Handbook of Medieval Sexuality

Vern L. Bullough, James Brundage, Vern L. Bullough, James Brundage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136512247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Like specialists in other fields in humanities and social sciences, medievalists have begun to investigate and write about sex and related topics such as courtship, concubinage, divorce, marriage, prostitution, and child rearing. The scholarship in this significant volume asserts that sexual conduct formed a crucial role in the lives, thoughts, hopes and fears both of individuals and of the institutions that they created in the middle ages.
The absorbing subject of sexuality in the Middle Ages is examined in 19 original articles written specifically for this "Handbook" by the major authorities in their scholarly specialties. The study of medieval sexuality poses problems for the researcher: indices in standard sources rarely refer to sexual topics, and standard secondary sources often ignore the material or say little about it. Yet a vast amount of research is available, and the information is accessible to the student who knows where to look and what to look for. This volume is a valuable guide to the material and an indicator of what subjects are likely to yield fresh scholarly rewards.

II
VARIANCE FROM NORMS

7 HOMOSEXUALITY
Warren Johansson and William A. Percy*

Homosexuality in the Middle Ages long remained virtually unexplored. All that the pioneer investigators of the pre-Hitler period, Xavier Mayne [pseudonym of Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson], The Intersexes (1907), Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), and Arlindo Camillo Monteiro, Amor säfico e socrätico (1922), had to say on the entire period from the death of Justinian the Great in 565 to 1475 could have been contained in two pages. The first to venture into this “blind spot” in history were Canon Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955), who sought to exculpate Bible and Church from blame for homophobia, and J.Z. Eglinton, Greek Love (1964), who devoted a section to the continuity of pagan pederastic tradition into the Middle Ages. More recently, Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in History (1976), consigned 100 pages to unconventional sexuality in Byzantium and the Latin West. Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice (1979) and John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), offered the first book-length studies. Taking advantage of the lack of documentation and of organization itself during the Dark Age 500–1000, Boswell expanded Bailey's efforts with the original thesis that Christians were not particularly homophobic before the thirteenth century—in spite of the death penalty imposed by Christian Roman and Byzantine emperors and the anathemas hurled at sodomites by the early Church Fathers. Boswell claimed that the secular governments, far more than Inquisitors, and without direct Christian inspiration, carried out most of the arrests, trials, tortures, and executions of sodomites during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a period little treated by him, but which Goodich had emphasized in part because documentation is so much more plentiful for it. David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (1987), has 60 pages in a slightly Marxist framework while Wayne L. Dynes (ed.), Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990), with well over 100 pages, is in the liberal mold. The least sound, if longest, monograph is Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe (1994), which seeks to identify orthodox liturgical precedents for gay marriages in a society that normally prescribed death for sodomites. The best is Michael J. Rocke's dissertation, “Male Homosexuality and its Regulation in Late Medieval Florence” (1989). Articles are pouring forth, some more significant, like those of Giovanni Dall'Orto on Italian cultural figures in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, than some burdened by social constructionism.

TERMINOLOGY

One of the problems of studying homosexuality in the Middle Ages is the question of whether homosexuals (or gay people) existed then. “Homosexual” and “gay” are modern words. Károly Mária Kertbeny invented the former and first used it in print in an anonymous pamphlet of 1869; the word gay as applied to homosexuality derives from the slang of the American homosexual underworld (first attestation OED2 1935). Terms keep changing, and currently some radicals prefer “queer.” In these contemporary acceptations no one in the Middle Ages was or could have been “homosexual,” “gay,” or “queer.”

Medieval theologians and jurists applied yet another term to those “sinning against nature,” namely sodomite. Latin Christians classified homosexual behavior under the deadly sin luxuria, “lust” or “lechery,” and assigned it to the worst form, namely the peccatum contra naturam, “sin against nature.” It had three subdivisions, ratione generis, “by reason of species,” that is to say with brute animals; ratione sexus, “by reason of sex,” with a person having the genitalia of the same sex; and ratione modi, “by reason of manner,” namely with a member of the opposite sex but in the wrong orifice, any one that excluded procreation, which was thought the sole legitimate motive for sexual activity.

