Download PDF | David Rollo - Medieval Writings on Sex Between Men_ Peter Damian's the Book of Gomorrah and Alain de Lille's the Plaint of Nature-Brill Academic Pub (2022).
194 Pages
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following colleagues in medievalism for their friendship, support and inspiration: Leslie Arnovick, Laura Ashe, Chris Baswell, Heather Blurton, Bill Burgwinkle, Leah DeVun, Carolyn Dinshaw, Sian Echard, Ruth Evans, Jane Gilbert, Noah Guynn, David Hult, David Johnson, Sharon Kinoshita, Steve Kruger, Peggy McCracken, Deborah McGrady, Michael Paraskos, Robert Rouse, David Scott-Macnab, Zrinka Stahuljak, Claire Waters, Kevin Whetter and Jonathan Wilson.
I embrace them all for being wonderful people.
Special thanks are due to Ruth for her wit and hospitality, to Peggy for her calm assurance, and to Bill for his sage advice. I extend particular gratitude also to Marcella Mulder, the wisest and most patient editor I could have hoped for.
In a different form, the Critical Commentary on Alain de Lille appeared under the title “Nature’s Pharmaceuticals: Sanctioned Desires in Alain de Lille’s De Planctu Naturae,’ in Exemplaria 25.2 (Summer 2013): 152-72. Thanks are due to Rights Link/The Copyright Clearance Center for permission to reprint.
General Introduction
1 Peter Damian, The Book of Gomorrah
The eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian composed the text today known as The Book of Gomorrah with a twofold intent: to warn the pope of the time, Leo 1x, that members of the clergy were having sex, largely with one another, and to suggest the pontiff introduce measures of reform that would return to Church to its former state of worldly prestige and spiritual power.!
Faced by what he considered the unfettered tyranny of the flesh, Peter inveighs against all sexual activity pursued for pleasure, arguing that, unless cleansed by confession and penance, even a single act of autoeroticism will occasion an eternity of infernal damnation. He holds, nonetheless, sexual relations between men to be a particular anathema: like all carnal sin, it is an affront to clerical chastity; yet, Peter contends, it also runs counter to the laws of nature. In an attempt to extirpate such purported depravities, Peter first documents each of the “unnatural” acts he censures and attributes them to devilish machination. He then directly addresses the fallen cleric and enjoins him once again to aspire to chastity and the union with the blood and body of Christ it will entail.
As the first concerted attempt to address sexual abuses within the Church, The Book of Gomorrah remains something of a historical milestone. Its contextual success, however, is open to debate. To all appearances, Peter never intended the text to have a wide diffusion: in formal terms, it is an extended letter addressed to Pope Leo, and it must in the first instance be assessed as a personal plea from one theologian to another. Leo did indeed read the work, since his own epistolary response is extant,? and, while less severe than Peter in his rhetorical response to sexual transgression, he is in broad measure in agreement over the possibility of penance and absolution. Like Peter, Leo argues that, with notable exceptions, all clerics found to have participated in any act of sexual impurity should be temporarily deposed from office but should ultimately be received back into the ministry if satisfactory remorse and submission to physical hardship have been demonstrated. To be excluded from forgiveness and reintegration, however, are those who have committed carnal sin on multiple occasions, either alone or with others.
Whether the reforms adumbrated by Peter and Leo ever received widespread implementation must, of course, remain unclear: by their very nature, alleged sexual abuses resist policing and rectification. There were also, perhaps, cultural forces in place that militated against their success. As the historian John Boswell argues, the eleventh and early-twelfth centuries were particularly tolerant of erotic relations between men, and there is evidence to suggest that some of the most prominent ecclesiastics of the era were themselves gay.3 Peter and Leo may therefore have met with widespread and successful resistance from quite precisely those he attempted to reform.
Whatever its immediate contextual effects, The Book of Gomorrah rapidly escaped the closed world of eleventh-century ecclesiastical reform and within two centuries enjoyed a wide diffusion throughout western Europe. It subsists in dozens of manuscripts and continued to influence attitudes toward samesex desire (clerical or lay) throughout the Middle Ages. It is, in fine, one of the most important legalistic documents of the era.
2 Alain de Lille, The Plaint of Nature
Like The Book of Gomorrah, Alain de Lille’s late twelfth-century The Plaint of Nature addresses “unnatural” sexuality. Also like Peter’s work, it was the medieval equivalent of the modern best-seller: it survives in over a hundred manuscripts; and it exerted a pervasive influence on the literature of the late Middle Ages and beyond. I would estimate that, with the exception of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the British Kings, The Plaint of Nature bore a more profound influence on subsequent developments in fiction than any other Latin text of the period.
