Bodies of Spirit and Bodies of Flesh: The Significance of the Sexual Practices Attributed to Heretics from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century

Modern historiography has stressed that medieval accounts of the sexual activities of deviant groups and individuals should rarely be taken at face value. In his transformative book Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn illustrated that the sex-filled nocturnal meetings ascribed to witches, heretics, and similar groups constituted a long-running trope in Western civilization. Cohn tracks accounts of the supposed nighttime meetings of various conspiratorial sects from the ancient world up to the witches’ Sabbaths of the early modern period. These meetings often feature sexual promiscuity, incest, demon worship, infanticide, cannibalism, and black magic. Cohn terms this trope “the nocturnal ritual fantasy.” In contrast to earlier scholars, who had sought some kernel of truth in these recurrent descriptions, Cohn argued that these activities never actually occurred but rather existed in the minds of learned men as part of a literary tradition.¹

The literary tradition of “the nocturnal ritual fantasy” helped to shape the portrayals of heresy created by the learned men in whose minds it existed, and these presentations offer a more immediately accessible object of study for the modern historian than the actual activities of those labeled as heretics in the medieval period. In particular, one can track how authorities created, disseminated, and implemented ideas of heresy and heretics in order to further their own sociopolitical and economic agendas.² This approach has some frustrating limitations. It focuses its attention upon a small elite and continues the marginalization of subaltern voices that originate from outside that elite.³ Limiting as it may be, close attention to these authorities’ descriptions can illuminate the meanings attached to certain types of sexual activity, meanings that can still influence or possibly “constrain our own thought” as part of the history of our ideas.⁴ While the sexual behaviors ascribed to medieval heretics are almost certainly fantastic, the formulaic accounts of heretics’ ritualistic sex are important because they set up a powerful logic regarding the place of certain kinds of sexually active individuals in both the human and the divine orders.

However much descriptions of heretical sex follow set formulas, these formulaic descriptions do change over time, particularly regarding the portrayal of sexual acts between members of the same sex. In these descriptions, the appearance of sex between men and men or women and women in the early twelfth century serves a rhetorical function, as well as reflecting a growing concern with these behaviors in medieval society as a whole.⁵ The appearance of homosexual sex as part of the “nocturnal ritual fantasy” in the early twelfth century, as well as the developing descriptions of heterosexual sex within this same fantasy, illustrate the beliefs of learned elites that the deviancy of heretical sects was shared between many different groups. In particular, Jews, heretics, lepers, and those who supposedly engaged in same-sex sexual acts all became targets of a newly persecutory society in this same period. In the accounts left by medieval intellectuals, these enemies become almost expressions of the same common enemy, exhibiting similar traits and threatening Christian society in thematically linked ways.⁶ In other words, homosexual sex between heretics emphasized themes of gross carnality and barrenness already present in descriptions of ritualized heretical heterosexual sex. These shared themes illustrate the existence in the minds of authorities of a specifically heretical, or non-Christian, kind of sexual morphology in which the non- or quasi-Christian social body expressed its identity through the kind of sex it repeatedly was driven to have.

What follows below is a partial attempt to delineate some of the central aspects of the medieval heretic, as viewed by hostile authorities, as a type with clear mental and physical characteristics expressed through sexual activities. Particular types of sexual behavior, as a heretical sexual morphology, established and expressed traits common to the larger community of human beings who had supposedly turned away from God.⁷ At the heart of the argument will be the familiar use in the Middle Ages of the image of...