78. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, pp. 472–473.
79. Kolve’s rich and suggestive study of just one liturgical play, Filius Getronis (Son of Getron) (“Ganymede,” p. 1061) manages to evoke the multiple ways in whichsuch issues could be dramatized within a monastic community and how such issues could, at least dramatically, be resolved.
80. On Jonathan and David, see 1 Samuel 18.1–3; 20.30, 41–43; 2 Samuel 1.26 (Jerusalem Bible). On John and Christ, see John’s repeated reference to himself as “the disciple Jesus loves” in his gospels: 13.23, 19.26, 20.2, 21.7, 20 (“The disciple Jesus loved was reclining next to Jesus; Simon Peter signed to him and said, “Ask who it is he means,” so leaning back on Jesus’ breast he said . . .” [13.23]). See the discussions of David and Jonathan in Boswell, Christianity, pp. 238–239, 252; Halperin, One Hundred Years, pp. 75–87; and Kolve “Ganymede,” p. 1052. On John the Evangelist, see Boswell, Christianity, pp. 115 n.76, 225–226 and Plate 13; Boswell, Same-Sex Unions, pp. 122 n.59, 138–139; Kolve, “Ganymede,” p. 1052 n.95.
81. “Deleo super te, frater mi Ionatha, decore nimis et amabilis super amorem mulierum. Sicut mater unicum amat filium suum, ita ego te diligebam” (I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women. As a mother loves her only son, so did I love you). According to McGuire, Aelred of Rievaulx looked to the friendship of David and Jonathan as a model of the “mirror for true friendship” throughout his life (Friendship, p. 321; see also p. 237).
82. As Boswell notes, the emphasis on friendship as the deepest of human attachments is entirely characteristic of the classical world: “‘Just friends’ would have been a paradox to Aristotle or Cicero: no relationship was more emotional, more inti- mate, more intense than friendship. . . . [it] was passionate and indissoluble, and much literature idealises intense, lifelong friendships involving great sacrifice on the part of one or both friends – motifs the modern world tends to associate almost exclusively with romantic love” (Same Sex Unions, p. 76). See also David Konstan (Friendship in the Classical World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]) for a fuller treatment of the classical antecedents of these models and Haseldine, “Love, Separation,” for the rhetorical formulation of friendship in letter writing.
As an example, here is Bernard’s letter of grief over the death of his brother, Gerard:
Ego, ego illa portio misera in luto iacens, truncata parte sui, et parte potiori, et dicitur mihi: ‘Ne fleveris?’ Avulsa sunt viscera mea a me, et dicitur mihi: ‘Ne senseris?’ Sentio, sentio vel invitus, quia nec fortitudo lapidum fortitudo mea, nec caro mea aenea est; sentio prorsus et doleo, et dolor meus in conspectu meo semper. (cited in McGuire, Friendship, p. 504 n.149)
83. McGuire, Friendship, p. 6.
84. McGuire (Friendship, p. 6) points out that these Eastern sources imply that even a father and son would be liable to sexual attraction as a result of their isolation; thus, they recommend such a pairing only if the youth has first lost his identity and marred his good looks with acid!
85. McGuire (Friendship, p. 18) cites Jerome’s translation: “Si deprehensus fuerit aliquis e fratribus libenter cum pueris sedere, et ludere, et habere amicitias aetatis infirmae” (see also Friendship, p. 435 n.57).86. Sister M. Monica Wagner, Saint Basil, Ascetical Works (New York: Fathers of the
Church, 1950), p. 23.
87. Brian McGuire summarizes nicely in the following passage a key distinction between the Eastern and Western monastic traditions: “Eastern writers made abso- lute distinctions between ways of life within the Christian brotherhood; Western writers combined the desert and the city in a new monasticism. If the East made the desert a city, the West brought the spirit of the desert to the city . . . the Western fathers made one central point from which their medieval heirs could benefit: they insisted that love of an individual neighbor was not necessarily a dangerous commitment” (Friendship, p. 90).
