Download PDF | William E. Burgwinkle - Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature_ France and England, 1050-1230-Cambridge University Press (2004).
314 Pages
Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature
William Burgwinkle surveys poetry and letters, histories and literary fiction — including Grail romances — to offer a historical survey of attitudes towards samesex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanore of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Burgwinkle illustrates how “sodomy” becomes a problematic feature of narratives of romance and knighthood. Most texts of the period denounce sodomy and use accusations of sodomitical practice as a way of maintaining a sacrificial climate in which masculine identity is set in opposition to the stigmatized Other, for example the foreign, the feminine, and the heretical. What emerges from these readings, however, is that even the most homophobic, masculinist, and normative texts of the period demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to separate the sodomitical from the orthodox. These blurred boundaries allow readers to glimpse alternative, even homoerotic, readings.
William Burgwinkle is Lecturer in French and Occitan in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in the University of Cambridge and fellow of King’s College. He is the author of Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus (1997), Razos and Troubadour Songs (1990) and co-editor of Significant Others: Film and Literature, East and West (1993).
Acknowledgments
Since this book was a long time in the writing, I owe thanks to a good number of people who have offered direct and indirect support. First, I would like to thank some of those who read parts of the whole: my incredibly generous colleagues, Sylvia Huot and Sarah Kay, and those wonderful readers and friends, Marilynn Desmond and Cary Howie. I benefited enormously from discussions at the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge and with Simon Gaunt, whose writing and friendship remain an inspiration. Many supported this project early on by allowing me to present material at conferences: Jeanette Beer, Emma Campbell, Bob Clark, Susan Crane, Allen Frantzen, Cynthia Gravlee, Steve Kruger, Linda Lomperis, Bob Mills, and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Cambridge. At the University of Hawai’i, Joe O’Mealy, Jean Toyama, Austin Dias, Kathryn Hoffman, Kathryn Klingebiel, Ricky Jacobs, and a host of wonderful students made this research possible and my life that much easier. Joy Logan provided me with a summer space in which to write as well as the constant reassurance of her friendship.
Several others have helped in ways they might not even recognize and deserve my warmest thanks: Dago Argueto, Hugues Azérad, Mary Burgwinkle and Greg Haworth, Bruce and Pam Burgwinkle, my mother, Peggy McNamara Burgwinkle, Kathy and Brian Cassity, Brigitte Cazelles, Paul Chandler, Pat DeCastries, Brook Ellis, Heidi Ellison, Fran Gadomski Gentry, Tamara and Gary Greenebaum, Noah Guynn, Nick Hammond, David Hult, Rhonda Knight, Joe McAlister and Herb Sato, Francie McGowan, Pat Scofield, Connie Sherak, Maria del Mar Torreblanca Lopez, Ray Vernon, Mingbao Yue and Richard Nettell, Joe and Joanna Zesiger, and several anonymous readers. Finally, I would like to thank the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, for a stay during which this project first took shape, Keith Hopkins at King’s College for providing an incomparable space in which to work, and my amazing students at Cambridge and at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.
Introduction
Sodomy appears as a topos in the very first mid-twelfth-century vernacular romances after surfacing in the previous century as a catch-all category for all that is evil and unclassifiable.’ Infamously difficult to define, then or now, sodomy is seen as what disrupts established law, systems of classification, religious, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Prior to this medieval flowering, there is little mention of sodomy as such in post-classical texts, and when it is evoked, the author often cautions that it should not be mentioned at all, lest it lead to dangerous ideas.”
The purpose of this book is therefore to examine what happens in these medieval texts — literary, historical/chronicle, or theological — when sodomy is either discussed or alluded to openly. What occurs when one speaks about what cannot be spoken of; when something vague, phantasmatic and troubling is made visible — identified, named, segregated from the body that performs and the specificities of culture? The answer is neither simple nor univocal, as sodomy becomes in the twelfth century a thematic, syntactical, rhetorical, mythical, and ethical feature of a number of diverse texts.
This book is divided into two main sections. The first deals with how sodomy was recognized, located, diagnosed, theorized, and imagined in texts from the mid-eleventh to the early thirteenth century. In brief, I will be arguing that this new category was, from the beginning, an effect of Law in the broadest sense, and that over the course of two centuries it begins to inflect that very notion. As a discursive topic, it threatens Law (religious, civic, moral, and especially imaginary) by suggesting alternatives, but it also supports it, by providing a space outside the community defined by that Law from which to establish boundaries of normalcy.
