Constructing Medieval Sexuality

Medieval Cultures #11

by Karma Lochrie

This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires.Always considering sexuality in relation to gender, the gender, the body, and indentity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of that period. Topics include the medieval understanding of sodomy, the historical construction of heterosexuality, and the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, and religion.

Genres: History, Medieval, Nonfiction, Queer

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Neal Spadafora]

Concerning Lochrie's chapter, she argues that female mystical writings, devotional practices, and images are rife with material that trouble the rather heterosexual categorization of them within the courtly love tradition. However, at the end of her chapter, Lochrie states that although the images and practices of mystical noir should destabilize our assumptions about the medieval world and our contemporary heterosexual norms of scholarship, she admits that the position of the women mystics within the church "casts in doubt [mystical noir's] capacity for a contestation of sexual and gender codes" (194).

Taking cue from Lochrie's cast of doubt, even if we embrace an erotic reading of Bernard's Song of Songs sermons or interpret Hadewijch's visions and poetry through the noir lens that Lochrie proposes or see Christ's wound as a vulva, does it follow that these texts must then be classified as not heterosexual? There seems to be a hermeneutic attuned to the erotic and the queer that paradoxically renders these texts rather straight.

[M F]

Well, I didn't read ALL of the articles in this book, but I read enough of them that I figured I could justify putting it on my "read" shelf. And some of them were even vaguely helpful, though I was quite glad to have read Foucault and Butler first because they were both referenced a lot.