État présent: Queer Theory and the Middle Ages

Queer Theory and the Middle Ages

Though it might surprise many, the Middle Ages are emerging as a kind of queer utopia, a historical period in which institutional state regulation as we know it hardly existed, in which marriage practices were not yet controlled entirely either by state or church and varied widely by class and region, in which same-sex segregation was a norm, particularly in intellectual communities, and in which love stories between men were common, if covert.¹ Texts, both literary and historical, actually spoke of same-sex eroticism, albeit it in a derogatory way, referring to such relations as sodomy, bougrerie, or heresy. Over the course of 1000 years, (c. 500–1500), when almost any sexual act or impulse which did not focus on sex exclusively in terms of procreative potential was branded as sodomitical, all readers conveniently find themselves in the same crowded boat, cast out one and all as sodomites. When that sodomite's every thought is ripe for interrogation, as we see in many of the major penitentials and theological works, we arrive, however proleptically, at that magic moment when the inviolable modern status of hetero and homo as polar opposites simply dissolves.² This perversely satisfying scenario finally promises a degree of equality in rejection and it requires a redefinition of the parameters within which we read medieval texts. When all readers get to play at being marginal and subversive, without ever having actually done anything other than that which seemed natural, it redefines the literary landscape. Like Perceval at his chess board competing against an invisible opponent, we feel what it is to confront an autonomous social force that claims to play by the rules, even when those rules are always of its own making.³

Such a scenario is particularly satisfying to scholars. What other period offers such fertile ground for the investigation of power and language, duplicity as the very essence of speech, heteroglossia as norm? I suppose many would spring to mind, at least in political terms; but when we add to the mix sex as an essential marker of culpability, then we have found our Foucauldian wonderland. A space in which unspoken laws govern behaviour, exclusion is not yet the norm, and the subject forms within the social yet without the humanist status of unique master of its fate — what could be better? Double consciousness reigns, full play between the signifier and signified is recognized and accented, everyone clearly aware that they are in ideology even as they undermine it. It is therefore doubly noteworthy that queer theory avant la lettre is so rare in medieval scholarship before the 1980s. It took until then to note, at least in published form, the homoerotic subtexts of romance, the predominance of rape, the appeal to voyeurism and the perverse in hagiography, the absolute primacy of the homosocial bond over all other erotic ties.⁴

John Boswell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and the early publications of Judith Butler changed all that, and by the 1990s, discussion of the queer topoi of medieval writing come to the fore.⁵ But what of France? Why is it that with the exception of Christiane Marchello-Nizia's ground-breaking article on homosexuality and Georges Duby's indirect but very useful studies of masculinity and social practices, there has been so little on queer practices in the Middle Ages?⁶ Despite having set the groundwork for what would eventually be called queer theory, Michel Foucault largely skips over the period in his final works, though he apparently intended to address in more detail the matter of confession in the Middle Ages. Jacques Lacan contributed much to an opening up of love lyrics to queer readings with his remarks on troubadour poetry, but his influential lectures have been read as both essential to poststructuralist interpretations of the troubadours' games and firmly anchored in profoundly homophobic thought.⁷ Guy...