Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian by Glenn W. Olsen (review)

In the three decades that have passed between the publication of John Boswell’s pioneering study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) and the appearance of Glenn W. Olsen’s Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian (2011), our perception of medieval Europe’s sexual landscape changed dramatically. This is immediately apparent in the bibliographies of these two books: Boswell’s contained fewer than one hundred entries; Olsen’s, more than fifteen hundred. It is also evident in the variety of new conceptual and methodological approaches manifest in that scholarship, some of which are complementary (“sexuality” and “gender” studies), but others not (“essential-ist” and “constructionist” perspectives). While Boswell’s book did much to stimulate the subsequent research into what had been terra incognita, Olsen’s magisterial study assembles and evaluates this extensive body of scholarship in a way that both broadens and deepens our understanding of that world.

In part 1 of his book (“Problems and Definitions”), Olsen explores the obstacles that modern scholars must encounter in studying homosexuality in the early Middle Ages: the paucity of data, which hampers our ability to make inferences, as well as the ambiguity of much of those data, most notably, the artistic representations; the lack of a shared sexual discourse among both men and women and clergy and laity; and a general reticence then to describe sexual acts, especially sodomy. In addition to the limits imposed by the extant sources are those established by the fact that “all history is written from a point of view” and that “we have no choice but to begin with the questions and vocabulary of our own time” (43–44).

Three of the chapters in part 1 of this study—“Gender and Power,” “Terms of Endearment,” and “The Sexual Subject”—assess current scholarship. In the first, Olsen discusses the challenge that male/male sexual relationships might have made to the prevailing social idea of male dominance/female submission. He brings to this issue the perceptions not only of medievalists (Guy Halsall, Bruce Holsinger, Mathew Kuefler, Jo Ann McNamara, Carol Pasternack, et al.) but also of classicists (Suzanne Dixon, David Halperin, David Konstan, Susan Treggiari, and Craig Williams) and scholars of other eras and cultures. Olsen’s purpose here, as elsewhere in this book, is to convey the complexity of the issues and the difficulties involved in generalizing from the extant data. In the last of these chapters, Olsen reviews the available sources, concluding that “some sense of sexual identities existed in the middle ages, early as well as late” (132). From these sources—which include widely read passages from the Scriptures, penitential handbooks, medical tracts, homoerotic poetry, and letters of friendship—it is evident that there was “a world of affectivity usually, but not always between males.” However, “for a millennium male same-sex relations centered more on emotional than sexual intimacy” (185).

In part 2 (“Peter Damian”), four of the five chapters focus upon a letter written in 1049 by Peter Damian to Pope Leo IX and the pope’s brief reply. Damian had long served as prior of the hermitage of Fonte Avellana near Gubbio; Leo had been bishop of Toul for about two decades before his election to the papacy early in 1049. Both men believed strongly that the clergy should be held to a higher moral standard than the laity and that priests as well as monks should be celibate. But on the issue of male sexuality raised in this letter, Damian and Leo differed in important respects. Damian insisted that any cleric who had engaged in solitary masturbation, mutual masturbation, femoral intercourse, or anal intercourse was a sodomite and should be expelled from the clergy. Leo agreed that all of these nonprocreative sexual acts were sinful but declined to expel those clerics who had repented unless they had committed...