It is thus a topic about which it is difficult to generalize, or to locate in any positivist sense, a topic which has much in common with classical characterizations of feminine masculinity and homoeroticism, but which is also strongly inflected by its categorization as a Christian sin. Often held to be a predisposition which, while not defining a subject, is nonetheless tenacious and usually linked with a variety of other flaws, sodomy can serve as a lightning rod to alert us to other cultural tensions. Thus, while sodomites cannot be collapsed into the category of “homosexual” as formulated in the late nineteenth century, such individuals are usually thought to be recognizable and are often linked with any number of other characteristics, including indeterminate gender (generally male), a weak will or disposition, foreign ethnicity, social origins, or particular physical traits. Accusations and treatment of the topos differ greatly from one text to the next, depending no doubt on the intended audience, the institutions within which they were produced and disseminated, the gender of the sodomites and their accusers.
Regretfully, this book covers only material from the mid-eleventh to the thirteenth century and concentrates almost exclusively on men. This is partly because I want to establish how crucial the invention of sodomy was to the institution of a new model of heroic and highly monitored masculinity in the twelfth century, and partly because the texts themselves, even when penitential, only very rarely allude to female sodomites.
The second section presents close readings of three major texts (and sequels/companion pieces) that problematize the conception of sodomy we find in the first part by blurring, sometimes deliberately, all attempts at categorization. Even, and often especially, in texts whose purpose seems to be to criminalize or eradicate the sodomite, we find slippage between categories and speakers. It is in these texts that we can best appreciate just how difficult it is to speak of sodomy without speaking also of gender. The mere evocation of sodomy seems to stain all that surrounds it such that distinctions between the sodomitical and normal, between me and it, masculine and feminine, the lawful and unlawful, the symbolic and the imaginary, become impossible to sustain. In this sense, the book illustrates one of the key theses of queer theory, here enunciated by Glenn Burger, that “the perverse is already an integral part of the dominant and not the tragic lack embodied by a subordinate minority”.* These final three chapters complicate any historical understanding of sodomy in that the texts of the second section unwrite many of the pretensions of the first. The theological writings and institution of categories discussed in chapters 1 and 2 resonate, and are highlighted in, the consciously literary texts of the second half; but all that was deemed wrong, already extirpated, incompatible with heroic masculinity or sanctity in the first section, is nonetheless present, even essential, in the texts of the second.
The sense in which I use “Law” in the title is perhaps excessively broad, but necessarily so, i.e., not only as any sort of regulation by which communities establish standards and norms, but also the internalized laws of exchange, prohibition, and development by which subjectivity, gender, and status are determined. Thus Law can be a publicly disseminated set of rules, a notion of the ordered society, or a set of unexpressed assumptions, the mastery of which determines the extent to which one belongs or is excluded from full participation in a community. This latter sense of the word includes not only ethical notions and the associations made between what is wrong or evil and what is excluded, but also psychoanalytic notions of Law as that foundational prohibition which holds together and gives access to the symbolic order, makes social relations possible, instantiates the subject.
Sodomy itself ranges from being a simple description of homoerotic relations or attractions to a theological category synonymous with the sinful. Sometimes discussed by medieval authors as a universal category that can be intuited, it is just as often considered an attribute or attitude, a disposition or location (in the sense that one can be in “the occasion of sin”), which favors sinful activity. To use the linguistic and grammatical metaphors favored by many theologians, sodomy involves a deliberate twisting of meaning through the combination of incongruous elements or a faulty combination of elements which can be corrected through proper training. Important to these nuances is the fact that though it makes regular appearances in twelfth-century texts, sodomy is never treated as a topic in and of itself. Other than the expression of sentiment in personal letters, there are no overtly male—male or female—female love stories and few theological or scientific treatises that, though they set out to condemn such relations, avoid veering into irony (Peter Cantor may be the exception).
Rather, sodomy is most commonly used as a textual seasoning, the addition of which colors the way in which other major themes and especially characters are discussed and received. Whether mentioned overtly, as sodomie, bougrerie or mestier (prostitution), or evoked in coded terms as something menacing or foreclosed, sodomy, and in this it resembles incest, once alluded to, never fails to make itself felt. Even when authors purport to contain it, building around it cautionary prologues or hysterical condemnations, the extraordinary power of its exclusion is such that it colors the text around it. The mere acknowledgement that there is the possibility of another way, a perversion of dogma that might escape detection, is enough to overturn and subvert the reading process; and this, in turn, calls attention to the text itself, to its own defensiveness and constructedness. Once sexuality is shown to exceed so effortlessly its framework (i.e., how it has been constructed as an attribute of gender within legal and theological documents), it becomes that much more difficult to contain the text itself within its own purported linguistic, thematic, and rhetorical boundaries. Identities, plots, and arguments in general begin to look constructed, pieced together around an absence.
DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH
Not surprisingly, sodomy surfaces as a charge and category at the very moment when heterosexual love becomes an essential theme and obligatory step in the development of exemplary knighthood. As Mark Jordan has argued, sodomy is an “invention” of eleventh-century Christian theology.’ This does not mean that same-sex acts never occurred before that period or that new acts and identities were made possible in its wake. Rather, by sodomy he means a discursive innovation which allowed for new ways of organizing and conceptualizing behavior and individuals within groups without ever really succeeding in exerting control.’ As a discursive category it is still amazingly vague and all-encompassing. In Penitentials, and in later ecclesiastical legislation, it is treated as a fluid and wide-ranging sin made up of a variety of non-reproductive bodily acts which can be, and presumably were, performed by men and women — alone, in couples, in groups, and to varying degrees of sinfulness. In theological tracts, it reverts largely to a male category; and in literary texts, it surfaces almost exclusively as a charge directed at men by women, of improper gender identity or object choice. Thus, when the Queen wishes to dissuade her daughter Lavinia from falling in love with the eponymous Trojan hero in the Eneas romance, she reverts to a charge of sodomy and an imaginative accounting of the tastes and behavior she associates with that category.°
Slippage within discussion of “unnatural acts,” between gender poles and between acts and identities, is thus very much a part of its initial conceptualization. Foucault’s utterly confused category was no less confused in the guise of sin, amongst medieval theologians, than it has been as a classification within mental health and legal circles. Whether cultures perceive same-sex eroticism as a problem and, if so, how they deal with it, is not a topic that can be considered in isolation. How such practices are performed in relation to ritual, religion, marriage, exchange, and the division of labor, is essential to any account of its cultural significance. The twelfth century was a period of rapid social and institutional change. Attempts to harness these upheavals through synthesis with existing social and intellectual formulations proliferated.
Medical traditions inherited from the Greeks were re-examined and refined in the light of contemporary learning and mores, allegorical traditions inherited from Boethius and Martianus Capellus were refigured by theologians, monastic models of Christian love were transformed by new conceptions of God and friendship, chanson de geste heroes were refigured as heterosexual lovers and, significantly, as knights. As chivalric, monastic, penitential, and literary codes shifted more toward classification, exclusion, and rigid definitions of sexual difference, institutions both acted upon and participated in the formulation of these discourses and in their implementation as social codes. Together these codes offer evidence of a cultural shift in which some of the complex of practices and desires we know today as heterosexuality (or heterosexuality before “heterosexuality” in James Schultz’s astute formulation) were codified in tandem with new models of masculinity at the dawn of vernacular writing in Europe.’ These practices were then codified within the rituals and topoi of that problematic discursive and ethical category known today as courtly love. Simon Gaunt’s key observation that “a dialectic between heterosexuality and homosexuality is at the root of many medieval texts” and his further assertion that the “act of muting [this dialectic] is . . . a necessary and defining moment in the production of dominant culture” raise a number of questions which underlie the arguments presented in the following chapters:
How were subjects gendered in the twelfth century? If (Althusserian) interpellation was involved, i.e., identification and miming through subtle and unconscious coercion, how many genders resulted and how many were actually recognized? Were all subjects interpellated by one gender or by several as part of the same process? To what degree can the category of elite masculinity be considered the one and only gender of which all others are simply defective copies? What became of males whose interpellation failed, for whatever reason? Were they relegated to another, third, gender? Finally, what role does literature play in interpellating subjects and patrolling gender borders?
Why does sodomy appear as a topic of discourse when it does? What connections might be made between sodomy as a discursive formation and the rise of knighthood? Once Geoffrey of Monmouth had linked definitively chivalry and love in the Historia Regum Britanniae, how did the heterosexual component of heroism inflect traditional notions of warrior masculinity?