Until twenty years ago, criticism held The Plaint of Nature to be very similar in concern to The Book of Gomorrah, and there is much ostensibly to corroborate this view. Nature, personified as a beautiful young woman, descends from the innermost sanctum of creation to what she refers to as “the vulgar whorehouses of the earth” and there joins the first-person narrator? in excoriating humanity’s proclivity to sin. Although Nature and Alanus do eventually denounce pride, vanity, greed, and gluttony, they devote almost half of their extended dialogue to decrying sexual practices they consider abhorrent and employ a colorful array of tropes culled from the verbal arts to do so. Men who love other men are both subject and predicate, they are not men of nature but barbarisms of art, and they take no pleasure in the straight predication of grammar, preferring instead the deviant path of metaphor. In sum, they have caused a dialectical split in Nature herself, and for this reason must be deprived of the seal of Venus, that is, physically emasculated.
Because explicitly homophobic on its verbal surface, The Plaint of Nature obviously lends itself to a homophobic interpretation, and, until recently, critics were content to provide one. Starting in the mid 1990s, however, this type of reading began to be questioned by a number of people, most notably Larry Scanlon, Elizabeth Pittenger, William Burgwinkle, and myself. As already mentioned, Nature and Alanus use metaphor itself as a metaphor for alleged sexual perversion; yet, as even the minimal paraphrase I have so far supplied will reveal, The Plaint of Nature is itself the most exuberantly metaphorical of texts. It is not an exaggeration to say that Nature and Alanus are positively addicted to the trope and often use metaphor to render even the most banal substantive. This has the effect of making the two interlocutors of the text linguistically participate in precisely the metaphorical deviance they denounce. Assessed in terms of its own linguistic economy, therefore, The Plant of Nature systematically undermines its grammatical import.
In the more detailed commentary on Alain’s stylistic choices that follows, I shall consider the circumstances that may have given rise to this most paradoxical of texts, ultimately to suggest that The Plaint of Nature is the work of a man who was himself either gay or, at least, sensitive towards and tolerant of male same-sex relations. Assessed under these circumstances, The Plaint of Nature becomes a manifesto of independent thought produced at a time of increased policing and conformity.
3 Importance to Medieval Studies
The Book of Gomorrah and The Plaint of Nature have become crucial to the modern discipline of Medieval Studies, particularly at its points of intersection with theories of gender and sexuality. The importance of both works to cultural history is also immense: if only by antiphrasis, The Plaint of Nature demonstrates that a gay community was clearly thriving in the High Middle Ages, and The Book of Gomorrah attests to the problematic relationship between clerical celibacy and sexual desire that is still manifested, though with different inflections, in the Catholic Church today.
By bringing the two treatises together for the first time, I hope to juxtapose the most conservative and liberal medieval meditations on male same-sex relationships in a manner that facilitates the understanding of both. In this, I do not mean to imply that one text is a direct response to the other: Alain, the later of the two authors, never cites Peter’s work or even seems to make implicit reference to it. Rather, I contend that each evokes the cultural context in relation to which the other was composed: fully to understand The Plaint of Nature, it is necessary to understand the imposition of conformity Peter condones; and fully to understand The Book of Gomorrah, it is necessary to understand the flouting of conservatism Alain enacts through his play on rhetoric.
4 Existing Translations
Separate translations of each text already exist, and the most recent have superseded all that precede them. In 2013, Winthrop Wetherbee produced a translation of The Plaint of Nature. His critical approach nevertheless vastly differs from my own. In his twelve-page introductory remarks, Wetherbee situates Alain’s work in neo-Platonic context and relates its themes to Christian concerns with sin and redemption. Nevertheless, he scarcely broaches questions of metaphor and sexuality. In what follows, I, on the other hand, shall devote extensive attention to the text’s performance of all it ostensibly seeks to proscribe. As the leading medieval Latinist of his generation, Wetherbee renders the grammar and syntax of Alain’s poetry and prose with exemplary precision. However, largely because Alain’s abstract concerns lend themselves to a multiplicity of formulations in English, his translation and my own are rarely, if ever, the same.
