Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  45. “Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium – its inner arena and enclosure surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form . . . symbolizes the id in a quite startling way” (Jacques Lacan in Ecrits [Paris: Seuil, 196], trans. A. Sheridan as Ecrits: A Selection [New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977], p. 5).

  46. Sara Sturm-Maddox contends that it is Perceval’s overweening pride that has kept him from learning the secrets and repairing the sword, but she also admits at the conclusion of her discussion that “we have not learned the precise nature of his qualification to receive the answers concerning Lance and Grail” (“Tout est par senefiance: Gerbert’s Perceval,” The Arthurian Yearbook II, ed. Keith Busby [New York and London: Garland, 1992], p. 205).

  47. Perceval finds and kills the white stag with the help of the lady’s dog but almost immediately an evil maiden steals the dog away and will not return him until Perceval has liberated a tomb from a knight who lives within it. While fighting this knight, another unidentified knight steals the stag’s head and Perceval spends the rest of the romance pursuing quest within imbedded quest.

  48. Althusser, Ideology, p. 162.

  49. Larry Scanlon, in the course of a very interesting discussion about excommunication as an exclusionary curse, says this: “But its political purpose remained the same, to police communal boundaries, to protect and define the community through the power of exclusion.” See his article, “Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius,” Romanic Review 86, 2 (March 1995), p. 237.

  50. Jo Ann McNamara sees the incitement to celibacy as a key moment in the reshaping of the gender system in the twelfth century: “The imposition of celibacy on the clergy and clerical monopoly of the universities set up to produce a new professional class enforced masculinist claims for the incapacities of women . . .”; and yet “men without women, if deprived of sexuality, came dangerously close to traditional visions of femininity. Celibacy deprived its practitioners of the necessary ‘Other’ upon which to construct a gender persona” (“The Herrenfrage,” pp. 8–9).

  51. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).

  52. Bernard Cerquilini, ed., Le Roman du graal par Robert de Boron (Paris: 10/18, 1981).

  53. Steven Kruger’s work on “The Spectral Jew” suggests other fruitful ways of reading this passage (New Medieval Literatures 2 [1998], pp. 9–35).54. Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus (1049) contains an interesting passage that might shed some light on Gerbert’s curious pit of sodomy. In denouncing clerical sodomy, Peter says: “those who fall from the dignity of sacred orders into the chasm of sodomy are thrown into hell in justly deserved perpetual damnation” (qui a sacri ordinis dignitate in sodomie voraginem corrunt, in perpetue dampnationis baratram merito devoluuntur [Reindel, ed., Die Briefe, 328: 2–3]). This passage is cited in Scanlon, “Unmanned,” p. 39 n. 7.

  55. The lai of Guingamor offers another fine example of this logic at work. In that lai, a young knight is propositioned by the wife of his lord. When he refuses her offer, she takes revenge by calling for a hunt of the white boar (le sanglier blanc). Her husband, the King, responds: “You know I hate to hear any mention of that quest. Never has any man who undertook it returned alive” (Ce sachez vos, molt me desplest / Qant en nul leu en oi parler. Onques nus hon n’i pot aler qui puis em peu st reperier [see Micha, Lais, 72: ll. 172–175]). The Queen, of course, understands that Guingamor has no choice but to volunteer: “Sire, by the faith that I owe you, not for anything that anyone could offer in this world would I give up the chance to hunt that boar tomorrow” (Sire, en la foi que je vos doi, / ne leroie por rien qui soit, / qui tot le monde me donroit, / que demain ne chaz le senglier [ll. 226–229]).

  56. Sara Sturm-Maddox makes this argument in another context. She postulates that the reason Perceval’s sword breaks as he bangs on the door of the castle in the woods where he will learn how to repair his sword, is that he, too, has tried to take heaven by force and must be punished (“Senefiance,” p. 199).

  57. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen offers a reading of a similar use of the topos in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that is consonant with my own: “In romance the beheading topos lost its political resonance and became once more what it seems originally to have been: an exemplary rite of passage rather than an ideological pronouncement.” See “Decapitation and Coming of Age: Constructing Masculinity and the Monstrous,” Arthurian Yearbook III, ed. Keith Busby (New York and London: Garland, 1993), p. 177.

  58. Leupin’s (“Faille”) reading ties this episode to similar ones in the other three Continuations in which a faille (gap) in signification is highlighted. He then posits that language, writing itself, is instrumental in bridging or obscuring these gaps.

  59. In Evans’ succinct formulation of The Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis (Dictio- nary): “The real is thus no longer simply opposed to the imaginary, but is also located beyond the symbolic. Unlike the symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as that between presence and absence, ‘there is no absence in the real’ (S2, 313) . . . [the real] is outside language and ‘resists symbolization absolutely’ (S1, 66). The real is the ‘impossible’ (S11, 167) because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order, and impossible to attain in any way. It is this character of impossibility and of resistance to symbolization which lends the real its essentially traumatic quality.” See Judith Butler’s pertinent statement a propos of another context: “What would masculinity ‘be’ without thisaggressive circuit of renunciation from which it is wrought? Gays in the military threaten to undo masculinity only because this masculinity is made of repudiated homosexuality” (Psychic Life, p. 143).