Why, in most of the best-known texts which include homophobic discourse and which appear to be entirely complicit with a repressive, coercive regime, can we continue to locate traces of resistance to that regime, especially in authors who have often been read as mouthpieces for repressive ideological apparatuses (Church, monastery, or court)? What political ends might have been served either by calling someone a sodomite, by exonerating him from the charge, or by linking certain nationalities, professions, courts, or appearances with same-sex eroticism?
What was meant by a “sodomite?” Is this a class of individuals or an occasional sinner? Would any individuals actually have identified themselves as “sodomites” or recognized themselves in the image propagated by reforming moralists?
What is the relation between the sodomitical and the feminine? Are women sodomites when engaging in sodomitical acts with other women? With men? What relations can be traced between celibacy and sodomy or between heresy and sodomy?
To what degree can the unrelentingly negative picture presented by medieval clerks and clergy of non-procreative sexual practices, including those between same-sex partners, be an effect of the fear that such acts were immensely attractive? If it was believed that the existence of these acts had to be hidden lest everyone start performing them, then does the institution of that “open secret” (we all know it goes on but can only refer to it in coded language) explain what we read today as a shadow that haunts twelfth-century literature across generic and disciplinary boundaries?
(8) Did disciplinary and fictional texts ever serve as lures to “sodomites” within the clergy, the monasteries and convents? Did they provide the conduit through which authorities could address such individuals directly by encouraging them to identify with the portraits sketched in the texts? If so, should this double-speak and constant monitoring of the self be seen as a continuation of classical thought (Foucault’s “souci de sot”) or, rather, as the institution and early manifestation of what he called the “repressive hypothesis?”!”
(9) If, indeed, the twelfth century can be identified with what R. I. Moore called the birth of a persecuting society, and if a form of compulsory heterosexuality, rather than compulsory reproduction, was then being erected as an essential component of that society, what forces were behind these discursive shifts and their very real consequences?'' Who had what to gain from this linking of rigid gender definition and policed sexual behavior?
(10) Could courtly love texts, which have so often been read as the bedrock of monolithic, monologic heterosexuality, not be read instead as laboratory texts, a failed ideological experiment in imposing seamless models of (hetero)sexuality and gender?
(11) To what extent might “sodomy” be seen as primarily discursive — more a collection of stories and stances than a collection of acts? Do these stories, as transmitted from place to place and generation to generation, change in relation to other social practices? Are these stories shaped primarily by apparatuses of power or by popular oral transmission?
KNIGHT OUT
Most of what I will be talking about in the following chapters concerns men, at least in the sense that the protagonists are male or the texts are addressed to men. It is they who are generally the butt of these accusations of sodomy, and it is their behavior that is at stake in the ensuing trials and calls to repentance. Of course, when I say “knight” I mean young males in general: not only those inducted into special military forces, but also the sons of the nobility or the new urban rich who trained for service at courts and strove through public spectacles to make their reputations and fortunes.
Knighthood as an institution probably does not pre-date the end of the eleventh century and in its first manifestation it continued many of the traditional practices of earlier warrior castes, including extensive training in horsemanship and arms, usually at a castle other than the father’s. Etienne de Fougére’s 1170 account of knighthood in the Livre des manieéres is one of the earliest known accounts of chivalry and it also contains, probably not coincidentally, a diatribe against homoerotic behavior (“whosoever is awakened by the ‘vile sin’ / is striving against nature. / He must be pursued with dogs, / throwing stones and sticks; / one should give him blows / and kill him like a cur”).'? Etienne is decrying female samesex acts, a rather exceptional condemnation of sodomitical acts between women in the twelfth century, but the terms in which he condemns such behavior can easily be extended to males as well.!°
By 1170, chivalry was already thought of, at least in some quarters, as an estate or order, and had taken on an ethical cast. Knights had to be noble but also generous, and their investiture, perhaps under the influence of the holy orders of knighthood necessitated by the Crusades, took on more and more of the color of a religious mission. Yet the essential criterion remained throughout, military might. When William Marshall rose from the ranks of the minor nobility (c. 1167) to the position of regent of England (c. 1195) it was clearly by virtue of his military accomplishments and success at court.!4 Romance portraits of knights never really lost sight of this essential element while progressively emphasizing the hero’s quasisacred mission.!> The pure, devoted, and exceptionally brave knight became the figure of elite masculinity to which all young men were to aspire. The ancient Christian moniker of milites Christi took on new force under the impetus of sacred knighthood, culminating by the century’s end in Robert de Boron’s fusion of monastic and chivalric ideals. Idealized figures of knighthood — Perceval, Galahad, even the fin‘amans of troubadour poetry — served to interpellate young men into ideological gender formations that made them, not coincidentally, more serviceable to institutional interests.