In 2015, Matthew Cullinan Hoffman published a paperback translation of The Book of Gomorrah.” It is the work of a highly accomplished, internationally renowned scholar of theology, and it provides rigorous and extensive background information on religious and cultural context, especially with regard to the state of the eleventh-century Church and possible sources for some of Peter’s ideas. With regard to accuracy and clarity, Hoffman’s translation is beyond reproach.
Hoffman does not, however, analyze Peter’s work as a piece of writing. Given his explicit preoccupations, there is no reason why he should. As a literary critic, 1am more attentive to the written artifact and argue that The Book of Gomorrah is not only a grammatical denunciation of pleasure, but also a pleasurable and stylish rhetorical performance of near-Dualist implications: Peter conceives of the body as the site of satanic impurity that is in a relationship of unceasing conflict with the Divinely favored soul. Here too, there is little overlap between my concerns and my predecessor’s: in our Introductions, Hoffman and I emphasize different aspects of the text and address different groups of readers.
Unlike Alain’s, Peter’s Latin is to-the-point and shows a clear substratum of vernacularity in its syntax. Sometimes, therefore, word-for-word, literal translation is the most logical, desirable and felicitous course, and on occasion Hoffman and I render in similar ways, our differences usually in such cases involving syntax and word-order rather than grammar and vocabulary.
5 Approach to Translation, Notes, and Sources
I have followed style and tone as closely as the English language and my own abilities allow. Peter is intentionally monitory and almost always pedantic. I have endeavored to reflect this. Alain is wildly mannered, also intentionally, and often to the point that the reader must parse his periods several times over in order to gain even a distant sense of what he is talking about. I have attempted to impart some of that mannerism, particularly the extensive assonance, alliteration and play on cognates. However, some of Alain’s more daring (I am tempted to say outrageous) stylistic gambits simply escape rendition. This is partly the result of attempting to render the liberties granted by a synthetic language such as Latin in the pedestrian confines of analytic English.
The following, for example, is Nature’s definition of Envy, here personified. Alain’s persistent wordplay is italicized:
Hec est inuidia, que continue detractionis rubiginosa demorsione hominum animos demolitur. Hic est uermis cuius morsu morbidata mentis sanitas contabescit in saniem, mentis sinceritas conputrescit in cariem, mentis requies /iquitur in laborem. Hic est hospes qui, apud suum hospitem inhospitaliter hospitatus, sui hospitis labefactat hospicium. Hec est possessio pessime suum possidens possessorem que, dum alios detractionis latratibus uexat, sui possessoris animum intestino morsu profundius inquietat. (14.47—-54).
Pedestrian confines lead to pedestrian results. The following is my translation. Deficiencies notwithstanding, it is the best I have been able to bend the English language to do. It misses out, however, on most of Alain’s pyrotechnics:
This is envy, who destroys the minds of men through the corrosive bite of unending detraction. It is a worm through whose bite the health of the mind, once infected, disintegrates into putrefaction, sincerity of mind rots into decay, peace of mind melts into misery. It is a guest who, welcomed with hospitality, acts inhospitably toward its host and undermines its host’s hospice. It is a possession that pejoratively possesses its possessor, and, while assailing others with the yapping of slander, damages its possessor’s soul all the more profoundly with its inner bite.
While attempting to negotiate passages such as this, I have at times wondered whether Alain had reached such a level of genial virtuosity that he was offering a deliberate, at once self-glorifying and self-deprecating, parody of his own tendency to flourishing excess.
For the sake of clarity and to reflect stylistic aspects of Alain’s work that are indeed lost in prose translation, The Plaint of Nature has been divided into numbered sections. These represent the alternating sequences of prose and verse of the original.
In preparing the translations and notes, I have attempted to cater to the needs of students, both undergraduate and graduate, rather than advanced scholars of Alain’s work. With regard to the notes, therefore, I may on occasion seem to be pointing out the obvious. I am sure that nine out of ten people know who Helen of Troy was. I suspect, however, that nine out of ten do not know anything about Phrixus. I have therefore aimed for consistency and glossed all mythological and historical figures. If the information appears redundant to the advanced reader, I beg the reader extend his or her forgiveness and ask that he or she simply skip over the note in question. For specialized remarks on Alain’s relationship with wider currents of neo-Platonism, the notes that James J. Sheridan provides in his translation cannot be matched.® To reproduce that information here would be an exercise in redundancy of a different nature.
