Download PDF | April Harper, Caroline Proctor - Medieval Sexuality_ A Casebook - (2007).
241 Pages
Introduction
It seems fitting to open this volume by paying tribute to the achievements of Professor Vern L. Bullough, a pioneer in the study of medieval sexuality, who sadly died on June 21, 2006. In fact, it was Bullough’s words that prompted us to hold the conference (Sex: Medieval Perspectives, University of St Andrews, 2004) from which this collection of essays stems.
In his article “Sex in History: A Redux,” published in Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler’s edited volume Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), Bullough recalled his experiences as a historian of sexuality. Following the warning not to publish on the topic until he had achieved success in “a respectable field,” he still faced the embarrassment and disapproval of his colleagues, who introduced him as “a specialist in whores, pimps and queers, who occasionally deigned to do real research.”
It was his determination in lobbying for sessions on the history of sexuality at the American Historical Association (AHA) conference, attracting an audience of over a thousand people, that motivated other scholars who were likewise devoted to the study of sexuality to push through a session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. A call to action went up to promote the history of sexuality and it was a call many took up. Over the last few decades, the success of this call has been proven as the topic of sexuality has moved from the margins of academic study to the mainstream of current medieval scholarship. Perhaps some of the best testaments to this success are found in the edited collection of articles by Bullough and the respected historian and legal scholar James Brundage, the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), a volume which immediately illustrated the breadth of sources and arenas open to the historian of medieval sexuality.
With the death of Vern Bullough in 2006, the field has lost a great historian of sexuality, a motivating force and mentor. It is, however, encouraging to note, when browsing through this year’s conference program for Kalamazoo, that over 100 papers were given on topics of sexuality by “specialists in whores, pimps and queers.” Increasing numbers of conferences are being held, and books and articles produced, devoted solely to the subject of sexuality.
We were incredibly fortunate to be given an excellent venue for our conference at St Andrews and enjoyed the great encouragement and support of the Department of Medieval History there, but Bullough’s lone session at the AHA was never far from our minds, for though our conference was occasionally standing-room only as well, we were aware of the struggles we and our colleagues can still face in our field. One delegate informed us that the poster, which had been sent to her particular institution for posting, had, instead, been sent to her directly. Her reputation as a member of the dirty circle of historians of sexuality was obviously known and it was assumed that only she would be interested in such a gathering. Experiences like this made us keenly aware of our position as a third generation of historians of sexuality, both in the continuing challenges we face, but much more so in the freedom we now enjoy.
It is the hard work of those like Bullough and Brundage in the first generation and the determination of the dozens of scholars who took up the call as a second generation to push open the doors of conferences, publishing houses and university curriculum committees that has made it possible for a third generation of scholars, including ourselves, to hold such conferences, to teach courses on the theme of medieval sexuality and to identify ourselves as historians of sexuality. In our title, we use the term “sexuality” deliberately.
The conference that inspired our collection was entitled “Sex: Medieval Perspectives” to draw attention to the fact that our focus was not exclusively masculinity, femininity, gender or the study of different sexualities; we wanted to talk about sex. It is a word that is so often deliberately avoided and one that we wanted to emphasize. We realized, however, that “sex” was just as erroneous as any other term we were being pressured to use, for we were interested not only in the act but in how it was perceived, its role in law, literature, societies, cultures and religions, how it shaped the image of men, women, and their roles in society, how it determined the definitions of masculinity, femininity, gender, “normality” and “deviancy.”
We wanted to explore, as Ruth Mazo Karras has described it in Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, “the universe of meanings that people place on sex acts” (New York: Routledge, 2005, 5). Sexuality is culture; it is representative of a culture’s religion, attitudes, taboos and experience. It is the cultural definitions, ideals and changes in attitudes across time, geographical distance, genre and culture with which this volume is most concerned, and thus we have chosen to title our work Medieval Sexuality to reflect the breadth of our contributors’ work.
There is a trend for authors to preface their work with an explanation of why the study of sexuality is valid and important. It is a credit to Bullough, Brundage, Murray, Salisbury, Mazo Karras and so many others whose names have become synonymous with the field, and who so eloquently and successfully argued on behalf of the history of sexuality, that we may now make the conscious decision not to begin our work with such a declaration, and can, instead, focus on what Bullough referred to as the “serendipity” of our field. It is chance findings that often inspire or shape our work, and so serendipity is perhaps one of the most fitting descriptions of what it is to study sexuality. What we study as historians of medieval sexuality is gleaned from a huge variety of sources.