The question of what categories these knights might then be “out of” is apposite. No one claims for the twelfth century a public gay identity with its attendant political agenda, somehow identical to current notions. Nor do I want to suggest that “the closet,” that very useful psychic metaphor out of which one steps, or within which one finds oneself revealed, was identical in 1130 to the post-Sedgwick definition.'© Yet I do want to retain a heuristic notion of such hidden spaces, spaces in which sinners withheld their transgressions from confessors, for example, as a way of imagining the different subject positions that a twelfth-century monk might inhabit in relation to his interlocutors, his confessor, and the rules of his order. While it does not follow that either that space or those subject positions are entirely coterminous with a post-Freudian notion of the closet or of gay identity, these earlier formulations, especially as we find them drawn in Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus, are closer than many want to acknowledge. If individuals only accede to subjectivity through interaction with the Law — ideological forces that are attempting to harness and dominate them — then it is logical to assume that the medieval clerks and monks who wrote these (largely homophobic) texts were subjects in this modern sense, even if, given the different forms that those ideological forces took, the subject positions available to them were not identical to our own.'” Secrecy, in Glenn Burger’s elegant formulation, is “the spiritual exercise by which the subject is allowed to conceive of himself as a resistance: a friction in the smooth functioning of the social order, a margin to which its far-reaching discourse does not reach.”!® It is clear that from within these spaces of non-disclosure the twelfth-century subject could speak, act, and perform, without necessarily ever being “outed,” and that these operations of secrecy and divulgence are very much at play in the texts that I will be discussing. '”
How can rhetorical formulations, clichés even, act as signs of proscribed desire while also maintaining their function as cover??? To what degree could a medieval author write in double-speak with some consciousness of writing for and against, within and without, established discursive conventions? If the closet is the most ready term for the psychic space that allows for games of hiding and revealing, the irony and camp so associated with the “gay canon” since Oscar Wilde, it is not the only heuristic we might use. As Allen Frantzen rightly observes, the term “closet” can have the effect of flattening variants from different eras, genres, genders, and disciplines, resulting in another falsified record of the past designed to please the present.’ I therefore fall back on John Winkler’s more malleable concept of “double-consciousness” in pre-modern authors as a way of circumventing charges of anachronism, all the while fully conscious of my own role in the construction of these texts.?* In Ed Cohen’s estimation, Winkler’s formulation has the advantage of allowing that “a marginalized poet can speak and write in the dominant discourse but subvert its monolithic truth claims by recasting them in the light of personal, subculture experience.””? This definition allies double-consciousness with camp while avoiding the messy closet, out of, or in, which one can only be, at any rate, until the next encounter. Double-consciousness, often in a less political form, is also a fixture of allegory, and is therefore fully consonant with medieval aesthetics.”4 Even so, there are many questions. Were self-conscious subcultures pervasive or were they tolerated only in major urban centers of learning, as John Boswell has argued??> To what degree did individual consciousness of sexual identity depend on such cultures?”° Finally, is double-consciousness a step toward individual subjectivity or a deeper burrowing into the proscriptions of the Law? Any answer to these questions has to begin with what appears to me to be an open invitation on the part of many twelfth-century authors to read their texts actively, to revel in their word play, ambiguity, and deliberate obscurity.
Despite the massive ideological investment in the link between masculinity and knighthood, they were never successfully staged as fully overlapping spectacles. Heroic masculinity, no less than knighthood, seems to have been under construction, not fully concomitant with the evolving social, political, and linguistic discourses which stressed the sacrificial nature of the masculine. While historians of the twelfth century have often over-emphasized the discovery of the individual at the expense of the evolution of communities, most of the texts I will be examining in the second part of this book are concerned with just that: (1) how the individual fits “into” or is situated “outside of” the social group; and (2) how that fit determines perceptions of gender and sexuality. Marie de France’s Lais, the Conte du graal and its Continuations, and the De planctu naturae, owe as much to the well-documented innovations and tensions of the twelfth century (Latin vs. vernacular, individual vs. collective, aristocratic vs. royal power, dialectic vs. rhetoric, etc.) and the discourses that they engendered as they do to any notion of individual consciousness. Peter Haidu may assert (questionably) that “in the tenth and eleventh centuries, then, there were no secular subjects,”*” but he also admits that “the subjectification of knight and peasant begins during the twelfth century, when a wave of disciplinary power persecutes all classes and engulfs the continent of Europe, with formation of the state as its leading edge.”?8 Haidu claims that ecclesiastical authority acted as the substitute for the Althusserian state during this period, i.e., as the ideological apparatus through which subjectivity was instituted, and while I agree that they overlap, I see the two fields as coterminous, not identical. It is quite clear that medieval subjects could envisage an order of the Real (all that cannot be symbolized within the Law) beyond the confines of the Church and that their subjectivity was just as often formed within the gaps between secular and ecclesiastical mechanisms as within an air-tight notion of the Law, no matter how strenuously the Church claimed a universal and totalizing explanation of experience.
