Something Queer is Going On: Sex and Methodology in the Middle Ages

Burger, Glenn, and Steven Kruger, eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $54.95hc. $19.95sc. 256 pp.

Jacobs, Kathryn. 2001. Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $59.95hc. 192 pp.

Medieval Studies has often been perceived by those outside the field as a scholarly backwater, a mire of Byzantine languages and sub-disciplines so numerous that their mastery leaves little or no room for methodological sophistication. While innovative work can be found in many areas of the field, it is in the study of medieval sexualities that contemporary theoretical models and methodological trends have most often been developed. During the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, the study of female mysticism in the Middle Ages was especially innovative. This work on mysticism and sexuality fed off of and supported a related series of studies on gender and textuality that helped change the way medievalists practiced their discipline.

No one should be surprised, then, to find that queer theory has for most of the 1990s found ardent practitioners among medievalists. Much like the place of queer theory in other disciplines, its presence in Medieval Studies has been both controversial and invigorating. In Before the Closet: Same Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America, Allen Frantzen, a leading scholar of same-sex love in pre-modern England, disparages queer theory as "a collection of methods and perspectives that pursue an aggressive politics of gay and lesbian liberation. . . merrily sweeping all work on the history of sex into its domain" (1998, 6). In contrast, Carolyn Dinshaw--who might fairly be deemed the most influential queer theorist working in medieval studies--sees in queer theory powerful models for engaging with history, models seeking "partial, affective connections . . . community . . . even a touch across time" (1999, 21). Despite the controversy surrounding it, the importance of queer theory as a central party to the discussion of medieval sexuality and its influence on the cultural products of the age can be easily understood by comparing two recent books devoted to that effort.

Queering the Middle Ages, a collection of essays edited by Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, and Kathryn Jacobs's Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage, present two dramatically different approaches to the role of sexuality in medieval culture and to the understanding of what Medieval Studies ought to be. The distinction does not, as it might seem at first glance, lie in sexual preference: gay versus straight. I doubt that any of the contributors to Queering the Middle Ages would seriously challenge a book's usefulness simply because its primary focus was hetero- not homosexuality. Rather, what separates these books is a whole series of concerns about how medievalists should pursue their subject, regardless of whether or not that subject is gay, lesbian, or straight. In fact, history, and the relationship between the historical critic, the historical text, and the context within which that text originated form the core differences between these two studies. Historical practice, then, as much as sexuality, is at stake in these books and in the larger debate about the study of sexuality.

Queering the Middle Ages celebrates the manifold possibilities of queerness (in the form of queer theory) as a positive presence in the community of medieval scholars. On this basis alone, it ought to find itself on many graduate reading lists. After a brief introduction (which could provide a better general introduction to queer theory), the book delivers three groups of essays, each group followed by a response essay. That the essays problematize the notion of queerness as much as they present it is apparent in the very first selection. Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn's "Queering Ovidian Myths" opens with a tactical rejection of "queer theory" as a label for the theoretical work they are about to undertake. Taking their cue from Sally...