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

REVIEWS 204 gagement. Rather, attention to the res publica—and most of all the demotic res publica—dictates perspicacity, irony, even cynicism. DAVID MARSHALL, The Johns Hopkins University William Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) 298 pp. The increase in literary and religious references to, and condemnations of, sodomy during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries has long plagued scholars of the Middle Ages. This scholarly interest has particularly been the case with the emergence and popularity of gender studies and queer theories. The latest stab at the material comes from William Burgwinkle in a study of French and English literature that succeeds by showing more complexities and raising more questions than ever before. One is left with a much more complicated and more nuanced, but perhaps more accurate, picture of high medieval culture, and one that attempts to make attitudes of seven or more centuries ago comprehensible to the twenty-first-century reader. In Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England , 1050–1230, Burgwinkle examines a wide array of textual sources, though largely prose and poetry, to survey, as the dust jacket says, “attitudes toward same-sex love” and to understand “how ‘sodomy’ becomes a problematic features of narratives of romance and knighthood.” The brief summaries of which these quotes are a part do not, however, do justice to the nature or breadth of Burgwinkle’s survey. For in attempting to illustrate medieval understandings of same-sex love and sodomy, the author forcefully demonstrates how these homosexual (if one can call them that) categories cannot be separated from the heterosexual concepts that were so integral to their formation and understanding . So even while Burgwinkle asserts the object of his study to be men and masculinity, he tackles questions of femininity throughout and repeatedly provides examples of how heterosexual women were often the root of accusations of sodomy in the literature. For it was as true in the Middle Ages as it is true today, that such opposing categories cannot be studied in isolation, since their very definitions depend on their opposites. It is with these intricate understandings of gender and sexuality, grounded in a knowledge of both the medieval sources and modern (and post-modern) theory, that Burgwinkle undertakes his most recent study. In the introduction to Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law, Burgwinkle lays out not only the background for his work, but also the historiographical context in which he is writing and the array of theories he shall employ. Specifically, the author, while outlining many of his questions, declares a thorough use of “Foucault ’s meditations on discipline, Althusser’s notion of interpellation, and the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and Zizek” (15). Additionally, Burgwinkle confesses to an extremely—no, “excessively,” as he writes—broad use of the term law, which for him never signifies law in the modern sense, but rather the standards and norms, the internalized laws or rules, of an ordered society. The first half of the work, “Part I: Locating sodomy,” presents an overview of the historical and religious context of the literature that is the focus of his study. Here Burgwinkle begins to argue for the rise in literary references to REVIEWS 205 sodomy as a result of instability in the concepts of marriage, chivalry and knighthood (and thus masculinity), monastic relations and rules, and celibacy. In such an uncertain climate, sodomy emerged as a means of attacking divergent forms of masculinity and interpersonal relations. Then, in “Part II: Confronting sodomy,” detailed studies of literature allow for Burgwinkle to engage closely with the text. For example, in literature centered on the character of Perceval, he examines how the Waste Land through which the knight travels can be understood as a form of Michel Foucault’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish. The next chapter’s look at the work of Marie de France permits Burgwinkle to engage not only in textual analysis, but also applications of queer theory. Finally, with Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae, he plays with ideas of gender slippage. As this all-too-brief summary of Burgwinkle’s dense study of medieval literature should show, Sodomy, Masculinity...