Presumptive sodomy and its exclusions

Textual Practice

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 295-310

  Lochrie, Karma ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Desire, as feminine; Heteronormativity; Natural unnatural sex; Perversion; Sodomy, male and female

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749821430     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369908582342     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 101. Some of the ideas presented in this article are explored in more detail in my book, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), Chapter 5.
2. The most recent example of this assumption of anal sex between men underlying such terminology as 'same-sex acts' and 'same-sex desire' is Mark D. Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
3. There are many examples of the unexamined use of these terms even as scholars assume that sodomy was a vice associated primarily with men in most medieval theological and literary discourse. In Renaissance sodomitic discourse even where the term is allowed to encompass a range of acts and behaviours, it is almost exclusively studied in connection with male sexuality. For example, in the collection, Queering the Renaissance, see the articles by Alan K. Smith and Jonathan Goldberg (pp. 84-106 and 218-35).
4. Goldberg elsewhere includes women in his definition of Early Modern sodomy, but notes that they are rarely actually meant in the contemporary discourse on the topic; see Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 19.
5. The kind of sodomy that is consistently studied in medieval scholarship is the masculine, anal variety. See David Lorenzo Boyd, 'Disrupting the norm: sodomy, culture and the male body in Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, in Allen J. Frantzen and David J. Robertson (eds) Essays in Medieval Studies, Vol. 11 (Chicago: Illinois Medieval Associates, 1994), pp. 63-74;
6. Carolyn Dinshaw, 'Getting medieval: Pulp Fiction, Gawain, Foucault', in Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (eds) The Book and the Body (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 116-63;
7. and Allen J. Frantzen, 'The disclosure of sodomy in cleanness, PMLA, 3 (May 1996), pp. 451-64.
8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 27-48, especially p. 32.
9. She interrogates the epistemology of ignorance that structures presumptive heterosexuality in her essay, 'Privilege of unknowing: Diderot's The Nun, in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 24-51.
10. Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 169.
11. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 400.
12. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer (3rd edn), ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), X.909-10. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Hereafter, references to the Parson's Tale from this edition will appear in the text.
13. Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 235, 240.
14. Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1, p. 27.
15. Brooten, Love Between Women, pp. 235-35.
16. Raymond of Peñafort, Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio (Rome, 1603; rpt. Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1967), 3.5.42, pp. 474-5.
17. For parallels between the Parson's treatise and Raymond's summa, see W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 729-41.
18. Quoted in Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 77.
19. Jordan also discusses this passage but dismisses as 'bland' Peraldus' reference to women on top; see Invention of Sodomy, pp. 110-11.
20. For parallels between the Parson's Tale and Peraldus' summa, see Kate O. Petersen, The Sources of the Parsons Tale (Boston, MA: Ginn, 1901)
21. and Bryan and Dempster, Sources and Analogues, pp. 741-5.
22. Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio, pp. 4745.
23. Ambrose, Commentaria in Epistolas B. Pauli, PL 17, col. 60: 'Hae irato Deo propter idololatriam human generi provenisse testatur, ut mulier mulierem turpi desiderio ad usum appeteret.' Abelard, Expositio in epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, PL 178, col. 806: 'Contra naturam, hoc est contra naturae institu- tionem, quae genitalia feminarum usui virorum praeparavit, et e converso, non ut feminae feminis cohabitarent.' Translations are from Louis Compton, 'The myth of lesbian impunity: capital laws from 1270 to 1791', in Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Petersen (eds) Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality (New York: Haworth Press, 1981), p. 14.
24. See also Judith C. Brown's discussion on the subject of 'lesbianism', in Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 6-7.
25. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II.ii.94, pp. 11-12.
26. See Jordan's discussion of Aquinas, Invention of Sodomy, p. 144.
27. Albert the Great, Opera Omnia, ed. August Borgnet, Vol. 33 (Paris: Vivès, 1895)
28. : 'Sodomia est peccatum contra naturam, masculi cum masculo, vel foeminae cum foemina'; Albert the Great, In evangelium Lucae, in Opera Omnia, ed. Borgnet, Vol. 23 (Paris: Vivès, 1895), p. 488.
29. For discussions of these passages, see Vern L. Bullough, 'The sin against nature and homo- sexuality', in Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (eds) Sexual Practices in the Medieval Church (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982), p. 6A;
30. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, pp. 1334.
31. See John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer The Penitential of Theodore, in Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 185;
32. Bede, De remediis Peccatorum, PL, 94, col. 570; and
33. for Ivo of Chartres see Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Middle Ages (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1979), pp. 31-2.
34. Robert of Flamborough: Liber Poenitentialis, ed. J. J. Francis Firth, Studies and Texts, Vol. 18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 229 and 197: 'Sicuti etiam quaesivi de masculo si contra naturam aliquid egerit, ita quaero de muliere, immo de moni genere fornicandi.'
35. See Goodich's discussion of Robert of Flamborough, The Unmentionable Vice, pp. 56-7.
36. John Chrysostom, Chrisostom: Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistle to the Romans, ed. Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 11 (Christian Literature Publishing Co, 1889), p. 356.
37. Payer also traces the medieval condemnation of sex in its theology to the vagaries of desire, and my own analysis is indebted to his, even though he does not make the kind of link between gender and desire that I am making here; see The Bridling of Desire.
38. Margaret Hunt, 'Afterword', in Jonathan Goldberg (ed.) Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 373.
39. Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices, trans. Pierre J. Payer (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982), pp. 6A, 68, 70, 79 and 82.
40. Alan of Lilie, The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), pp. 69 and 135-36.
41. See Joan Cadden's discussion of female desire especially as it applies to natural philosophical accounts of sodomy, in Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp- 150-62, 214-16 and 268-9;
42. and 'Sciences/silences: the natures and languages of "sodomy" in Peter of Abano's Problemata commentary', in Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz (eds) Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 40-57.
43. Thomas Lacqueur also discusses the feminization of desire in medical texts; see Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 524.
44. As Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset explain, the feminizing of desire derives in pan from medieval physiology theory that classifies the feminine as cold and moist, and therefore in need of warmth which desire seeks out; see Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 81-2 and 144-7.
45. In addition to Jordan and Brooten, see Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 108-47.
46. Dyan Elliott, 'Pollution, illusion, and masculine disarray: nocturnal emissions and the sexuality of the clergy', in Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz (eds) Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 1-23.