The various authors I will be discussing, composing at the brink of what has been called a new episteme of modernity, surely operated within discursive restrictions but they also resisted and rewrote these discourses through a set of double references that exposed fissures as well as links between the past and the present, institutional norms and the demands of patronage, gender and sex, and especially the socially constructed subject and the private, interior spaces in which that subjectivity can, however briefly, be cast off. This space is both more and less than a closet: it is the very gap out of which subjectivity arises in the split subject, a gap the subject tries to conceal even from himself rather than one in which he can ever successfully hide.”? It is no coincidence that the texts in which masculinity and the Law that subtends it are most clearly problematized through the deployment of accusations of sodomy, are also texts that refigure this gap as an alternate space in which to situate action: the long-lost other-space of Celtic legends (Marie de France), Greek foundation myth (Eveas), dream narratives (De planctu naturae), or the gap between the “real” terrain of Perceval’s wasteland and the apparitional status of the Fisher King’s castle in the Conte du graal. In this respect, twelfth-century texts are explicitly ideological in that they do exist, in Haidu’s formulation, to “cover over social selfcontradiction . . . wrap[s] band aids on the abyssal wounds of psychic constitutions.”*” The anachronisms of twelfth-century literature might well reflect a willed ignorance of history and an insensitivity to cultural difference, but they attest, more importantly, to an attempt to refigure the present through that past — to rewrite the present not only as demanded by patronage but also as a contested site of knowledge. Furthermore, these fissures between past and present, Latin and vernacular, masculine and feminine, sleep and waking, also provide for authorial “escape hatches” from which we, the readers, can glimpse, or imagine that we glimpse, some resistance on the part of authors to the signifying practices and disciplinary forces that patrolled them. Without going so far as to suggest a fully articulated and superhistorical individual author, I believe we can read resistance into the interstices of the competing discourses to which the author was subject, even when such resistance was unconscious or unacknowledged.
To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, then: is there a sodomite or is he/she/it simply a brand deployed by one who controls discourse? And if there is, can he/she/it speak, or speak out? Even if we admit that the infamously hegemonic force of homophobic texts such as the Liber Gomorrhianus or the De planctu naturae might be accurate reflections of the deep and abiding moral beliefs of their authors, can we not also detect within them resistance and counter-discourse, even in the most orthodox of quasi-theological and philosophical arguments? How important is it, after all, to know whether a prolific theologian like Alain de Lille truly believed in the epistemological critique of sodomy he outlines in the De planctu naturae? Though it appears to be written with monologic pretensions, we can never really establish Alain’s intentions, and must therefore be ever attentive to the texts’ failure to contain slippage of meaning and to Alain’s not always subtle highlighting of those leaks. In sum, what violation is done in “queering” these texts? None at all. Most readers of what we would now consider twelfth-century canonical texts would agree that they are already very queer indeed and that it is precisely that queerness, or alterity, that continues to attract us. Firsttime younger readers, increasingly untouched by any familiarity with canonical literature or traditional justifications for the study of medieval literature, are even more likely, in my experience, to remark on the queer, unexpected, and illogical elements in the texts and to express consternation over the unconvincing heterosexual narratives that they purvey — unconvincing only in the very narrow terms within which heterosexuality is constrained. One classic justification for literary criticism is that it allows us to recapture lost meaning and in some cases “render audible what was forcibly silenced,” either by contemporary mores or by subsequent criticism.*' In the case of twelfth-century texts, the hazy distinction between what has been lost and what might never have been very clear in the first place makes the goal of recovery of some essential meaning particularly illusory and untenable. Such, I suspect, was also the case in 1160.
