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  • Unpleasures of the Flesh: Medieval Marriage, Masochism, and the History of Heterosexuality
  • Sarah Salih

Twenty-first-century scholarship on medieval sexuality has been much concerned with the fits and the misfits of the terms in which these two periods conceptualize sexual matters. Historians of sexuality have debated the utility of modern identity categories such as “homosexual” in premodern contexts since Michel Foucault proclaimed that “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”1 More recent studies have extended the logic to query the relevance of “heterosexuality” and its cognates to medieval sexuality, for if homosexuality is a postmedieval concept, so too is heterosexuality, which has meaning only in relation to its twin. Judith Butler's analysis of the interdependence of homosexual “copy” and heterosexual “original” dismantles the claims of heterosexuality to be natural.2 Jonathan Katz argues that heterosexuality has a history, and that “an official, dominant, different-sex erotic ideal—a heterosexual ethic—is . . . a modern invention.”3 While sexual contacts between men [End Page 125] and women have occurred throughout history, these actions were not necessarily conceptualized as manifestations of heterosexuality. Karma Lochrie's Heterosyncrasies and James Schultz's Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality doubt that there was such a thing as medieval heterosexuality, or heteronormativity.4 Lochrie and Schultz agree that “desire in medieval texts is not heterosexual: that is, it is not called into being by the sex of the object of desire.”5 Schultz thus argues for the elimination of the term from analyses of medieval sexuality: “If one refuses to abandon heterosexuality as a category of analysis, one refuses the effort to think outside the terms set by this regime. . . . Unless we are willing to make this effort, we will never be able to recognize the criteria according to which medieval people understood their intimate relations.”6 Lochrie, distinguishing heterosexuality from heteronormativity, argues that we need to “drive a methodological wedge between the modern identity formation we call heterosexuality, which is heteronormative, and past sexualities, which were not governed by heteronormativity.”7 Her formula leaves room to discover forms of heterosexuality other than modern heteronormativity: it does not prohibit the use of such terms but recommends an “epistemological humility” about the limits of their explanatory potential.8

Such humility liberates. It would hardly be practical to write criticism in an English innocent of all postmedieval language; most of the terms we use to discuss the Middle Ages, including the periodization itself, are anachronistic. Nevertheless, as Schultz warns, the unexamined use of terms such as “heterosexuality” risks producing misrecognitions. There are certainly moments in medieval literature when sexual difference is productive of desire, such as Troilus's admiration of Criseyde as a creature “nevere lasse mannyssh.”9 However, to assume that this moment is fully comprehensible once it has been labeled “heterosexuality” is to foreclose investigation into how it might relate to other motors of desire [End Page 126] in this poem; to obscure the complexity of Chaucer's anatomy of desire by seeing only what is already known. But although we should not expect a term such as “heterosexuality” fully to encompass medieval desires, the juxtaposition of the two may be informative. Marriage, a formulation that both Schultz and Lochrie identify as requiring scrutiny, insistently presents itself as a test case.10 If medieval sexuality is not heteronormative, how do we understand that substantial body of legislation, narrative, rituals, images, and architecture that defined and supported the institution of marriage? What was marriage, and to what extent was its organization of gender, sex, difference, and power reliant on sexual difference?

Although there are numerous social and legal histories of medieval marriage, utilizing the rich records of the ecclesiastical courts, marriage was a relatively minor theme within the first wave of medieval sexuality studies. Such studies concentrated on the marginal, the saints or the sodomites, while skirting around the apparently more central topic of marriage. Vern Bullough and James Brundage's Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, for example, includes a chapter on chaste, that is, unconsummated, marriage but not one on the standard version.11 Complementarily, Sue Niebrzydowski sites her study of literary wives, and...

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