Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  61. See Althusser’s curt summation of free will: “An individual believes in God, or Duty, or Justice, etc. This belief derives (for everyone, i.e. for all those who live in an ideological representation of ideology, which reduces ideology to ideas endowedby definition with a spiritual existence) from the ideas of the individual concerned, i.e. from him as a subject with a consciousness which contains the ideas of his belief. In this way, i.e. by means of the absolutely ideological ‘conceptual’ device [dispositif ] thus set up [a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes], the [material] attitude of the subject concerned naturally follows” (“Ideology,” p. 167).

  62. A similar scene occurs in another Celtic-inspired lai, Guingamor (in Micha, ed., Lais, p. 63). The young knight is propositioned by the wife of his lord in terms similar to those found in Lanval, but the Queen, rather than accuse him of treachery or sodomy, sets up a challenge to find the sanglier blanc, knowing full well that no one returns from that impossible quest.

  63. This scene, itself derivative of the biblical scene of Potiphar’s seduction and accusa- tion of Joseph (Genesis 39. 6–20), seems to have been the source of similar scenes in later texts. See, for example, this passage from L’Histoire de Gilles de Chyn (1230–40: La roine tote en tressaut, / Por .i. pau li cuers ne li faut / De la joie que veu l’a; / Dejouste lui seoir s’en va. / . . . / De s’amour, car n’en a talent; / En autre liu li cuers li tent. / La roine se couroucha, / Vilainement l’arraisona: / ‘Gilles,’ fait ele,

  ‘mout me duel / D’une riens que dire vous wel.’ / ‘De coi, dame?’ ‘D’une folie / Qui mout voz torne a vilonnie. / Ains ne vosistez dame amer / Puis que venistez dec¸a mer, / Tant fust gente, haute ne basse.’ / ‘De coi?’ fait Gilles, ‘me meslasse? / Je ne voi dame ou je peu sse / Mettre m’amor si com deu sse.’ / ‘Comment, Gilles, que faut en moi?’ / ‘Nule riens, dame, par ma foy. / Voz estes dame bele et gente, / Mais j’ai ailleurs mise m’entente.’ / ‘Voire,’ fait ele, ‘en .i. garchon; / Vos traie´s de mauvais archon, / N’a point de fer en vostre flece, / En vous a mout vilaine tece; / N’aiez cure de teil mestier / Car trop em porriez avillier.’ / Gilles l’entent, ne li plot mie / Qu’ele le rete d’irezie; / Si li respont en eslepas: / ‘Sodomitez ne sui je pas; / Ains ainc bien et si sui ame´s,/ Plus que nus hom me mere ne´,/ De la millor, de la plus bele/ Qui soit... (ll. 3524–3561)

  [The Queen is shaking, her heart is breaking with joy over seeing him; she goes to sit beside him . . . he doesn’t want her love; his heart is elsewhere. Now the Queen is angry and she speaks to him in this coarse and dishonorable manner: – “Gilles,” she says, “I am very upset about something and I want to talk to you about it.” – “About what? my lady?” – “About a crazy rumor I heard that disgraces your name. You have shown no interest in loving any lady, neither noble nor peasant, since you returned from overseas.” – “What are you going on about?” says Gilles. “I see no lady I could love the way I really should.” – “Oh? And what’s wrong with me?” – “Why nothing, my lady, I assure you. You are a beautiful and noble woman, but my heart is elsewhere.” – “That’s right,” she said, “with a boy; you are pulling on an evil bow there, and there’s certainly no metal in your arrow. There is an ignoble stain within you [(or: on your reputation]. Have nothing more to do with that profession for it could truly ruin you.” Gilles hears her but is not pleased that she is calling him a heretic. He answers back, right away: “I am no sodomite; quite the opposite. I love someone and am loved, more than any man born of a mother, by the best and most beautiful woman ever.. .”.]64. Another contemporary Celtic lai (Graelent) tells a very similar story but forgoes the scene of seduction and accusation of sodomy (Micha, ed., Lais, p. 20). Instead, the young knight Graelent prefers to say publicly that the Queen is the most beautiful woman he knows. There ensues a trial and a rescue by his fairy lover, just as in Lanval.

