Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature Read online

  Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

  France and England, 1050–1230

  WILLIAM E. B U R G WINKLE

  King’s College, Cambridge

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Discipline and Punish

  Knight Out

  Part I - Locating sodomy

  Locating Sodomy

  Pre-Medieval Traditions

  Theological and Ecclesiastical Responses

  Monastic Traditions

  Physiological Explanations of Gender and Sexuality

  John of Salisbury

  The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart

  Part II – Confronting Sodomy

  Making Perceval: Double-binding and Si`eges Perilleux

  Perceval: Making Men

  Women Under Chivalry

  Victimization

  Christian Knighthood and Sodomy

  Queering the Celtic: Marie de France and the Men Who Don’t Marry

  Narcissus and Guigemar

  Troubled Desires

  Writing the Self: Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae

  Clothing and Art

  Grammar and Rhetoric

  Gender and Reproduction

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

  Prologue

  Que as tu dit, fole desvee? / Sez tu vers cui tu t’es donee? / Cil cuiverz est de tel nature / qu’il n’a gaires de femmes cure; / il prise plus lo ploin mester; / il ne velt pas biset mangier, / molt par aimme char de maslon; / il priseroit mialz un garc¸on / que toi ne altre acoler; / o feme ne set il joer, / ne parlerast pas a guichet; / molt aime fraise de vallet; / an ce sont Troien norri. / Molt par as foiblement choisi. / N’as tu oi confaitemeant / il mena Dido malement? / Unques feme n’ot bien de lui, / n’en avras tu, si com ge cui, / d’un traitor, d’un sodomite. / Toz tens te clamera il quite; / se il avoit alcun godel, / ce li seroit et bon et bel / quel laissasses a ses druz faire; / s’il lo pooit par toi atraire, / nel troveroit ja si estrange / qu’il ne feist asez tel change, / que il feist son bon de toi / por ce qu’il lo sofrist de soi; / bien lo lairoit sor toi monter, / s’il repueit sor lui troter; / il n’aime pas poil de conin. / De cest sigle seroit tost fin, / se tuit li home qui i sont / erent autel par tot lo mont; / ja mes feme ne concevroit, / grant sofraite de gent seroit; / l’an ne feroit ja mes anfanz, / li siegles faudroit ainz cent anz. / Fille, molt as lo sens perdu, / quant de tel home as fait ton dru / qui ja de toi ne avra cure / et qui si fet contre nature, / les homes prent, les fames let, / la natural cople desfait. / Garde nel me dies ja mes; / ceste amistie´ voil que tu les, / del sodomite, del coart... (Salverda de Grave, Eneas: Roman du XIIe si`ecle, 2 vols. [Paris: Champion, 1985], ll. 8565–8611).

  (What have you said, you crazy madwoman? Do you know who you’ve given yourself to? That lustful tormentor is one of those, the type who has little interest in women. He prefers those who trade in flexible rods: he won’t eat hens, but really loves the flesh of a cock. He would rather embrace a boy than you or any other woman. He doesn’t know how to play with women, and you wouldn’t find him hanging around the hole in the gate; but he really goes for the crack of a young man. The Trojans are raised on this. You have really chosen badly. Haven’t you heard how he mistreated Dido? No woman has ever got anything good from him, and neither will you, if you ask me, not from a traitor and a sodomite. He will always be ready to leave you. If he finds a pretty boy, it will seem perfectly fair to him that you should let him go off to do his courting. And if he can attract the boy by means of you, he won’t think it strange at all to make an exchange: in return for letting the boy have his pleasure from you, he gets to do him. He will gladly let the boy mount you, if he in turn can ride him: he doesn’t like pussy [cuntly or rabbit] fur. It would soon be the end of this life if all men in the world were like him. Never would a woman conceive; soon there would be a shortage of people; no one would ever bear children, and this world would be no more before a hundred years had passed. Daughter, you have completely lost your senses choosing such a man as your lover. He will never care about you; men who, against nature, take men and abandon women undo the natural couple. Take care that you never speak to me of him again. I urge you to give up the idea of loving this sodomite coward.)

  Introduction

  Sodomy appears as a topos in the very first mid-twelfth-century ver- nacular romances after surfacing in the previous century as a catch-all category for all that is evil and unclassifiable.1 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.2 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, phan- tasmatic 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 cen- tury 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 alterna- tives, 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 clas- sical 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 ten- sions. Thus, while sodomites cannot be collapsed into the category of “homosexual” as formulated in the late nineteenth century, such indi- viduals 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”.3 These final three chapters complicate any historical under- standing 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 masculin- ity 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 com- munities 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 assump- tions, 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 psycho- analytic 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 over- turn 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 theo- logical 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 obliga- tory step in the development of exemplary knighthood. As Mark Jordan has argued, sodomy is an “invention” of eleventh-century Christian theology.4 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.5 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 sinful- ness. 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.6

  Slippage within discussion of “unnatural acts,” between gender poles and between acts and identities, is thus very much a part of its ini- tial 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 tra- ditions 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, insti- tutions 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 hetero- sexuality 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.7 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 theproduction of dominant culture” raise a number of questions which underlie the arguments presented in the following chapters:8

  (1) 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 th
e 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?

  (2) 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?9

  (3) 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)?

  (4) What political ends might have been served either by calling someone a sodomite, by exonerating him from the charge, or by linking cer- tain nationalities, professions, courts, or appearances with same-sex eroticism?