Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (review)

Reviews279 Blackmore, Josiah, and Gregory S. Hutcheson, Eds. Queer Iberia: Sexualities , Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 1999. 478 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2326-5 (hb), 0-8223-2349-4 (pb) Throughout the Middle Ages, Iberia is a site of cultural and sexual liminality, Europe's point of contact with a cultural other that was immense and frightening, a "queer" space of unnatural sexualities, accursed religious practices, and vile abominable traditions that threatened the core of medieval Europe's militant Christian Latinity. Yet, as the editors energetically argue in their introduction, Iberia is intrinsically queer, not only in the imaginarles ofwestern Europe but as a consequence ofits own historical process of Reconquest and the complexities of its cultural identities. The introduction by Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (1-19) successfully expands the concept of Iberian queerness as non-normativity and insists on the crossings between sexuality and culture, prefacing an impressive collection of fifteen essays that plumb the discursive intersections among culture, sexuality, literature and history in canonic and non-canonic texts from the tenth to the early seventeenth centuries and "that not only confound a tradition of normative readings, but confront the geopolitical and chronological biases by which scholarship continues to relegate medieval and early-modern Iberia to the critical closet" (5). This critical "outing" begins with three essays grouped together as "Queering Iberia". Mark D.Jordan examines several tellings of the martyrdom ofSt. Pelagius, a beautiful thirteen-year-old Christian youth who rebuffed the sexual advances ofhis Muslim captor, 'Abd ar-Rahmän III ("Saint Pelagius, Ephebe and Martyr", 23-47). Even as the tenth-century accounts by Raguel and Hrotswitha contain and condemn same sex desire as something alien and repugnant, imposed on Christianity from without by its Saracen enemies, in the Mozarabic liturgy male clergy appropriate and celebrate Pelagius's body as an object of Christian adoration. In "'Affined to love the Moor': Sexual Misalliance and Cultural Mixing in the Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer" (4872 ), Benjamin Liu situates the production of these poems in the wake of the surge of the Reconquest during the first half of the thirteenth century that introduces a new set ofpolitical and social problems concerning the relations and boundaries between the three religions under Christian domain. Whereas the legal rhetoric of the Alfonsine codes represents a monologic discourse that seeks univocally to regulate practice and language, Liu reads the equivocal poetics of the cantigas as its discursive antithesis that thrives on multiplyLa corónica 29.2 (Spring, 2001): 279-83 280ReviewsLa corónica 29.2, 2001 ing rather than restricting ambiguities; both discourses of control and transgression offer complementary views of sexual and cultural mixing (54). Catherine Brown focuses on the performance of misogyny in "Queer Representation in the Arcipreste de Talavera, or The Maldezir de mugeres Is a Drag" (73-103) and on the narrator's frequent slippage out ofthe authoritative masculine voice of the moralist preacher into a feminine rhetoric. While the narrator constructs "men" and "women" as separate and stable discursive categories , his own drag performance whereby women are no longer the object ofdiscourse but its cacophonous subject blurs the borders between masculine and feminine, order and disorder, natural and unnatural, truth and noise; such discursive confusion, Brown concludes, is an essential characteristic of the Archpriest's wor(l)d. Sara Lipton ('"Tanquam effeminatum': Pedro II of Aragon and the Gendering of Heresy in the Albigensian Crusade", 107-29) leads off the section of "Iberian Masculinities"; she presents an intriguing account of events surrounding Pedro IFs participation in the crusade based on opposition chronicle accounts that transform him into an effeminate and a heretic and analyzes "femininity" as a shifting concept with positive or negative valence depending on political position. Her insistence on historicizing the gendering of heresy rather than accepting it as a timeless semiotic pattern leads her to examine the role played by women as symbolic currency in the aristocratic society that conducted the crusade, the economic competition between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and the misogyny that underlies courtly culture. Louise O. Vasvári combines disciplined philological rigor and carnivalesque esprit in mining richly...