  60. The fairy’s understanding of sexuality would then be consonant with Judith Butler’s notion (Psychic Life, p. 134) ofa pre-Oedipal renunciation of same-sex attachment, the foreclosure of which is mourned as a prerequisite to heterosexual identity: “Giving up the object becomes possible only on the condition of a melancholic internalization or, what might for our purposes turn out to be even more important, a melancholic incorporation.”

  61. Butler, Psychic Life, p. 113.

  62. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, screenplay, direction by Woody Allen, produced by Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe and Brodsky Gould production, 1972; CBS/Fox Video, 1983.

  63. Peter Cantor discusses Sodom in just these terms in the virulently homophobic De vitio sodomitico section of his Verbum abbreviatum, a late twelfth-century text. In John Baldwin’s summary (Language of Sex, p. 44): “Divine fire so thoroughly destroyed the region of the Pentapolis that the sea itself became dead, unable to support fish, fowl or ships. Trees bearing comely fruit turned to ashes at mere touch . . .”

  64. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).

  65. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

  Press, 1955).

  66. Sedgwick, in using this terminology, acknowledged her debt to D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). See Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 88.

  67. David Lorenzo Boyd (“Disrupting the Norm: Sodomy, Culture and the Male Body in Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus,” Essays in Medieval Studies 11 [1994], p. 68) makes this same point: “But as much as Damian emphasises sodomy as an evil in itself, the message that emerges is that sodomy is an evil because the heteronormative order is too weak, too unstable, to withstand deviance.”

  68. Gerbert mentions sodomites only once more in the text. When asked why he persecutes good men, the devil answers that the rest are already his: “li malvais seront tot mien: / li userier, li ypocri
te, li desleal, li soudomite, / chiax laisse je tot en pais vivre, / car Diex en la fin le mes livre” (the bad ones are mine already: the usurers, hypocrites, traitors, sodomites – I let them live in peace because God always lets me have them in the end [ll. 14539–14542]).

  69. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, p. 100.

  4 q ueering the celtic: marie de france and the men who don’t marr y

  1. Gayle S. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy of Sex’,”

  in R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review,1975), pp. 157–210; rpt. in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An

  Anthology (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), p. 543.

  2. Steven F. Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s

  Pardoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6, 1 (Spring 1994), p. 139.

  3. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, cited in Pike, trans., Frivolity, p. 18.

  4. I will be citing text from Lais de Marie de France, trans. and notes by Laurence Harf-Lancner, ed. Karl Warnke (Paris: Livre de poche, 1990). The numbers in parentheses following quotations refer first to page numbers, then to line numbers in that edition. Translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

  5. “Soventes fies en ai veillie” = “many is the time I stayed up all night working on these lais” (Prologue, 24, 42). “Sen” is intelligence or learning (22: 16, 20); “sur- plus,” though it also means surplus or leftover, has been interpreted as “meaning,” “signified,” or, conversely, what goes beyond meaning, what cannot, for whatever reason, be signified: God, sex, pain, and pleasure, intangible rhetorical effects like irony. See R. Howard Bloch, “The Medieval Text – ‘Guigemar’ – As a Provoca- tion to the Discipline of Medieval Studies,” in K. Brownlee, M. S. Brownlee, and S. G. Nichols, eds., The New Medievalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 99–112.

  6. Guigemar also follows the Prologue in the only other manuscript (N, an Old Norse translation) which contains both texts. In manuscript S (a French thirteenth- century manuscript) Guigemar is copied first but the Prologue is missing. In the thirteenth-century Picard manuscript P, Guigemar follows Yonec but precedes Lanval. See A. Ewert, ed., Marie de France, Lais (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976).

  7. “Listen, Lords, what Marie has to say, she who is not forgotten in her day” or “she who takes her responsibilities seriously.”

  8. “They want to ruin her reputation and so begin to act like dirty, back-stabbing, cowardly dogs, who bite others to further their treasonous designs.”

  9. These tendencies are particularly pronounced in the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Grail cycle; and nowhere more than in the Queste del saint graal, where the tensions between matter and spirit, sex and abstinence, homo and hetero become central concerns. See Peggy McCracken, “Chaste Subjects: Gen- der, Heroism, and Desire in the Grail Quest,” in G. Burger and S. F. Kruger, eds., Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 123–142, on the queer heroes of the Grail romances who “desire not to desire.”

  10. Any number of Arthurian tournament scenes correspond to this description. See, for one unusual example, the scene from the romance of Eneas, in which Lavine falls in love with Eneas as she gazes down from her tower upon him and his Trojan cohorts (ll. 8047–8460).

