Nothing Natural Is Shameful

Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe

Joan Cadden

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780812245370
  9780812245370
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812208580
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

In his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained.From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.

Chapter 1

Moved by Nature

Commenting on a chapter about marriage and “venereal matters” in an astrological work, George of Trebizond noted the planetary conditions which could produce a man born to “filthy things [immunda].” In conjunction with Venus, the cold and dry influences of Saturn might cause the obstruction of his seminal pores, that is, the anatomical deformities described in the Problemata. The result, he explained, would be “certain monstrous things contrary to universal nature” as well as a “particular nature” of a feminine sort.¹ This particular nature, as Trebizond explained, itself has more general natural causes: “It is necessary that, by nature, the semen is driven out toward the genitalia. When it finds no channels and no ways through, it is drawn off to nearby passages.”² The coexistence of these two senses of “nature” produced paradoxes and tensions surrounding the phenomenon of men who were susceptible to anal sexual stimulation. The project of explaining this set of deviations from the ordinary course of things thus presented a serious challenge. The efforts of Pietro d'Abano and others to meet that challenge to the discipline of natural philosophy is this chapter's central subject. What could it have meant to say, as one reader did in summarizing Problemata IV.26, that “some men commit the sodomitical sin [peccatum] moved by nature”?³

At one level, the two manifestations of nature are at odds with each other. Universal nature, sometimes referred to as “unqualified nature [natura simpliciter]” is a force and embodiment of an ordered existence. It constitutes the teleological principle that subsumes the purpose, the final cause, of everything in the physical world. And it is, not incidentally, consonant with medieval Christian notions of divine Creation and Providence. In contrast, a particular nature, sometimes referred to as a “qualified nature [natura secundum quod]” may stray from the path defined by universal nature. That is, it may, at the very least, fail to meet the imperatives of teleology, and might even appear to defy them. But the two ways of looking at nature were not regarded as entirely contradictory in the Middle Ages. First, the particular natures of individual objects usually did succeed in realizing the prescribed goals of universal nature, if not to perfection, at least adequately. Second, objects and events that were sometimes referred to as “against nature” were not usually beyond natural explanation. No supernatural intervention was required to account for most deviations from the norm—especially those that occurred with some frequency.⁴ The medieval scientific notion of a natural world governed through final causes was not equivalent to the modern notion of a natural world governed through natural laws: individual imperfections and even failures were expected. As portrayed in the literature of the period, such as the French Romance of the Rose and Chaucer's English work, the allegorical figure Nature, who rules Creation as God's viceroy, was not always able to keep things—especially animate things—in line. She had particular difficulty regulating desire.⁵

What is more, medieval scholars wished to defend the teleological order against encroachments by the threatening philosophical notions of randomness or “chance,” incompatible with both Aristotelian principles and Christian theology. For that reason, they sometimes went so far as to argue that irregularities were meant to happen. In commentaries and questions on Aristotle's Physics, the text that defined “nature” for them, they discussed “whether monsters, which are called errors (peccata) of nature, are intended by nature.”⁶ Jean de Jandun and Walter Burley, both figures in the history of the Problemata, wrote on that subject. Defending the fundamental axiom that nature always acts toward some higher end, they nevertheless both concluded that, in a weak and contingent sense, nature could be said to “intend” the occurrence of a specific individual with an “inappropriate disposition [dispositio disconveniens].” Thus, bending over backward to contain randomness itself within the ambit of a purposeful natural order, Burley declared that “if ‘monster’ is taken to be the whole aggregate” of individual substance and inappropriate disposition, as he believed it should be, “then I say that qualified nature intends such a monster, and that which it intends occurs by chance.”⁷ The Problemata, free as it was from the dominion of final causes and filled as it was with questions about curiosities, implicitly raised doubts about the sway of nature in its most commanding, universal form.

Such explicit distinctions between “universal nature” and “particular nature,” “unqualified nature” and “qualified nature,” do not appear in late medieval discussions of problema IV.26. Nevertheless, the senses and behaviors of “nature” were at the heart of attempts to understand the men “with whom intercourse is had.” Taking his cue from Bartholomeus de Messina, whose translation uses nature-related terms ten times within this problema, Pietro d'Abano's commentary contains more than fifty such words. In most instances these are words like “nature,” “natural,” “naturally,” and even “most natural”; in a dozen cases they are words related to birth—nativitas (birth) and natus (which I have usually translated as “constituted”). Along with anatomical terms (“penis” occurs twenty times and “anus” sixteen), the vocabulary of nature dominates the Problemata-related texts that follow Pietro's commentary. Within the sections of the commentaries that discuss the irregular bodies of men with irregular desires, the notion of monstrosity reinforces the theme of nature. It both stands in opposition to nature in its “universal” guise and, at the same time, represents an example of “particular” or “qualified” nature. George of Trebizond held that the natural and regular motions of the heavenly bodies caused “monstrous things contrary to universal nature.” This ambiguity is embodied in the concept of a “monstrous nature” that figures in Pietro's exposition written half a century earlier—a nature “against nature.”⁸

As the first, the most extensive, and the most influential medieval commentary on the Problemata, Pietro d'Abano's work offers the best introduction to how medieval readers understood the answers to the question posed by Book IV, problema 26. For that reason, this chapter and the next are built around a detailed account of Pietro's reading of Aristotle's brief discussion of deformities and habits. They constitute an exposition of his exposition. They explain his interpretation of the ancient text as he had received it in Latin, and introduce the basic natural philosophical concepts and sources to which he had recourse. In addition, the explication takes account of views of Walter Burley, Evrart de Conty, and a number of anonymous authors and readers that sometimes varied from Pietro's.

