Homosexuality in the Middle Ages - William A. Percy

Homosexuality in the Middle Ages - William A. Percy
43 captures
02 Jan 2007 - 12 Jul 2024
Dec
JAN
Feb
02
2006
2007
2008
success
fail
About this capture
COLLECTED BY
Organization:
Alexa Crawls
Starting in 1996,
Alexa Internet
has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the
Wayback Machine
after an embargo period.
Collection:
36_crawl
this data is currently not publicly accessible.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20070102153807/http://www2.hu-berlin.de:80/sexology/BIB/Homosexuality_in_the_Middle_Ages.htm
Warren Johansson and William A. Percy
Homosexuality in the Middle Ages
Homosexuality in the Middle Ages long remained virtually
unexplored. All that the pioneer investigators of the pre-Hitler
period, Xavier Mayne [pseudonym of Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson],
The Intersexes
(1907), Magnus Hirschfeld,
Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes
(1914), and Arlindo Camillo Monteiro,
Amor sáfico e socrático
(1922), had to say on the entire period from the death of Justinian the
Great in 565 to 1475 could have been contained in two pages. The first
to venture into this "blind spot" in history were Canon Derrick Sherwin
Bailey,
Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition
(1955), who sought to exculpate Bible and Church from blame for homophobia, and J. Z. Eglinton,
Greek Love
(1964), who devoted a section to the continuity of pagan pederastic
tradition into the Middle Ages. More recently, Vern L. Bullough,
Sexual Variance in History
(1976), consigned 100 pages to unconventional sexuality in Byzantium and the Latin West. Michael Goodich,
The Unmentionable Vice
(1979) and John Boswell,
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
(1980), offered the first book-length studies. Taking advantage of the
lack of documentation and of organization itself during the Dark Age
500-1000, Boswell expanded Bailey's efforts with the original thesis
that Christians were not particularly homophobic before the 13th
century in spite of the death penalty imposed by Christian Roman and
Byzantine Emperors and the anathemas hurled at sodomites by the early
Church Fathers. He claimed that the secular governments, far more than
Inquisitors, and without direct Christian inspiration, carried out most
of the arrests, trials, tortures and executions of sodomites during the
14th and 15th centuries, a period little treated by him, but which
Goodich had emphasized in part because
documentation is so much more plentiful for it. David F. Greenberg,
The Construction of Homosexuality
(1987), has 60 pages in a slightly Marxist framework while Wayne L. Dynes (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality
(1990), with well over 100 pages, is in the liberal mold. The least sound, if longest monograph, is Boswell's
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
(1994) which seeks to identify orthodox liturgical precedents for gay
marriages in a society that normally prescribed death for sodomites.
The best is Michael J. Rocke's dissertation,
Male Homosexuality and its Regulation in Late Medieval Florence
(1989). Articles are pouring forth, some more significant, like those of Giovanni Dall'Orto on Italian cultural figures in the
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality,
than some burdened by social constructionism.
Terminology
: Did homosexuals (or gay people) exist in the Middle Ages?
This
question is not fanciful; rather, it needs a precise answer.
"Homosexual" and "gay" are concepts created by the clandestine
subculture that had been driven underground by Christian intolerance
and Victorian prudery. Károly Mária Kertbeny invented the former and
first used it in print in an anonymous pamphlet of 1869; the latter
with our meaning belongs to the slang of the American homosexual
underworld (first attestation
OED2
1935). "Homosexual" has
(erroneously to be sure) acquired in the minds of many a (pejorative)
medical connotation, while not a few speakers since 1969 restrict "gay"
to politically selfconscious activists. Nowadays some radicals prefer
"queer". In these contemporary acceptations no one in the Middle Ages
was or could have been "homosexual," "gay," or "queer."
Medieval theologians and jurists applied yet another term to those "sinning against nature", namely
sodomite.
Latin Christians classified homosexual behavior under the deadly sin
luxuria,
"lust" or "lechery," and assigned it to the worst form, namely the
peccatum contra naturam
"sin against nature." It had three subdivisions, ratione generis "by reason of species," that is to say with brute animals,
ratione sexus,
"by reason of sex," with a person having the genitalia of the same sex, and
ratione modi,
"by reason of manner", namely with a member of the opposite sex but in
the wrong orifice, any one that excluded procreation, which was thought
the sole legitimate motive for sexual activity.
It was widely believed that anyone could be tempted into
sodomy, although some casuists were dimly aware of habitual or
inveterate if not of exclusive sodomites. This theological definition
of
peccatum contra naturam
underlay the definition of
"homosexual" in late nineteenthcentury Germany, belonging to a third or
intermediate sex and as one exclusively and involuntarily attracted to
others having the genitalia of the same sex. All the other dimensions
of the physique and personality of the partners - and even the
activepassive dichotomy that had dominated the Greco-Roman
conceptualization - were simply disregarded. Hence it is not surprising
that more than a century of medical and biological research have failed
to find any common denominator in those labeled "homosexual."
