Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (review)

William Burgwinkle's most recent book is a vigorous and rigorously argued critique of that slipperiest of categories: "sodomia," or sodomy. Although not as broadly conceived as James A. Brundage's classic tome Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987), Burgwinkle's work is an updated narration of how sodomy, as a deployable rhetorical instrument, worked to create a militarized and homoerotic chivalric ethos that had been increasingly used to define strict, and obligatory, codes of heterosexuality in the French and Anglo-Norman twelfth century. Like Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992), Burgwinkle's scope in this book is also historically grounded, ranging from the rhetoric of homophobia in theological and historiographic texts from the late eleventh and to the early thirteenth century in England, France, and Normandy. Through the first four chapters, Burgwinkle charts the invention of sodomy as a socio-political category in medieval Europe, framing his discussion in the context of writers such as Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus and Orderic Vitalis's Historia Ecclesiastica, before moving to the French literary works of Chrétien de Troyes (Perceval, or Li contes del Graal), Marie de France's Lais, and thirteenth-century Arthurian Grail romances. His study then returns to the Latin tradition in his last chapter, as he extends his examination to Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae, a dream vision dialogue with "Natura," written in 1155.

In Part I, "Locating Sodomy," Burgwinkle focuses on how "sodomy was recognized, located, diagnosed, theorized, and imagined in texts from the mid-eleventh century to the early thirteenth century," arguing that the new category of sodomy was an effect of the "Law in the broadest sense" (1). Specifically, as sodomy "threatens Law (religious, civic, moral, and especially imaginary) by suggesting alternatives, … it also supports it, by providing a space outside the community defined by that Law from which to establish boundaries of normalcy" (1). The Law, for example, is a system of power relations that serve as regulatory instruments by which gendered identity is inculcated, primarily informed by theorists such as Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Slavoj Žižek. Sodomy produces a potential threat to that masculine and paternal Law; hence the far-reaching discursive implications: "Sodomy itself ranges from being a simple description of homoerotic relations or attractions to a theological category synonymous with the sinful," and can be used grammatically as "a deliberate twisting of meaning through the combination of incongruous elements or a faulty combination of elements which can be corrected through proper training" (3).

While in chapter one the author presents a survey of ecclesiastical regulations of sexuality in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, in chapter two, "Imagining Sodomy," he attends to those figures in this early period who are either accusers or victims of accusation. Peter Damian and John of Salisbury both represent the former (those who inculcate Law through the imagining of sodomitical acts), while the accused, specifically William Rufus (son of William the Conqueror), Richard Lionheart, and Phillipe Auguste of France, serve as touchstones for the infusion of sodomy into the literary culture of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, engendering the chivalric code.

In Part II, "Confronting Sodomy," Burgwinkle turns his attention to three major literary texts: Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval and its Continuations, the Lais of Marie de France, and Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae. The chapters of the second section purport to "complicate any historical understanding of sodomy in that the texts of the second unwrite many of the pretensions of the first" (3). Such is the case for Perceval, whom Burgwinkle argues "is subjected to a discourse of elite masculinity," a codified system "so completely naturalized by ideology that even in contemporary critical commentary it passes unmentioned" (92). He traces the elements of "obligatory heterosexuality" in the Lais of Marie de France (Guigemar, Lanval, and Bisclavret), creating a context within...