  65. Raphael Levy (“L’allusion a` la sodomie dans Eneas,” Philological Quarterly 27 [1948], pp. 372–76) studied the word “mestier” in relation to the Queen’s usage in the homo- phobic tirade in the Eneas romance and found that it often refers to prostitution and in three particular cases to male prostitution and male–male sex acts.

  66. Lanval is not, of course, on trial for sodomy, but for having offended the honor of the King and Queen. In fact, there is never any suggestion that the men accused or suspected of sodomy in the texts discussed in this book should be punished by civil or religious authorities (Greenberg, Construction, p. 288; Goodich, Unmentionable, pp. 43–46), though excommunication, exile from the community, and penance were the recommended punishments, as per the Lateran Council of 1179 (Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 399).

  67. Avalon is presumably the Insula Avallonis mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Historia Regum Britanniae. It is the home of Morgan, the place where Arthur’s sword was forged and to which he was returned after his fateful wounds in the final battle. It is widely associated in the twelfth century with a sort of afterlife paradise where apples grow in abundance and life is sweet. Later in the century, there are claims that link it with the abbey of Glastonbury (Norris J. Lacy, ed., The Arthurian Encyclopedia [New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1986], p. 32).

  68. See also Sharon Kinoshita’s reading of Lanval (“‘Cherchez la femme’: Feminist Criticism and Marie and France’s Lanval,” Romance Notes 34, 3 [Spring 1994], pp. 263–273) in which she argues that the truly revolutionary act of Lanval is to reject voluntarily both the orders of feudalism and chivalry. In this way, Marie de France constructs the other world as a space of possible transgression, beyond the symbolic structures which patrol gender at court.

  69. Judith Rice Rothschild (“A Rapprochement Between Bisclavret and Lanval,” Specu- lum 48, 4 [October 1973], p. 88) emphasizes that Lanval’s disappearance at the end of the lai actually enacts the two dire consequences predicted if his lover were not to appear: “E s’il ne puet guarant aveir, / ceo li devum faire saveir: / tut sun servise pert del rei, / e sil deit cungeer de sei” (And if he cannot produce a guar- antor [alibi, witness, savior] this is what we must make understood: that he will have lost the right to serve the King and that the King will have to banish him [ll. 459–462]). Furthermore, Lanval is as isolated from the court at the end of the lai as he was at the beginning; and his boast to the fairy at his first meeting has become a description of his actual state: “Pur vus guerpirai tutes genz” (128). All of this would lead us to conclude that the fairy episode, including the final liber- ation scene, is a figment of Lanval’s own imagination. From the perspective of all others at court, he has lost his trial and been banished, in fulfillment of his own prophecy.70. See the footnotes to SunHee Kim Gertz’s “Transferral, Transformation, and the Act of Reading in Marie de France’s Bisclavret,” Romance Quarterly 39, 4 (1992), pp. 408–410, for an excellent survey of different interpretations of Bisclavret.

  71. Harf-Lancner (Lais, p. 119) says: “It will be the end of your love for me and my own loss of self ”; Ferrante and Hanning, eds. (Lais, p. 93), agree: “I’d lose your love and even my very self.”

  72. I am thinking of the lost or disguised identities of Guigemar in exile, Tristan in Ch`evrefeuille, and Muldumarec in the form of the bird; but the same could be said, from another perspective, about Fresne, the fairy lover of Lanval, or Milon and his son as they confront each other in battle.

  73. Actually, there was little agreement among theologians over whether man’s sexual nature was the result of an operation of natural law or an anomalous, secondary, diabolical intervention into creation. See Caroline W. Bynum (“Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” Speculum 73, 4 [October 1998], pp. 987–1013), and James Brundage (Law, Sex, and Christian Society) on the Glossa Ordinaria and the Decretum. Either way, however, it was commonly agreed that man without God would revert to a beast that lives for pleasure alone.

  74. The wife has already sexualized his disappearance, suggesting
that he spends his away time with someone else he loves (“mun escient que vus amez” [I think you must love (someone else)] [118, 51]).