88. “In the entire section V of Verba Seniorum (PL, 73), I cannot find a single story that refers to homosexual temptation. There is the abstract cogitatio fornicationis, but whenever the temptation is concretized, it deals with a woman” (McGuire, Friendship, pp. 41 and 438 n.8).
89. Censorship within commentaries and translations abound. The Problemata (attributed to Aristotle) 4:26 discusses why some men enjoy intercourse with other men, but Jacques Despar’s fifteenth-century commentary is frankly evasive when he reaches this topic (Problem 26) and a late Greek commentary on the Problemata omits that passage entirely (Cadden, “Sciences/Silences,” p. 43). Brian McGuire notes that the passage from Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter on the grief he felt over his brother’s death (cited in note 82) was excised from the Exordium magnum cisterciense, an official reckoning of the Clairvaux Cistercians’ history since their founding: “Even in its rich use of legends about Bernard, it sheds little light on his friendships. It is probably by no means accidental that the Exordium leaves out some of the most passionate passages in Bernard’s description of his love for his brother, Gerard” (Friendship, p. 184). In similar fashion, John Boswell notes (Same- Sex Unions, p. 264 n.12) that MS Ba of Gerald of Wales’ Topography of Ireland was defaced at a point in the text where same-sex unions were being discussed. The rubric De argumento nequitiae et novo desponsationis genere (An argument for their wickedness and a new kind of marriage) and a drawing were cut out of the page.
90. The plan of St. Gall shows that in early Benedictine houses children were confined to a special cloister, separate from both the monks’ quarters and the “outer school” where noble boys were educated for careers in the outside world. As Kolve says: “Monastic architecture was designed very specifically to prevent desire for the love of anyone but God” (“Ganymede,” p. 1038).
91. A. C. Meisel and M. L. del Mastro, eds., The Rule of Saint Benedict (New York: Image Books, 1975); Kolve, “Ganymede,” p. 1040; Greenberg, Construction, p. 284.
92. See Dom Thomas Symons, trans., Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis monachorum sanctimonialiumque / The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1953), pp. 7–8. The passage is cited in Kolve, “Ganymede,” p. 1028. Kolve also provides an excellent discussion of the wider implications of this passage.93. Other Carolingian authors who express similar strongly worded devotion to their male correspondents or the dedicatees of their poems include Rhabanus Mau- rus (776–856) and his student, Walafrid Strabo (809–849). See Helen Waddell, Medieval Latin Lyrics, 5th ed. (London: Constable, 1951); Stehling, Medieval Latin Poems; James Wilhelm, Gay and Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology from Sappho to Michelangelo (New York: Garland, 1995); and Boswell, Christianity.
94. Cited in McGuire, Friendship, p. 122, from E. L. Du mmler, ed., Epistolae Karolini
Aevi (Berlin: Weidmannos, 1895), Epistle 157, p. 255.
95. Cited in McGuire, Friendship, p. 118, from Du mmler, Epistolae, Epistle 10, p. 36.
96. Cited in McGuire, Friendship, p. 123.
97. See Stehling, Medieval Latin Poems, pp. 38–53, for samples of Baudri’s love verse, and Gerald Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). See also the illumi- nating remarks on the homoerotic poetry of Leoninus in Bruce Holsinger and David Townsend, “Ovidian Homoerotics in Twelfth-Century Paris,” GLQ 8, 3 (2002), pp. 389–423.
98. Boswell, Christianity.
99. The profundity of the love that Galahad feels for Lancelot in the Vulgate cycle would alone be enough to disprove that statement. See E. Jane Burns, “Intro- duction,” in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, 5 vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1993–96), vol. I, pp. xv– xxxii; Christiane Marchello-Nizia, “Amour courtois, socie´te´ masculine et figures du pouvoir,” Annales 36, 2 (1981), pp. 969–982; and Gaunt’s chapter on “Mono- logic Masculinity,” in Gender and Genre.
100. See Ha
seldine, “Love, Separation,” pp. 238–255.