It is often a question of reading between the lines, reading between the sheets. We rely on our own work, trawling through texts and manuscripts for occasional references; we welcome the serendipitous findings of colleagues and students that are so often generously shared and the chance meetings with others working in separate fields but united by our fascination with questions of sexuality. As we looked out across that conference room in St Andrews, we saw an international group of historians, experts in a multiplicity of fields of medieval studies, as well as a large number of young academics and postgraduate students, and we could only conclude that it is indeed serendipitous that we, who might have had little in common in our “real” scholarly pursuits, should share this aspect of our study.
This shared concern reflects the very nature of the history of sexuality, as Foucault acknowledged when he asserted sexual discourse to be part of a universal experience. Indeed it is the universal, ubiquitous, pervasive nature of sexuality that enables it to touch all our work at some level. The goal of this collection is to reflect that universal serendipity and to draw attention to new findings gleaned from the sources. It seemed timely, a decade on from the publication of Bullough and Brundage’s Handbook, to produce a collection which explores the breadth, scope and impact of current research into medieval sexualities. It is for this reason that we are so delighted to be able to include work both from specialist historians of sexuality and from those newer to the field, written from a variety of perspectives. Included in this volume is a collection of work from scholars of all fields of medieval study, including literature, gender, medicine, political theory, hagiography, historiography, art history, Islamic and Eastern history, whose work contributes to the growth, development and celebration of the history of sexuality. This collection represents just a fraction of the current new research being done on medieval sexualities, and indicates the potential richness of sources yet to be explored. We hope these articles will interest, intrigue, provoke and encourage further research.
The collection opens with an essay by Ross Balzaretti, a widely published expert in the history of gender and sexuality. His introduction articulates the approaches to sexuality that inform this whole volume. He seeks to open up the sources of Lombard Italy, illustrating clearly how historical and legal texts can be woven together to present us with a clearer picture of early medieval sexualities and society. Dominic Janes, whose research is increasingly focused on modern views of early sexuality, contributes a piece on the reception and historiography of early medieval penitential literature. Both these authors share a concern with gaps and silences in the histories of early medieval sexuality.
The following section focuses on the pervasive nature of sexuality in the struggles of the holy. Joyce Salisbury, who in 1991 edited the first ever collection of articles on sex in the Middle Ages, takes us back to the desert fathers and mothers, and to their beautifully articulated and resonant personal struggles with sexuality. Sam Riches, art and gender historian, applies notions of gender and sexuality to narratives and images of the hagiographic encounters between saints and monsters. Both these articles negotiate the complexities, and the complex manipulations, of sexual identity. April Harper is also concerned with using gender and sexuality as ways of interpreting medieval sources, particularly Old French literature. She examines a diverse range of sources to elucidate the relationship between food and adulterous women, consumers and the consumed.
Lynn Martin, long interested in early modern intersections between alcohol and gender, again uses literary sources. His analysis, focused on material from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century, highlights the function of sex and alcohol in male portrayals of unruly women. Finally in this section, Caroline Proctor looks at the way sex, and sexual morality, featured in the careful manipulations of diet and lifestyle recommended in late medieval medical texts. Sexuality and consumption, and their moderation, appear intimately linked in all three of these articles. In the following section, David Santiuste, whose work deals with late medieval English political and historical identities, is also concerned with issues of sexual morality but takes this to a higher political level, scrutinizing the motivations behind Richard III’s Proclamation for the Reform of Morals. Sexual behavior, it seems, could play a central role in the political rhetoric of medieval power struggles. Philip Crispin looks at the political hierarchy reversed. His work on late medieval French theater is channeled here into a consideration of the role sexuality played in the festive drama of the clerks of the Parlement de Paris.
He suggests that even in this world upside-down, notions of sexuality, and particularly female sexuality, remained conservative. The final section explores the erotic and the exotic frontiers of sexuality in the Middle Ages. Hugh Kennedy, perhaps one of the foremost experts in the history of the medieval Islamic world, turns his attention to a work of Al-Jå˙iΩ and his sexual commentary. The debates in this work are examined as a product of the changing court, but are also compared to an earlier Greek text to illuminate early understandings of sexual orientation and to compare Greek and Arabic cultural attitudes to homosexuality.
Kim Phillips brings the collection to an end, looking at medieval travel writers and their views of the sexualities they encountered on their travels. Her article shows how pre-colonial descriptions of the peoples of the East did not depend on allegations of sodomy, surprising evidence that allows her to engage with ideas of sexuality, sodomy, colonialism and the other. Her work urges us to see what is not, as well as what is, medieval sexuality.
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