunuchs of God: Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus and the Sexual Politics of Papal Reform,” New Medieval Literatures 2 [1998], p. 54): “Celibacy, though it is the refusal of all car- nal desire, nevertheless assumes and builds upon such desire. That is to say, the physical discipline of the celibate depends on the prior discipline inherent in the

  ‘natural’ officium of sexuality, a masculine restriction of phallic desire to that which masculinity lacks, that is, femininity, according to a hierarchical scheme of sexual difference. For this reason, clerical celibacy was as much an extension of heterosex- ual desire as a repression of it.” McNamara sees the issue of clerical celibacy as one of the prime causes of the crisis of masculine identity that she locates in the twelfth century (“The Herrenfrage”). She sees the increasingly virulent homophobic and misogynistic discourse of the first half of the twelfth century as a manifestation of this crisis.

  64. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 69–70.

  65. Boswell, Christianity, p. 217 n.33.

  66. Guibert de Nogent makes this accusation explicitly in his discussion of the pre- cepts of a Manichean heresy which flourished near Soissons in northern France. The heretics are said to lie men with men and women with women, and to indulge in orgies as part of their secret rituals. John Benton, ed., Self and Society, p. 212.

  67. John Baldwin, Language of Sex, p. 44. Sodomy can, of course, refer to any non- procreative sex act, performed by any gender. See also Pierre Payer, Sex and the Peni- tentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 135; Boswell, Christianity, chapter 8; Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus iuris canonici, 2 vols. (Leipzig: G. Tauchnitz, 1879) on Gratian’s Decretum C.32, q.7, C.11 Adulterii; and Peter Lombard, Sententiarum, 4.38.2 in Libri IV Senten- tiarum, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum (Grottaferrata: Collegium S. Bonaventurae,

  1971–81).

  68. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, p. 399 and n.391; Baldwin, Language of

  Sex, p. 44.69. In the case of the Council of Paris, the statute forbade nuns from sharing a bed and stipulated that a lamp should burn all night, an adaptation of the original Benedic- tine rule that had governed monasteries since the fifth century. Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara and Oxford: ABC-Clio, Inc., 1979) p. 46, and Greenberg, Construction, p. 286.

  70. Baldwin (Language of Sex, p. 1) notes that there are over one hundred manuscripts extant.

  71. Peter confirms the association of Sodom and Gomorrah with same-sex erotic plea- sure and claims that the sin is so distasteful to God that he himself had to come to punish it. His account brims with imagery of barrenness, non-fertility, and death. See Baldwin, Language of Sex, pp. 44 and 247–250; and Boswell, Christianity, pp. 277–278 and 375–378 for a translation of the portion “De vitio sodomitico.”

  72. Michel Foucault accords this date great importance in the development of what he calls the ritualistic production of truth through confession (l’aveu) (Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 78). In Karma Lochrie’s account of his thinking, it pro- duced “a new Christian technology of the self and a discourse tailored to the requirements of power of the medieval church” (“Desiring Foucault,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, 1 [Winter 1997], p. 6). Lochrie also notes, however, in Covert Secrets, that many of the characteristics of this “new technol- ogy,” including private confession, were operating well before the marker date of 1215.

  73. Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century: A Study of Their Relations during the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period (New York: Hermon Press, 1966 [1933]), p. 308, cited in Stev
en Kruger, “Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?” in J. J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland,

  1997), pp. 21–41.

  74. In a 1250 law, Bologna allowed people banished because of a sodomy conviction to return to the city if they paid a fine. By 1259 they were banished permanently. A year later, sodomy was declared a capital offence. Frederick II’s 1231 Constitutions of Malfi, on the other hand, do not mention sodomy at all; nor do contemporary German law codes. See Greenberg, Construction, pp. 272–273; E. N. Van Kleffens, Hispanic Law until the End of the Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968), pp. 155–156, 207–213; Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence (New York: Frederick Unger, 1961), p. 112; and Boswell, Christianity, pp. 286–287.

  75. Baldwin, Language of Sex, p. 44.

  76. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, p. 97.

  77. See Greenberg Construction, p. 274, and his sources: Bailey, Homosexuality, pp. 142–

  143; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley

  & Sons Inc., 1976), pp. 391, 410 n.65; Goodich, Unmentionable, p. 78; Claude

  Courouve, “Sodomy Trials in France,” Gay Books Bulletin 1 (1979), pp. 22–26.