Information on mythological, literary and religious figures from classical antiquity is followed by page reference to The Oxford Classical Dictionary (= ocp), edited by Simon Hormblower and Anthony Spawforth, 3rd ed. revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). This provides a convenient hardcopy source for further information. The online version is available at classics. oxfordre.com. The online Encyclopedia Britannica at britannica.com is cited for figures from Christian history and theology.9 If reference to one of more Latin texts is also made, it is to the sources from which Alain may have plausibly gleaned his knowledge. When no reference to a possible source appears, it is because I have judged Alain to be alluding to simple bywords for moral categories.
6 Terminology
A few words are in order to explain the terms I use when addressing what each author considers deviance. Here too, Peter’s case is straightforward. He refers to clerics who engage in masturbation and/or have sex with one another as “sodomites,” and he states that they perpetrate “sodomitic crimes.” I translate literally in order to impart, unfiltered, the author’s pejorative vocabulary.
The case of Alain, nevertheless, is more nuanced and requires greater explanation, particularly with regard to my use of “hermaphrodite” and its cognates. In Kiss my Relics, | demonstrate how, between late Antiquity and the revival of classicism that marked the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors, a theory of poetic language developed that took Hermaphroditus as its tutelary deity. Reaching its clearest articulation in the ninth-century work of Remigius of Auxerre,!° this “hermaphroditic” register figuratively embodied the tutelary domains of the demi-God’s parents, language (Hermes) and pleasure (Aphrodite), and it would ideally function as the medium through which the mortal mind could take the first step towards a lucid understanding of universal truth. The proposed “Language of Hermaphroditus” would mobilize above all the trope and rhetorical ornamentation as vehicles of sensual pleasure: the more the senses were gratified in the process of learning, the more the intellect found itself liberated from arid scholasticism. Probably because so abstruse and of no applicability to the everyday lives of most people, the discursive theory in which Hermaphroditus became a figure of rhetoric appears to have remained unknown, impenetrable, or simply uninteresting to anyone outside the closed circles of neo-classical intellectualism in which it had developed. Members of the laity and, indeed, the less theoretically orientated clergy would have understood “hermaphroditus” in a very different way. Since at least the time of Pliny the Elder, the word and its vernacular derivations had come to mean a person born with genital attributes that did not correspond with the received binary of “male” and “female,” and this definition was in turn passed to the Middle Ages by Augustine in the De civitate Dei.11 This far more widespread usage held the potential for ridicule and denigration. The classical era and the Middle Ages of course differed in their formulations of male prerogative, particularly, in ancient Rome and not the Christian West of later centuries, the assumed and accepted sexual subordination of some males to others in the light of factors such as age, class and slavery. Differences notwithstanding, the cultures of both were rigidly patriarchal, and the charge of effeminacy leveled against any man who should be perceived not to meet certain social expectations of masculinity could be devastating indeed. A person who did not anatomically reflect traditional male/female categorization could be seen to incarnate a falling away from some idealized definition of what it meant to be a man and could therefore be the object of opprobrium and ostracism.12
Within a hundred years of Augustine’s death, the latent abuse carried by “‘hermaphroditus” and its epithets grew wider in application: by the sixth century, these terms were being applied to gay people as well. For example, the first chapter of the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (Book of Prodigies of Various Types) bears the title “De quodam homine utriusque sexus” (“About a certain man of both sexes”):
Me enim quondam hominem, in principio operis, utriusque sexus cognosse testor. Qui tamen ipsa facie plus et pectore virilis quam muliebrus apparuit, et vir a nescientibus putabatur. Sed muliebria opera dilexit et ignaros virorum, more meretricis, decipiebat.8
At the beginning of this work, I bear witness to having known a certain man of both sexes. In the face itself and in the torso, he appeared a man rather than a woman, and he was taken to be a man by those who did not know him. However, he took delight in playing the role of a woman [in sex] and like a harlot deceived unsuspecting men.
The anonymous author at a later stage considers “Androgynae” as a separate category, and it is to them that he attributes non-binary reproductive particulars. The man introduced in the first chapter thus emerges as “of both sexes” exclusively because he engages in sex with other men. Certainly, he is nowhere expressly identified as a “hermaphrodite.” Nevertheless, another work of literature from the period dispels this objection: the roughly contemporary poem ‘In puellam hermaphroditam’” is not about a girl who is a “hermaphrodite” in the sense inherited from Pliny and Augustine. It is about a girl who has sex with women and is accordingly perceived to be a “female” in body and “male” in orientation.
