They Got Medieval

Ruth Mazo Karras is a well-known historian of medieval European sexuality and gender. In Sexuality in Medieval Europe she has produced a survey of sexuality in the Middle Ages geared to a nonspecialist readership; thus the book contains few footnotes and includes, instead, a bibliographical essay for further reading on sex in the Middle Ages, the sexuality of chastity, sex and marriage, women outside marriage, and men outside marriage. Written in a deceptively casual, simple, even plain style, the book successfully presents an absorbing and informative narrative that draws on Karras's extensive knowledge of the period and the critical debates within sexuality studies. Further, not only does the book exhibit a pluralistic and expansive view of sexual practices and ideologies, it also decenters an ethnocentric version of Western Europe as the medieval world and the medieval world as an exclusively Christian one. Thus, although she largely restricts her study to Western Europe, Karras draws on sources from Islam, Muslim Spain, and North Africa, as well as Iceland, England, Germany, and the rest of the Continent, and looks at Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures.

Karras has some theoretical points to make about sexuality in medieval Europe. The subtitle, "doing unto others," expresses her position that sex in the Middle Ages is a "transitive" act, something someone does to someone else, rather than a reciprocal act between mutually agential partners, and that there are sharply divided active and passive roles that are also closely related to gender. Thus she writes, "To be active was to be masculine, regardless of the gender of one's partner, and to be passive was to be feminine" (23). For Karras, gender is an important and determinative category in the Middle Ages. Her intervention into the acts and identities debate—which she also characterizes at length and not unfairly, as she does the essentialist/social constructionist debates, for the benefit of her nonspecialized readership—is to say that the status of the individuals committing acts governs the organization of her study, rather than the acts themselves (because, for example, sex has fundamentally different meanings and con sequences for women and men). Second, she argues that there were sexual identities in the Middle Ages but that, rather than falling on one side or the other of the homo/hetero divide, they were organized according to the difference between chastity and sexual activity and between reproductive and nonreproductive sex. These arguments also implicitly or explicitly refute other sweeping scholarly contentions about premodern Europe: the too-influential "one-sex" model derived from Aristotelian understandings of sexual difference, for example, where females are construed as defective males. ¹ Finally, Karras is careful to argue for a complex and conflicted medieval relation to sexuality. She avoids the pitfalls of adopting an exclusively top-down official perspective on sexual practices and asks questions at each turn about what people might have done and thought about what they did. Her use of sources—literary, religious, linguistic, historical, legal, and medical—is skillful and cautious, even and especially when the questions she asks are bold.

The topical chapters, in their approaches, nicely illustrate what it might be like to work with textbooks that do not adopt a heteronormative viewpoint when discussing sex and sexuality. Heterosexuality in its myriad forms is treated with specificity, as is chastity, and both are estranged from their reflexively normative contexts. One could say that the Middle Ages, with its distinctions between licit and illicit sex without regard to object choice, facilitate this approach, but it is to Karras's credit that she implicitly incorporates a critique of modern heteronormative assumptions into her perspective. Of the two chapters in particular that concern same-sex sexual practices and ideologies, "Women outside of Marriage" and "Men outside of Marriage," the latter—the fault, no doubt, of sources—is better and provides more information. Karras has written a book on men and masculinity in the Middle Ages, and this probably also contributes to the sense one has of...