As a close reading of medieval texts, what follows mirrors some of the laborious practices of scholasticism from which Renaissance humanists so proudly liberated modern inquiry. But it was precisely those practices that enabled—indeed, in some sense, required—intellectuals of the late Middle Ages to speak in medical and philosophical terms about men who had sex with men. This chapter pieces together a concrete picture of superfluities pressing to get out, what happens when ejaculation through the penis is impossible, and which men are able to emit what substances. Yet it involves more than a summary of medieval arguments. It reveals the rhetorical practices and explanatory strategies that rendered the condition of men who are passive in coitus familiar and ordinary, conforming to the usual ebb and flow of bodily fluids and responding to the universal psychological and physiological mechanisms of desire. And it suggests that those processes and principles simultaneously created the very standards that some men fail to meet. In particular, it shows how late medieval scholars struggled to fit the pleasures of “those with whom intercourse is had” into the natural world and to subsume them under natural science.

The format of Pietro's work conforms to standard Latin scholarly methods, themselves indebted to the earlier models of biblical exegesis on the one hand and Arabic philosophical commentaries on the other. Conservative insofar as it was closely tied to the words of the text, the method nevertheless afforded scholars ample opportunity to redefine the issues being addressed, impose meanings on the content in question, introduce new material into the discussion, and in general place their personal stamps on a subject. Pietro, intellectually aggressive in all his works, took advantage of each of these avenues to assert and develop his own perspectives. His freedom to do so was, of course, enhanced by the very character of the compilation of unresolved problemata with which he was dealing.

Why Those Having Intercourse Enjoy It

In the previous chapter I introduced the first lemma of Problemata IV.26, which posed the question itself and the ways that various readers understood it. Having proposed his own view of it, Pietro proceeded to answer the first part of the problema as he had construed it—Why is sex a source of enjoyment? Like his reconfiguration of the question itself, his answer has the effect of subsuming the explanation of some men's particular desires under an explanation of the universal nature of sexual pleasures. And thus, in a sense, he makes their peculiar pleasures themselves a special case of a natural process. In order to explain the physiological predicament faced by the men in question, Aristotle had stated certain axioms of anatomy and physiology concerning the ways superfluous materials are drawn off and excreted from the body. At home with the topics of bodily parts and fluids, Pietro took the opportunity to display and deploy his deep familiarity with natural philosophy and theoretical medicine. Like his expansion of the problema itself to include active and passive heterosexual pleasures, this incorporation of standard terms and explanations associated with familiar bodily functions serves at once to normalize and to obscure the men whose pleasures gave rise to the problema in the first place. Indeed, when Burley summarized Pietro's treatment of IV.26, he allocated four times as much space to the twelve general causes of coital pleasure and to a comparison of men's and women's enjoyment as he devoted to his few comments about “effeminate men.” The ratio is reversed in Pietro's own commentary, and Burley no doubt had other reasons to shape the problema as he did. Nevertheless, his move was facilitated by Pietro's virtuoso treatment of the anatomy and physiology of desire in the early sections of the exposition.

Indeed, Pietro not only frames the inclination to “be acted upon” within the context of sexual dynamics more generally, he places all sexual desire and pleasure within the context of a more general physiological pattern, namely the buildup and release of bodily substances. He identifies three passages in the Aristotelian text as the response to the first of the two questions posed by the problema—why people enjoy sex. In the first (at the lemma “Either because”) he stated the axiom that each superfluity produced by the body has an innate and proper place in which it collects and from which (with the involvement of effort and a certain “windiness”) it is expelled. In the second (at “Like urine”), he gives the examples of urine, feces, tears, mucus, and blood. And finally (at “Surely similarly”), he makes the connection with the collection of generative seed in the testicles and penis. Neither subjective experiences nor persons, much less relationships between persons, were the subject here for medieval scholars.

[Aut quia] Either because for each superfluity there is a place in which [the part] is appropriate according to nature that it is separated out. And the effort having been made, the departing windiness makes [it] inflate and separate out through it.