The origin of this medieval notion of sodomy derives from Genesis 19 and the destruction of the city of Sodom on account of the wickedness of its inhabitants. Yet this reference by itself cannot explain the semantic development of Jewish Hellenistic Greek Sodomites, Christian Latin Sodomita, into the medieval notion of the “sodomite”—a far broader concept. The depravity of the Sodomites took the form “to know,” that is to have sex with the male strangers (supposedly “angels”) who were visiting Lot.

Significantly Lot, following the literary example of the host at Gibeah in Judges 19 (perhaps an older version), offers the townsmen his daughters instead of the males that they clamored to know, a fact that implies their bisexuality as well as the low esteem in which females were held. Moreover, the verses add that Lot's daughters had not yet known men. This interpretation of to know (which has ample scriptural precedent) seems more valid than the one that Bailey and Boswell argued, namely, that the Sodomites were punished for inhospitality. Whether it is or not is unimportant, because it is the medieval interpretation that is important here, and this seemed to imply same sex relationships were at issue.

Certainly the reworking in the Hellenistic period of the homosexual aspect of the episode into the legend that the Sodomites were one and all similarly and specifically depraved, making the city's destruction the source of the taboo on homosexuality, did not obliterate other mythopoetic elements. Sodomites were also equated with satyrs, beings allegedly endowed with insatiable, and what we should now call “polymorphously perverse” sexual appetites. The prohibitions in Leviticus 18:22–23 concern only two categories of offender: males who have intercourse with other males, and males and females who copulate with animals. Both were excluded from the sacral community of Israel, as were subsequently all sodomites in the wider definition from the Christian Church.

The Christian concept of the sodomita, and then of sodomia (which appears in medieval Latin about 1175, possibly in the Iberian peninsula on the model of Arabic liwāt It “sodomite”), also has as its ideological substratum the mythical archetype of the satyr.¹ Satyrs embody male sexual desire by virtue of their enormous virile members and more or less permanent erections, but they are unsuccessful in their pursuit of women. For this reason they prefer to assault sleeping women or boys who are taken unawares, but frustrated in their search for pleasure they often turn to one another or even to animals.² This assumption explains the manifest expansion of the biblical tradition and the multiplicity of referents of the term sodomy. The legal definition, it is true, may often be a narrower one, restricted to anal intercourse with man or woman or vaginal penetration of an animal. But the psychological understanding, the moral reprobation, rests upon the implicit belief in an uninhibited sexual appetite.

The second aspect of satyrs' behavior that shaped the Christian definition of the sodomite is sacrilege.³ While, albeit often reluctantly, sacralizing heterosexual activity within marriage, mainstream Christian writers demonized all other forms of sexual expression. They even condemned as sacrilege violation by a religious of the vow of chastity. This part of the mythopoetic legacy of the ancients completed the negative image of the sodomite as one who has placed himself outside the pale of Christian belief and practice. In a sense this hypothesis also gives the rationale for classifying as sodomy intercourse with Jews and Saracens,⁴ or even, in a case from rural Poland in the eighteenth century, of so labeling a liaison between the daughter of a noble family and a young serf trained as a musician.⁵ The sodomite is driven by lusts so bestial, demonic and blasphemous as to make him trample upon every law of God and man in quest of pleasure.

Another term that came into use in the twelfth century but gained ground after 1235, is Bulgarus, “Bulgarian,” whence French bougre and English bugger (from which the nouns of action bougrerie and buggery were subsequently derived). It was the merit of a heresy hunter Robert le Bougre to have confounded all the heretical sects under one name,⁶ which became synonymous with “heretic” and then “sodomite” and “usurer.” Catholic inquisitors accused adherents of dualist sects of practicing the detestable vice, in part because of their unconventional views on sexual morality.⁷ English “buggery” is not, however, unambiguously attested in the sexual sense until the penal law of Henry VIII in 1533; it is nowhere found in Middle English.

PEDERASTY VS ANDROPHILIA

Another question that must be addressed, if only because Boswell has so insistently raised it, is whether medieval (and Roman) homosexuality was predominantly pederastic or androphile. Quite clearly, the homosexuality of the ancient world was predominantly age-asymmetrical. In ancient Greece approved sexual interplay normally took place between an (active) adult male and a (passive) adolescent male between the ages of 12 or 13 and 17 or 18.⁸ Theorists pra...