  75. Claude Seignolle, Contes populaires de Guyenne (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve, 1946).

  76. The lai of Tyolet offers an interesting perspective on Bisclavret. Tyolet, a naive and rustic lad of fifteen who recalls the young Perceval in the Conte du graal, asks the first knight he meets what his name is. The man responds only that he is a knight. Tyolet then asks what kind of a beast a knight is, where it lives and where it comes from. The knight answers that “a knight is a formidable beast which attacks and devours other beasts. He usually lives in the forest but can sometimes be found on the plains” (E Tyolet a demande´ / quel beste chevalier estoit, / ou conversoit e dont venait. / – Par foi, fet il, jel te dirai / . . . / C’est une beste molt cremue, / autres bestes prent et menjue, / el bois con- verse molt souvent, / e a plainne terre ensement [Micha, ed., Lais, pp. 188–

  190, 137–145]). This definition sounds very much like Marie’s definition of Bisclavret, thus suggesting that the scourge of the forest described by Marie in her prologue is actually an Arthurian knight. From the conclusion of Bisclavret, one might even understand that she is claiming that the taming of a knight is best accomplished through homosocial rather than heterosexual bonds. Tyolet’s mother echoes this negative evaluation of knights when she reiterates for her son later in the text: “All you’ve seen is the kind of beast which captures and eats so many others” (que tu as tel beste veu e / qui mainte autre prent e manjue” [ll. 256–257]).

  77. By “aventure” Marie probably means a strange story, or a story in which there is magical or supernatural intervention. Though Bisclavret does not follow the pattern of otherworldly travel as the road to heterosexual union, the forest is clearly an arena of magic and transformation.78. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.

  Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).

  79. The treatment of the Arthurian knight, Kay, offers an interesting answer to this question. The diversity of treatment he receives at the hands of authors following in Chre´tien de Troyes’s footsteps indicate that how to treat a mocking (as in Le Chevalier au lion and Conte du graal ), not particularly heroic (Chevalier de la charrette), unloving and unlovable knight was a real quandary. Kay emerges from the conglomerate of Arthurian tales as the least consistent and most perplexing of the knights of the Round Table.

  80. Kinoshita, “Cherchez,” p. 272.

  5 writing the self: al ain de lille’s de pl anctu n a turae

  1. Slavoj Z izek, “Da Capo Senza Fine,” in S. Z izek, J. Butler, and E. Laclau, eds., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 220.

  2. Slavoj Z izek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 106.

  3. Slavoj Z izek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popu- lar Culture (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1992), citing Robert

  Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (Hicksville, NY: Gnome Press,

  1959).

  4. Z izek, Looking Awry, pp. 14–15.

  5. Z izek’s useful discussion of Hegel’s notion of negation can be found in The Ticklish

  Subject, pp. 90–92.

  6. All citations from the De planctu naturae are from James J. Sheridan’s translation, Plaint of Nature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). The Latin text is taken from Nikolaus M. Haring, De planctu naturae, Studi Medievali

  19, 2 (1978), pp. 797–879. The De planctu is still extant in at least 133 manuscripts,

  though in twenty-two of these it is entitled the Enchiridion. From this Haring concludes that it was untitled and anonymous in the first written copies and that it was largely unknown during Alain’s lifetime. A portion of this chapter was presented as a paper at the Queer Middle Ages conference, held at the CUNY Graduate Center and New York University in October 1998.

  7. “miror, cur quaedam tue tunice portiones, que texture matrimonio deberent esse confines, in ea parte sue coniunctionis paciantur diuorcia, in qua hominis imaginem picture representant insompnia” (Haring, De planctu, 838, 161–163).

  8. The image is taken from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, in which Philosophy’s

  robe has been ripped by the wrangling of philosophical sects. The citation in Alain reads: “Cum enim, ut prediximus, plerique homines in suam matrem uiciorum armentur iniuriis, inter se et ipsam maximum chaos dissensionis firmantes, in me violentas manus violenter iniciunt et mea sibi particulatim uestimenta diripiunt et, quam reuerentie deberent honore uestire, me uestibus orphanatam, quantum in ipsis est, cogunt meretricaliter lupanare. Hoc ergo integumentum hac scissuradepingitur, quod solius hominis iniuriosis insultibus, mea pudoris ornamenta dis- cidii scissionis contumelias paciuntur” (Haring, De planctu, 838, 165–172).

