Kiss My Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages by David Rollo (review)

David Rollo has written a deeply learned and often fascinating book about the nature of textual pleasure in one strand of medieval literary tradition. While the title might suggest an avowedly lighthearted enterprise—and Rollo does write with a certain esprit—Kiss My Relics is largely an intricate engagement with some formidable Latin texts as precursors to the Roman de la rose, and is especially an argument for the importance of Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology for vernacular poetry. Any scholar interested in the relationship between textuality and sexuality, medieval discourses of homoeroticism, and the lineages that lead to and from Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature and the Roman de la rose will find much of interest in Kiss My Relics.

The introduction opens with a story from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, “The Statue and the Ring,” in which a bridegroom in Christian Rome innocently places his ring on a statue of Venus for safekeeping; the statue, however, takes the temporary gift as a sign of a more permanent contract. Rollo eventually reveals his interpretation of the tale as a figure for the knowing ways that medieval Christian writers empower the classical past—acknowledging the dangers of this investment, and yet exploring the pleasures that emerge from their engagement with pagan fictions and figures. The introduction justifies the book’s textual terrain by quickly tracing each text’s contribution to the defense of fiction as a source of erotic writerly and readerly pleasure. The hermaphrodite is introduced as the emblem of this pleasure.

The nine chapters that follow treat Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis along with a commentary by Remigius of Auxerre, William’s Gesta, Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature, and Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose. I found the multiple chapter divisions to be confusing: it made much more sense to read each grouping of three chapters as a single, seamless unit. The first three chapters treat Martianus, Remigius, and William, making a continuous argument about the rehabilitation of fallen language. The De nuptiis offers both a performance of the inadequacies of mortal language and the emergence of a principle, Harmony, capable of uniting poetry and divinity, body and intellect. In his ninth-century commentary, Remigius reads the figure of Venus as producing an “alternative hermaphroditism” via her interaction with categories associated with Mercury, allowing for a notion of sensual language that may nevertheless be a vehicle for truth. The third chapter returns to “The Statue and the Ring” to offer an example of an innovative defense of fiction that is contemporaneous with Alain de Lille, whose Plaint of Nature takes up the next three chapters.

The chapters on the Plaint offer a reevaluation of the text’s (and Alain’s) homophobia. Rollo reads the Plaint as disallowing any full rejection of either deviant sexuality or deviant grammar. Nature emerges as a vehicle that transports pleasure from the bodily register to the linguistic. As Rollo described Nature’s promise to “unveil her mysteries,” I wondered why he did not make space—here or elsewhere—for any discussion of Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, since the commentary was an influential text for all of the high and late medieval authors treated here. It also pertinently engages with the simultaneous dangers and edifications of fables, explicitly derides castration narratives as unworthy of analysis, and portrays Nature as a desirable woman whose secrets are approachable when properly veiled by fables. In Rollo’s reading of the Plaint, Nature’s secrets are revealed to be accessed via non-reproductive sexuality, and themselves to be coincident with the full variety of human sexual deviance. Other critics, cited here, have noted Alain’s complicity in the linguistic deviance that his text apparently condemns, but Rollo suggests that this complicity is purposeful, ultimately oriented toward constructing a “hermaphroditic poetics.”

The book is most energetically...