Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature
France and England, 1050–1230

This book offers a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

William E. Burgwinkle (Author)

9780521118583, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 August 2009

316 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

"William Burgwinkle deserves immense credit for crafting a throughly grounded and critically refreshing argument about homophobic rhetoric and how it attempts to police the borders of gendered norms."
Adam Miyashiro, Comparative Literature Studies

William Burgwinkle surveys poetry and letters, histories and literary fiction - including Grail romances - to offer a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Burgwinkle illustrates how 'sodomy' becomes a problematic feature of narratives of romance and knighthood. Most texts of the period denounce sodomy and use accusations of sodomitical practice as a way of maintaining a sacrificial climate in which masculine identity is set in opposition to the stigmatised other, for example the foreign, the feminine, and the heretical. What emerges from these readings, however, is that even the most homophobic, masculinist and normative texts of the period demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to separate the sodomitical from the orthodox. These blurred boundaries allow readers to glimpse alternative, even homoerotic, readings.

Introduction
Part I. Locations: 1. Locating sodomy
2. Imagining sodomy
Part II. Confrontations: 3. Making Perceval: double-binding and sieges périlleux
4. Queering the Celts: men who don't marry in Marie de France
5. Writing the self: Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]