[Ut urina] Like urine into the bladder, the superfluity of food into the intestines, and tears into the eye, mucus into the nose, and blood into the veins too.⁹

In explaining what he construes as the cause of pleasure, Pietro follows closely the mechanisms itemized in Aristotle's text, adding physiological elaboration. For example, he reminds his readers that food undergoes several stages of refinement (“digestion”), for each of which there is a supporting receptacle by which waste products (“superfluities”) are drawn off, contained, and eventually expelled. Aristotle had said here that each excess was segregated “according to nature” and later that its receiving organ was “innately suited” to it; Pietro added that the attraction and excretion occur “naturally,” adumbrating his concern with the “nature” of the men he will later be inquiring about. The dynamics of these processes commanded Pietro's attention and he explains that the effort of which the text speaks is closely associated with motion, both of which help a windiness (a subtle, spiritous substance) to effect the collection, thickening, and expulsion of each substance. It is this propulsive windiness that causes the discharge of superfluities to be accompanied by swelling, he explains, citing the authority of Avicenna.¹⁰ Pietro adds both detail and technical anatomical terminology to Aristotle's list of examples of superfluities and their receptacles: mucus is generated in specific areas of the brain and evacuated into the nostrils; blood is evacuated into the veins, and so forth. Scholastics used enumerations of this sort to display intellectual virtuosity, but this particular list also served to domesticate the subject matter. What could be more familiar, more ordinary than urination or sneezing?

Pietro's appeal to specific doctrines and vocabulary of Galenic medicine may have had a similar effect. Even scholars with no specialized medical knowledge were familiar with the theory of natural faculties—active powers inherent in organs that attract, retain, and expel the substances appropriate to them. Less familiar to Pietro's northern readers in the university arts faculties, but nonetheless legitimizing, was his appeal to Arabic medical expertise.¹¹ Taken together, the science and the rhetoric of Pietro's treatment provided a learned and dignified introduction to Problemata IV.26. Standard physiological knowledge conveyed in neutral philosophical and medical terms placed the men who were its subject within an unexceptional and even respectable environment.

The same tone of scholastic sobriety is sustained in the excursus on blood that follows. Clearly demarcated by phrases like “It should be noted that” and “Someone might doubt,” digressions of this kind were an important dimension of the commentary form, often intended to respond to objections that might occur to listeners or readers. One might ask, says Pietro, why blood, a vital fluid, is mentioned in the same breath with the disposal of waste products like urine? Not all readers were bothered by this apparent problem, as is attested by the Erfurt commentator's addition of milk—another useful fluid—to the list of superfluities.¹² And the issue was, after all, tangential: blood was just one in a list of examples, ranging from feces to tears, of substances that collect in the body. But the digression is significant on two levels. First, precisely because it was standard scholastic practice, it formed part of the apparatus of normalization that characterizes the early sections of Pietro's commentary. Its expected, routine character is probably the reason that the Aachen and Bavarian commentators included it in their short summaries of Pietro's work. Second, the passage introduces for the first time the ambiguities of “nature” that will permeate the rest of Pietro's analysis. And, for some readers at least, the use of a superlative even evoked the notion that there was a continuum of naturalness, from less to more. Blood, they were given to understand, with its natural place in the veins, was “the most natural [naturalissimus] of humors.”¹³ Yet Aristotle appeared to be treating it as a waste product that needs to be expelled. Pietro's solution is to distinguish the positive sense of “blood” from “blood” that is “mixed with many superfluities of other humors and is not natural.”¹⁴ This explanation makes clear, however, that the unnatural blood itself is a regular product of the (natural) processes of digestion. The digression thus foreshadows the transition between the unexceptional physiology of superfluities to the less natural natures at the heart of the problema. It is here too that Pietro first introduced the word “anus,” as one of the sites at which the less than fully natural “melancholic” blood is manifested.

[Similiter utique] Surely similarly to these, and the generative material in the testicles and penis.¹⁵

Before confronting directly the subject of anal sexual stimulation, however, Pietro added an element to his elaboration of the normal workings of the body. It involved what commentators on Aristotle's Physics called “universal nature.” The text of the Problemata simply incorporated semen into the list of superfluities routinely produced and the testicles and penis into the list of appropriate receptacles. Pietro explicates, distinguishing between the testicles, which are intermediaries that contribute to the forcefulness of the seed's exit, and the penis, though which it is emitted. But he also takes the opportunity to introduce and highlight the subject of pleasure. The text he is commenting on subsumes the buildup of semen under the general movement of superfluities; his explication similarly subsumes the pleasure of sexual release under the general experience of expelling them. “Thus, therefore,” he explains, “the cause of pleasure and joy is due to expelling what is superfluous. And it is expelled at the place in which it is naturally constituted to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Natural Philosophy of Sodomites and their Kind
• Chapter 1. Moved by Nature
• Chapter 2. Habit is a Kind of Nature
• Chapter 3. “Just Like a Woman”: Passivity, Defect, and Insatiability
• Chapter 4. “Beyond the Boundaries of Vice”: Moral Science and Natural Philosophy
• Chapter 5. What's Wrong? Silence, Speech, and the Problema of Sodomy
• Epilogue
• Appendix. Pietro d'Abano, Expositio Problematum Aristotelis, IV.26: A Text
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Manuscripts Consulted
• Works Cited
• Index
• Acknowledgments