101. Aelred of Rievaulx’s conception of friendship was hardly the norm, at least if we go by the surviving copies of his manuscripts. Although he composed his Spiritual Friendship at the request of Bernard of Clairvaux, the library of the Cistercian mother house in Clairvaux held only one copy, acquired in the thirteenth century. Aelred’s works circulated for the most part in England with a few copies having made it to the Low Countries.
102. McGuire, Friendship, p. 505 n.155; Bernard Lucet, Les codifications cisterciennes de
1237 et de 1257 (Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 1977), pp. 317–
318; and Lucet, La codification cistercienne de 1202 et son ´evolution ult´erieure (Rome: Biblioteca Cisterciensis, 1964), p. 122.
103. See above, n.69. More can be found Bullough, Sexual Variance, pp. 384 and 408
n.28. He is citing from the Concilium Parisiense, par. III, ii, col. 849.
104. McGuire, Friendship, pp. 387–388.
105. Summa theologica, Q. 92, obj. 1; cited in Paul E. Sigmund, ed., St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 38.
106. Cadden, Sex Difference, p. 174.
107. Ibid., pp. 177–178.
108. Baldwin, Language of Sex, p. 230.109. Baldwin, Language of Sex, pp. 230–232, and Cadden, Sex Difference chapter 1, provide excellent summaries and interpretations of this material.
110. Peter Cantor also recognizes the physiological status of the hermaphrodite but notes that the Church grants such individuals the option of choosing definitively only one sex and gender. Once chosen, largely following physiological character- istics, the individual is limited to acting out the role assigned to that sex/gender. No switching is allowed (Baldwin, Language of Sex, p. 45).
111. Cadden, Sex Difference, p. 202.
112. Ibid., p. 204.
113. Cadden, “Sciences/Silences,” p. 41.
114. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, p. 100.
115. Cadden, “Sciences/Silences,” pp. 46 and 52.
116. Cadden (“Sciences/Silences,” p. 49) attributes to the “persistent instability” of the text the possibility of such a reading. She isolates three rhetorical techniques that characterize his work: “normalizing the subject by citing accepted authorities and using conventional scholastic methods,” persistent application of naturalis- tic explanations at the anatomical, physiological, and psychological levels,” and “evasive and unstable usage of language, especially of names for the types of men he is discussing” (p. 43). Cadden also notes strategic reasons for this “instability”: “There were many reasons not to speak, and Peter’s run-ins with the inquisition, apparently in connection with his tendency to overstate the powers of nature, hint at the presence of political dangers, in addition to the disciplinary divisions and standards of decorum” (p. 51).
117. This notion of an itch is actually closer to the way that many of the scholastics theorized sexual desire. Jean Gerson, for example, advocated warning boys very early of the dangers of sexual desire: “Because of the ‘corruption of nature,’ boys of three or four are already inclined toward masturbation because of a certain unfamiliar itch that accompanies erections” (Dyan Elliott, “Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray,” in Lochrie, McCracken, and Schultz, eds., Constructing, p. 9. Elliot is citing Gerson, De confessione mollitei, 8: 72–73, found in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. 8, ed. Mgr. Glorieux [Paris: Descle´e & Cie., 1960]).
118. On the rich associations of the hyena with sodomy, see Boswell, Christianity,
138–143.
119. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, p. 151.
120. Cadden (“Sciences/Silences,” p. 52) concludes that on the basis of Peter of Abano’s commentary one may conclude that “the medieval and the modern overlap with respect to significant areas of homoeroticism – however different the cultural readings of these acts and desires might be.”