By the High Middle Ages, therefore, “hermaphroditus” had come to participate in three lateral semantic fields, one ostensibly physiological and therefore ostensibly neutral, yet lending itself to abuse, one clearly offensive, making no pretense even to the bodily categorization of the preceding, and one abstract, rhetorical and to all appearances intended to be positive, but inevitably permeated by the negative senses implicit or explicit in the others. Alain never uses the term “hermaphroditus’ or its masculine epithetic derivation “hermaphroditicus.’ (With no elaboration, he once uses the feminine “hermaphroditica” [2.193], about the bat, which he seems to regard as both animal and bird and therefore partaking of two genera.) He does nevertheless employ the neologistic, transitive verb “hermaphroditare’” (“to make into a hermaphrodite”), the mythological variation “tiresiatare” (“to tiresiatize,” that is, to grant someone the attributes or knowledge of the soothsayer Tiresias, who lived part of his life as a man and part as a woman), or, more directly, “devirare” (‘to unman’). He is sparing in his employment of all three, however, using each once. Usually, he does not even make a tangential reference to the classical demi-God in his choice of metaphor and states that Venus, using her magical
ro”
art, turns “he’s” into “she’s.
”
As in sixth-century usage, this alteration in grammatical gender seems to imply that gay men are “hermaphroditic” because they are “male” in body but “female” in orientation (with these received sexual categories the other way round, the same would hold true of gay women, though female sexuality is never within Alain’s purview).
In the three chapters of Kiss my Relics that I devote to The Plaint of Nature, I extensively analyze the tension between Alain’s grammar of homophobia and the rhetoric of “hermaphroditic” liberation by which it is both articulated and contested. Moreover, toward the end of the critical commentary I shall be offering in the following pages, I shall provide some further, clarifying remarks on “the magical art of Venus” through which the latter strategy of subversion is effected. I shall not, therefore, here repeat what I have argued at length elsewhere.
Rather, I would like to stress the fact that, beyond the veils of rhetorical and mythological theory, the word “hermaphroditus” and its modern English derivation have referents that very much exist in reality, yet run the risk of becoming obscured by the density of abstraction itself: There are indeed people who are born with genital attributes of that cannot be categorized according to the received binary (“hermaphrodites” according to one medieval formulation), and there are indeed many people of same-sex orientation (“hermaphrodites” according to another). Almost all have probably heard themselves called, in modern usage, “hermaphrodites” as a slur and have been obliged to endure the hate and ostracism the term unveils. I emphasize, therefore, that, in using “hermaphroditic” and “hermaphrodite” as mythological and linguistic abstracts, Iam not doing so with a myopia to social realities.
For similar reasons, I do not use the words “homosexual” and “homosexuality” at all. Despite the veneer of neutral probity with which they are often ostensibly used, both in fact bespeak a dismissive alterity, with resonances ranging from disdain to abuse.
Much is currently being done, online, in print, and in colloquia, to the argue the necessity for such shifts in reference and to posit appropriate terminology,!® particularly with respect to people of Trans and Inter selfidentification. Pioneers in this regard are Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, whose Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide is a crucial resource. It is at present available as a downloadable Pre-Print PDF (June 2019) and as an appendix to Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, ed. Spencer-Hall and Gutt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Also bridging modern and pre-modern concerns are the essays brought together in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, ed. Anna Ktosowska, Masha Raskolnikov and Greta LaFleur (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021). Ruth Evans’ Editor’s Introduction and the Afterword by Tain Morland in “Medieval Intersex: Language and Hermaphroditism,” a special issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 9.2 (2018), are of theoretical relevance in helping establish parameters of debate. The other contributions, by Leah DeVun, M. W. Bychowski, Amanda Lehr, Jonathan Hsy, and myself, are of relevance as close readings of specific texts. The diachronic positioning of Trans is also engaged online in the following journals, again appearing as special issues: “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism,” Medieval Feminist Forum (https://ir-uiowa.edu/mff/vol55/iss1/), and “Trans Historicities,” TsQ (Transgender Studies Quarterly) (https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/issue/5/4). 16 Although currently burgeoning, this field of inquiry has been in place for some time.
It is an understated but recurrent theme of Boswell’s work and appears with some frequency in Glenn W. Olsen's study of male same-sex relations during the early Middle Ages, Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2011), especially chapters 1 (“Naming Sodomy”) and 4 (“The Sexual Subject”). Illuminating also is Steven F. Kruger’s “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale,”
Exemplaria 6 (1994): 15-39, especially 110-25, on the (possible) same-sex orientation of Chaucer’s Pardoner, but with wider implications for the Middle Ages in general.
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