  11. Joan Ferrante and Robert Hanning (The Lais of Marie de France [Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1978], p. 31) translate the passage: “But in forming him nature had so badly erred”; Harf-Lancner (29, 57): “Et pourtant la nature avait commis une faute en le formant”; Harry F. Williams adapts it freely (Les Lais de Marie de France [Newark, Del.: Linguatext, 1991], p. 84): “il avait un grand de´faut.”12. Ovid is frequently quoted in early courtly literature and his influence can be found both in the developing rhetoric of romance and lyric and in the situations inspired by his work. He was widely studied in the schools, often in the form of glosses or sententiae. He was also widely cited by didactic authors such as Isidore of Seville, Hugh of Saint-Victor, Brunetto Latini, and Vincent de Beauvais. See Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich: Arbeo- Gesellschaft, 1986); Aime´ Petit, “Aspects de l’influence d’Ovide sur les romans antiques du XIIe sie`cle,” in R. Chevallier, ed., Actes du colloque: Pr´esence d’Ovide (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1982), pp. 219–240; and Peter L. Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

  There is widespread disagreement over whether Marie rejects Ovid even as she uses him or embraces him as a positive model. See Glyn S. Burgess (The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Context [Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987], p. 135) and Robert Hanning (“Courtly Contexts for Urban Cultus,” Symposium

  35 [1981], pp. 34–56) for the former view; M. L. Stapleton (“Venus Vituperator,” Classical and Modern Literature 13 [1993], pp. 283–295) for the latter, and SunHee Kim Gertz (“Echoes and Reflections of Enigmatic Beauty in Ovid and Marie de France,” Speculum 73 [1998], pp. 372–396) for a very interesting discussion of how Marie’s work echoes Ovid, rhetorically and thematically.

  13. The song can be found in The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, ed. S. J. Nichols, Jr. and John A. Galm (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962).

  14. The vida for Bernart de Ventadorn says that the Viscount of Ventadorn sent him away from his court when he discovered that Bernart had been having an affair with his wife. Bernart then traveled to the court of the Duchess of Normandy with whom he supposedly had another love affair and for whom he wrote many songs. Only when she married Henry II of England did this idyll end. This account, given by the vida, is inaccurate in that Eleanore became Duchess of Normandy only after her marriage. Nonetheless, if we assume the vida to be partially correct, it would appear that Bernart worked for Eleanore between 1152 and 1154 (when she was between husbands) and then followed her to England, where he continued to write for both the King and Queen. See Jean Boutie`re, A. H. Schutz, and I. M.

  Cluzel, eds., Biographies des troubadours: textes proven¸caux des XIIIe et XIVe si`ecles

  (Paris: Nizet, 1973), p. 25 n.5.

  15. It has even been speculated that Marie was the illegitimate daughter of Godefroy d’Anjou, father of Henry II. This would make her the half-sister of the King. This historical figure became the Abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey in 1181 and died around

  1216. See Ewert, ed., Lais, p. ix for a survey of the other possible identifications that have been forwarded.

  16. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 3): “Now Narcissus / Was sixteen years of age, and could be taken / Either for boy or man; and boys and girls / Both sought his love, but in that slender stripling / Was pride so fierce no boy, no girl, could touch him. / He was out hunting one day, driving deer / Into the nets, when a nymphnamed Echo saw him. . . . / She was not the only one on whom Narcissus / Had visited frustration; there were others, / Naiads or Oreads, and young men also, / Till finally one rejected youth, in prayer, / Raised up his hands to Heaven: ‘May Narcissus / Love one day, so, himself, and not win over / The creature whom he loves!” (Rolfe Humphries, trans., The Metamorphoses [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

  1957], pp. 68–70).

  17. Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la rose (c. 1235) is probably the most notable later use of the Narcissus figure (Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, ed. A. Strubel [Paris: Livre de poche, 1992]). The fountain of Narcissus is now an artifact not of nature but of artistic creation, probably built under the direction of the God of Love. The lover is lured there by this God of Love who tracks his movement like a patient hunter, waiting for the best shot (“Et li dieus d’amors m’a seu / Endementiers, en aguetant / Co li vanerres qui atant / que la beste en bon leu se mete. / Por laissier aler la saiete” [ll. 1417–1421]). This is quite different from the earlier figure f
ound in Bernart. Love is no longer a trap set for men by women, or by men for each other using women as the intermediary, but an adventure quest, directed by one man against another, a homosocial romance par excellence. See Gaunt, “Bel Acueil,” for more on gendering and allegory in the Rose, and Ellen Friedrich (“When a Rose is not a Rose: Homoerotic Emblems in the Roman de la rose,” in Karen J. Taylor, ed., Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature (New York and London: Garland, 1998), pp. 21–43, on homoeroticism. See also Steven Brahm (Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001]) for queer readings of Narcissus.

  18. The text has been dated to c. 1160, i.e., written by a contemporary of the authors of Eneas, the Roman de Th`ebes, Marie de France, and the other poets who benefited from the patronage of Plantagenet court. I will be citing the edition by Ray- mond Cormier in Three Ovidian Tales of Love (New York and London: Garland,