When it comes to dealing with an emotionally charged issue like sodomy, medieval texts can even seem more phantasmatically familiar to us today than many post-Enlightenment texts in which the subject of dissident sexual practices is completely occluded.*” But this sense of proximity can also be illusory. What we sometimes imagine to have recovered is less easily classifiable than we would expect, not surprising given the very different ways in which subjects experienced their selves through the medium of interpretive communities. That is, there were interpretive filters or screens then operating that may go unrecognized today, including extensive use of irony.°? We should be careful about making facile generalizations about our “gay” predecessors, but no more careful than when dealing with other issues that should be flagged for eraspecific connotations (freedom, power, dreams, imagination, oppositesex eroticism, love, etc.). Not that we need a Foucauldian blessing, but David Halperin, in response to numerous critiques about the restrictiveness of some social constructionist theories, claims that Foucault never intended caution to be interpreted as proscription. We should not feel constrained simply to map “the shifts in categories and classifications of an otherwise unchanging “sexuality” or insist too strictly on “a historical distinction between pre-modern sexual acts and modern sexual identities” in the name of fidelity to Foucault: Nothing Foucault says about the differences between two historically distant, and operationally distinct, discursive strategies for regulating and delegitimating forms of male same-sex sexual contacts prohibits us from inquiring into the connections that pre-modern people may have made between specific sexual acts and the particular ethos, or sexual style, or sexual subjectivity, of those who performed them.*4
If no continuities can be perceived over the course of almost nine hundred years (1120-2004) in sexual behaviors or the ways in which sexuality was configured as a part of identity, then it must be equally impossible to claim understanding of any other of the political, social, and philosophical formulations within which sex acts were framed. In other words, to privilege sexuality as the one unfathomable formation, isolated from other equally powerful components of identity, is to perpetuate the nineteenth century’s over-emphasis on sexuality as the truth of the self. Certainly some of the semiotics of medieval sexuality are now impossible to read (the role of gestures, choice of clothing, tone of voice, word choice, occupation, education, religious affiliation, cultural identity) and though we know something about attempts to regulate sexual behavior, we know next to nothing about their effectiveness. Which techniques were more productive and not just more easily recorded in writing — self-discipline (as in internal policing through examination of conscience, public or private confession, penance, monitoring of dream content, conformity to institutional standards); or legal, social, and institutional controls (self as judged by others, subject to external review but internal regulation to conform to non-negotiable community standards)? Were these controls seen primarily as customary (cultural, temporally bound through ritual and tradition), rhetorical (subject to manipulation), and/or divinely inspired? Writers trained in exploiting rhetorical figures as part of their clerical training might well have seen identities, including sexual identities, as similarly figural, to be evoked and cast off as best suited the ends of the texts they were writing or some more personal agenda. Sexuality, in other words, need not be so allied with strictly defined categories of preference and licit/illicit behavior, but could be more an effect of adherence or non-adherence to gendered standards, more performative, in effect. This does not mean that sexual preference is in itself performative, quite the opposite, but that the possibilities of acting on those preferences in the Middle Ages are numerous and fluid. What is objected to in most of the homophobic diatribes is not sexual acts per se but non-adherence to the gender roles, themselves allied with disciplinary discourses, from which sexuality was thought to emerge.
Thus I want to imagine the medieval texts discussed in the following chapters as outside of the disciplinary frameworks of their own age as well as our own rigid classificatory schemes; “out” of the grip of the homo/hetero distinction. If, in the first section, I insist on history, I hope that the second section responds more to Carolyn Dinshaw’s call to transcend historical barriers through affective alliances and imagined queer communities.*> To these ends, I will be taking up a wide range of questions, guided largely by Foucault’s meditations on discipline, Althusser’s notion of interpellation, and the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and Zizek, all of which in one way or another question the boundaries between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. And inevitably it is the construction and the conflict with Law that shapes our categories and identities, a Law that is imagined as upholding all categories, the ideology and symbolic placement from which one speaks. Even today, sodomy presents one of the most effective challenges to the quidditas of institutions, in that it reveals just how fragile the social structures and subject positions founded on this fantastical notion of Law really are. This challenge raises one final question: no matter how successful the attack on Law, or how overtly transgression is celebrated, can one ever truly be outside of the Law? Will it not simply morph, absorb, and regroup? In the following chapters, we will watch authors struggle with these questions, sometimes knowingly, sometimes in spite of themselves. But as they sideline the sodomite, banish and condemn him, they also, paradoxically, give him a voice.
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