There Is Lots to See about Sodomy

When I first entered the field of gay and lesbian studies in the late 1980s, remarkably few publications shed light on images of same-sex love, friendship, and sexuality from the European Middle Ages. What there was to know about sodomy—the infamous name for a variety of illicit sex acts, including homoeroticism—revolved around words (whose conceptual and social horizons medievalists debated vividly). In the meantime, thanks to studies by, among others, Alan Bray (2003), Michael Camille (1989), and Glenn Olsen (2011), the visual representations that elucidated same-sex desires in medieval times have entered markedly into our field of vision: the volume to be reviewed here lists no less than eighty-nine illustrations.

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages is nothing short of splendid, and the captivating visuals are but one aspect of its many riches. Robert Mills brings close readings, historical concerns, and theoretical insights to bear on manuscript illuminations, stone capitals, friezes, frescoes, woodcuts, drawings, and marginalia from the twelfth century to 1500 (with a focus on English and French materials). While the author draws on queer modes of analysis to unravel the multiple and ever-shifting meanings of same-sex eroticism in medieval images and texts, he also engages questions pertaining to context, circulation, media, and interpretive communities. In performing this difficult yet engrossing juggling act, Mills animates the realization that every terminological tool in approaching past sexualities, whether medieval (such as vicium sodomiticum or sodomia) or modern in origin (e.g., homosexuality), comes with its own possibilities and limitations. In the interstices between the partial views offered by the respective terms of critical choice, we can indeed make out what there is to see about medieval sodomy.

Ingeniously, this study sets out with investigating the “surge of interest in the topic . . . in thirteenth-century Paris” (30), the intellectual and political center from where much of the age’s discourse on sodomy emanated. However, authoritative texts rarely, if ever, limited the function of images to illustrating certain preestablished truths. In the case of the Parisian Bibles moralisées, or “moralized Bibles,” for royal viewers (whose reading presumably was guided by spiritual advisers), the usually assumed hierarchy of texts and images was in fact reversed: illuminations took precedence over explanations from biblical sources. This is just one example among many of the multiform text-image-relations Mills urges us to consider. In every instance, the visual and the textual media discussed have one thing in common: they actualize a passage from the past for a presumed present, thereby occasioning moral or other meanings for particular audiences. As Mills makes clear, such acts of translation were neither firmly anchored nor highly constrained by an original referent, though the representations in question certainly marshaled the great prestige of the Bible or ancient authors. Translations thus emerge as the perpetual condition for engaging sodomy, both visually and textually.

Importantly, medieval “translators” took up or confronted homoeroticism as part of the “afterlife” or “survival” of antiquity (Didi-Huberman 2003). They brought to life pertinent narratives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for instance. Albrecht Dürer, as well as other artists, reenvisioned figures like Orpheus—Eurydice’s lover, the great bard, and the supposed ur-sodomite of Greek mythology—or Iphis, who, having been raised as a boy, fell in love with a woman, Ianthe, and whose sex the gods reassigned so the two could marry. Transgender is a further concept that Mills introduces in the context of Ovid-inspired imagery and textual reworkings. Like translation, transgender complicates some of the either-or thinking that pervades the modern terminological apparatus on sexual matters. What if we expanded the conventional notion of sexual object choice—often said not to have existed before the rise of sexology in the nineteenth century—to include monks and nuns, Mills asks provocatively in one chapter. After all, monastics turned to or were supposed to orient their erotic desires toward God: virginity, chastity, and celibacy, he argues, may thus have been “analogous, in certain respects...