Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern

Series Q

by Carolyn Dinshaw

In Getting Medieval Carolyn Dinshaw examines communities—dissident and orthodox—in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century England to create a new sense of queer history. Reaching beyond both medieval and queer studies, Dinshaw demonstrates in this challenging work how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to current issues in cultural studies. In the process, she makes important connections between past and present cultures that until now have not been realized.
In her pursuit of historical analyses that embrace the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of sex and sexuality, Dinshaw examines canonical Middle English texts such as the Canterbury Tales and The Book of Margery Kempe . She examines polemics around the religious dissidents known as the Lollards as well as accounts of prostitutes in London to address questions of how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were proscribed. By exploring contemporary (mis)appropriations of medieval tropes in texts ranging from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to recent Congressional debates on U.S. cultural production, Dinshaw demonstrates how such modern media can serve to reinforce constrictive heteronormative values and deny the multifarious nature of history. Finally, she works with and against the theories of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, Roland Barthes, and John Boswell to show how deconstructionist impulses as well as historical perspectives can further an understanding of community in both pre- and postmodern societies.
This long-anticipated volume will be indispensible to medieval and queer scholars and will be welcomed by a larger cultural studies audience.

Genres: History, Theory, Nonfiction, Queer, Medieval, Gender Studies, Medievalism

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Noa Sepharia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Medieval Slayyy

[courtney]

Admittedly I have only read the introduction but this is a really interesting text that concerns the homogeneity of history; highlighting the exclusionary tactics used to separate sexual history between the mediaeval and the post modern.

[Wei Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way Dinshaw defends the field of medieval studies from the perspective of queer theory is highly inspiring. Though her argument seems familiar - I feel like I've read other historians who have the same take on the importance of history to our current milieu - Dinshaw's is perhaps the tightest one I've come across so far.

Overall, this book was a fun read! Dinshaw's analysis of the sodomite accusations thrown between the Lollards and the orthodox as well as her reading of Pulp Fiction are my favorite moments of this book. The humor she weaves into her passages is also on point.

[Meghan Molnar · Rating 4 out of 5]

highly interesting queer theory read— i only read the introduction, the barthes section, the beginning of the lollard section, and the margery kempe section closely and skimmed the rest, but i could see myself going back in for more. i’m not a medievalist but it was really interesting to think w caroline dinshaw

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I presented on this book for a seminar, so I have many thoughts. However, I'll just summarize a few.

*Getting Medieval* is marked by two refusals. First, it refuses to stabilize premodern sexuality into gay identities, as John Boswell did. Second, and only fully legible by the book's end, it refuses Foucault's idealization of the European Middle Ages as a site absent of sexual identities but rife with sexual acts.

This two-fold refusal does not secure a truth about the past; rather, it catalyzes Dinshaw's own historiography, one she designates as "getting medieval." This is not a return to origins, a retrieval of sameness, nor is it the preservation of difference in the service of modernity’s self-legitimation. To get medieval, in Dinshaw’s queer formulation, is to enter into affective proximities that forgo the assurance of identical resemblance. It is to recognize that identification, particularly queer identification, does not require sameness--it thrives on misfit, on partial connection, on the touch that fails to ground itself in identity.

This method informs her readings across a late-medieval English archive: Mirk’s _Instructions for Parish Priests_, the Lollards’ _Conclusions_, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath, the legal case orbiting John/Eleanor Rykener, and *The Book of Margery Kempe*. However, Dinshaw neither celebrates nor recuperates these figures as proto-gays or queer icons. Instead, she cautions against easy identification, particularly when the historical record reveals a patriarchal violence masked by a veneer of egalitarian dissent, as with the Lollards.

Instead, Dinshaw's subjects reveal the arbitrariness of hegemonic sexual practices and categories; they illustrate how the medieval, far from a monolith, is a site of heterogeneity with sexual and historical multiplicity.

[Sara G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a fun, well written nonfiction.

[Mackenzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful book not only for medieval scholars, but for queer scholars working in any time period. She is exhaustive in outlining her critical methods, using an extended introduction to do for queer historiography something like what Eve Sedgwick did for queer theory with the intro to _Epistemology of the Closet_. Dinshaw is interested in looking at the way society's 'untouchables' have touched one another across time, thus building an identificatory community and writing a strategic history of illegal sexuality.

[Karl Steel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beginnings of a review here

[Liza]

There is a lot to love here. I didn't think I cared about Medieval history, but this book made me realize it is actually related to the only thing I care about anymore, queer community.

[Mills College Library]

306.709 D587 1999