121. Cadden, Sex Difference, p. 221; Greenberg, Construction, pp. 278-279.
122. Juvenal, in his Satire 2 (ll. 15–21), offers two portraits of “feminized males,” imply- ing that in the first case the man’s disposition is a physiological inevitability: “Peribomius, therefore, provides a more honest and genuine case. That I put down to the workings of fate. His walk and expression proclaim his disorder. Such folk, by their candor, call for pity: their very obsession secures indulgence.Far worse are those who condemn perversion in Hercules’ style, and having held forth about manly virtue, wriggle their rumps.” See Juvenal, The Satires, trans. N. Ruud, intro. and notes W. Barr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
123. Peter of Abano is today best known for his esoteric speculations on astrology.
124. In terms of the four humors that dominated medieval medical thought and treat- ment, males were thought to be hot and dry, prone to higher degrees of yellow and black bile, the humors of fire and earth, and choleric and melancholic natures; while females were cold and moist, dominated by blood and phlegm, associated with water and earth, sanguine and phlegmatic personalities.
125. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos II, 3, 61–62; cited in Tolomeo, Le Previsioni astrologiche, p. 111.
2 ima gining sodomy
1. Toril Moi, “Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love,” in David Aers, ed., Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, History (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1986), p. 20. A portion of the section of this chapter on Peter Damian will also be appearing in a volume of essays entitled Troubled Vision, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York and London: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).
2. Michael Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–
1750, trans. R. Crowley, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Cited in Crane, Gender and Romance, p. 167.
3. On the association of sodomy with Muslims and heresy in general, see Boswell, Christianity, pp. 278–286; Goodich, Unmentionable and Other Middle Ages; Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996); Brundage, Law Sex, and Christian Society, p. 399; and Gautier de Tornay’s L’Histoire de Gilles de Chyn, ed. Edwin B. Place (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1941), ll. 3555–3556. On the association with learning and new urban spaces again see Boswell, Christianity, chapters 7–10. For political critiques, see the discussion of John of Salisbury and Walter Map below. See Greenberg, Construction, p. 297 n.285, for more on the economic and class tensions that found expression in contumely against Jews, heretics, and sodomites, and Goodich, Unmentionable, chapters 1–3.
4. Maurice Lever, Les buˆ chers de Sodome: histoire des “infaˆmes” (Paris: Fayard, 1985), p. 41.
5. “ubi regnat luxuria, ibi miserabiliter ancillatur et affligitur animus. O Parisius, quam idonea es ad capiendas et decipiendas animas!” (J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completes, Series Latina [Turnholt: Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1855, 1976],
202: col. 519, cited in McGuire, Friendship, p. 486 n.190. Henceforth the Patrologia
Latina will be abbreviated as PL.)
6. These short texts are found in Stehling, Medieval Latin Poems, pp. 94–95. They were found written on folio 81 in a twelfth- or thirteenth-century hand in aninth-century manuscript, now in Leiden (Vossianus lat. in oct. 88), interspersed amongst letters, grammatical and philosophical works:
91
Carnotum, Senonis, pereant ubi prostat Adonis lege lupararis: sunt ibi stupra maris.
His infecta malis urbs nobilis, urbs specialis
Parisius tenerao nubere gaudet ero.
Tu magis insanis his omnibus, Aurelianis, Que titulum sceleris huius habendo peris.
92
Sordent nunc husque Carnotum Parisiusque
In Sodome vitio, Senonis quoque fit Paris Io.
93
Aurelianenses sunt primi, si bene penses
; Illorum mores, puerorum concubitores.
7. Cormier and Kuster, “Old Views,” p. 605.
8. Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), p. 175.
9. Tatlock, Legendary History, p. 353. To refer to any of these monastic or ecclesiastical figures by nationality is problematic, to say the least. Anselm was born in Lombardy, educated at Bec, in Normandy, and finally became Archbishop of Canterbury in
1093,a position he held until his death in 1109.
10. “Filii nobilium, dum sunt iuniores, / mittuntur in Franciam fieri doctores, / quos prece vel precio domant corruptores; / sic pretextatos referunt Artaxata mores” (Moralisch-satirische Gedichte Walters von Chaˆtillon, ed. Karl Strecker [Heidelberg: Winter, 1929], pp. 69–70; cited in Boswell, Christianity, p. 236 n.98; Stehling, Medieval Latin Poems, pp. 80–81).
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