  9. “Cum Venus in Venerem pugnans illos facit illas / Cumque sui magica deuirat arte

  viros” (Haring, De planctu, 806, 5–6).

  10. Three recent pieces offer the most convincing and thorough readings I have seen.

  Mark Jordan’s Invention of Sodomy dedicates a very fine chapter to De planctu. Larry Scanlon’s “Unspeakable” article provides an astute and wide-ranging survey of a number of issues raised by Alain’s text, and Susan Schibanoff’s admirable take on Alain is one that I clearly endorse (“Sodomy’s Mark: Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, and the Medieval Theory of Authorship,” in Burger and Kruger, eds., Queering, pp. 28–56). Jan Ziolkowski’s work on Alain and grammar is indispens- able (Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth- Century Intellectual [Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1985]), as is Elizabeth Pittenger’s elegant and original essay “Explicit Ink,” in Fradenburg and Freccero, eds., Premodern, pp. 223–242. See also the discussions in Boswell, Christianity; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Dante’s Sexual Solecisms: Gender and Genre in the Commedia,” in Brownlee, Brownlee, and Nichols, eds., New Medievalism, pp. 201–225; Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) and idem “Some Implications of Nature’s Femininity in Medieval Poetry,” in Lawrence D. Roberts, ed., Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), pp. 47–62; Gillian R. Evans, Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

  1983); and Maureen Quilligan, “Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Deallegorization of Language: The Roman de la Rose, the De planctu Naturae, and the Parlement of Foules,” in M. Bloomfield, ed., Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 163–186.

  11. Alain elsewhere defines dreams according to a tripartite schema corresponding to epistemological, ontological, and moral models. It is interesting to note that the dreamer’s dream in the De planctu corresponds to none of these categories but rather merges the theological, imaginative, and base elements into one semi- coherent whole. This would clearly suggest that the text was not meant to be read as the illustration of a prior theory or as a prescriptive treatise alone (Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

  1992], p. 80).

  12. Slavoj Z izek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 18.

  13. See Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison Wisc.: University of

  Wisconsin Press, 1989).

  14. In this Alain’s text shows the clear influence of the School of Chartres with its mirrored surfaces and insistence upon Nature as the link between God and man, the sublunary and celestial.

  15. “Nunc mea tela jacent, quibus olim victus Achilles / Cessit, degeneri mentitus veste puellam. / Inque colum clavam vertens, in pensa sagittas, / In fusum pharetras, Alcides degener armis, / Totus femineos male degeneravit in actu
s. / Haec ait, etvitam pariter cum voce reliquit.” (Anticlaudianus sive De officio viri boni et perfecti,

  PL 210, cols. 481–576, ed. J. P. Migne (Turnholt: Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1855,

  1976), 412: col. 571.

  16. Both Jordan (Invention of Sodomy, p. 75) and Sheridan (Plaint, p. 130 n.1) note how the narrator pushes Nature to make her answer difficult questions.

  17. It has been suggested that the De planctu was written, probably on commission, as a pointed attack on the morals of the Archbishop of York, Roger de Pont-L’Eveˆque, an avowed enemy of Thomas Becket. See Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, and Guy Raynaud de Lage, eds., Le Moyen Age, rev. Genevie`ve Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1964, 1994), p. 33.

  18. Ziolkowski surveys other uses of grammatical metaphors in the twelfth century and finds that Alain was not the first, or the only, author to have found grammat- ical theory and terminology a convenient source of metaphor. Ziolkowski finds him unusual only in the insistence with which he pursued his task and the range and complication of the metaphors he used to expose sexual misconduct. Alain apparently had many models to follow and several contemporaries with whom he could have compared notes, including the classical authors Martial and Juvenal and his contemporaries Gautier de Coincy, Matthew of Vendoˆ me, and Walter of Chaˆtillon, all of whom exploited similar metaphors of improper joining, though none to the same degree. See Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille, pp. 56–68.