The origin of this medieval notion of sodomy cannot be
understood without some cultural archaeology. The account in Genesis 19
of the destruction of the city of Sodom on account of the wickedness of
its inhabitants cannot alone explain the semantic development of Jewish
Hellenistic Greek
Sodomites,
Christian Latin
Sodomita,
into the medieval notion of the "sodomite" - a far broader concept. The
depravity of the Sodomites took the form of attempting to rape the male
strangers (supposedly "angels") who were visiting Lot.
Significantly Lot, following the literary example of the host at Gibeah in
Judges
19 (perhaps an older version), offers the townsmen his daughters
instead of the male that they clamored to know, a fact that implies
their bisexuality as well as the low esteem in which females were held.
This view, rather than the one that Bailey and Boswell argued, namely
that the Sodomites were punished for inhospitality, although it too was
a component of the iridescent myth, circulated as early as the First
Commonwealth (established under the Persian Empire) and was reinforced
by the antagonism between Judaic and Hellenic sexual mores.
Further, "to know" in
Genesis
and in
Judges,
as
in numerous other examples in the Jewish scriptures, means to have sex
with to know in the Biblical sense not to become acquainted with
(unknown and therefore potentially threatening strangers) as Bailey and
Boswell claimed. Lot's daughters had not "known" men. The reworking in
the Hellenistic period of the homosexual aspect of the episode into the
legend that the Sodomites were one and all similarly and specifically
depraved - making the city's destruction the aition of the taboo on
homosexuality - did not obliterate other mythopoetic elements. Sodomites
were equated with
satyrs,
beings allegedly endowed with
insatiable, and what we should now call "polymorphously perverse"
sexual appetites. The prohibitions in
Leviticus
18:22-23
concern only two categories of offender: males who have intercourse
with other males, and males and females who copulate with animals. Both
were excluded from the sacral community of Israel, as were subsequently
all sodomites - in the wider definition - from the Christian Church.
The Christian concept of the
sodomita,
and then of
sodomia
(which appears in medieval Latin about 1175, possibly in the Iberian peninsula on the model of Arabic
liwãt
< lt "sodomite"), has as its ideological substratum the mythical archetype of the
satyr.
[1]
Satyrs embody male sexual desire by virtue of their enormous virile
members and more or less permanent erections, but they are unsuccessful
in their pursuit of women. For this reason they prefer to assault
sleeping women or boys who are taken unawares, but frustrated in their
search for pleasure they often turn to one another or even to animals.
This assumption explains the manifest expansion of the Biblical
tradition and the multiplicity of referents of the term
sodomy.
The legal definition, it is true, may often be a narrower one,
restricted to anal intercourse with man or woman or vaginal penetration
of an animal. But the psychological understanding, the moral
reprobation, rests upon the implicit belief in an uninhibited sexual
appetite. In medieval Greek and Latin, variations of the root (sodom)
normally meant buggery.
The second aspect of satyrs' behavior that shaped the Christian
definition of the sodomite is sacrilege. While (perhaps reluctantly in
the case of many "fathers" as of St. Paul himself) sacralizing
heterosexual activity within marriage, mainstream Christians demonized
all other forms of sexual expression. They even condemned as sacrilege
violation by a religious of the vow of chastity. This part of the
mythopoetic legacy of the ancients completed the negative image of the
sodomite as one who has placed himself outside the pale of Christian
belief and practice. In a sense this hypothesis also gives the
rationale for classifying as sodomy intercourse with Jews and Saracens,
[2]
or even, in a case from rural Poland in the eighteenth century, of so
labeling a liaison between the daughter of a noble family and a young
serf trained as a musician.
[3]
The sodomite is driven by lusts so bestial, demonic and blasphemous as
to make him trample upon every law of God and man in quest of pleasure.
Another term that came into use in the twelfth century but gained ground after 1235, is
Bulgarus
"Bulgarian," whence French
bougre
and English
bugger
(from which the nouns of action
bougrerie
and
buggery
were subsequently derived). It was the merit of a heresy hunter Robert
le Bougre to have confounded all the heretical sects under one name,
which became synonymous with "heretic" and then "sodomite" and
"usurer." Catholic inquisitors accused adherents of dualist sects of
practicing the detestable vice, in part because of their unconventional
views on sexual morality.
[4]
English "buggery" is not, however, unambiguously attested in the sexual
sense until the penal law of Henry VIII in 1533; it is nowhere found in
Middle English. This term is the semantic reflex of the equation
sodomite = heretic
in late medieval Latin Christendom paralleled by such phrases as
Ketzer nach dem Fleisch
alongside
Ketzer nach dem Glauben.
Pederasty vs. Androphilia
: A question that must be
addressed here, if only because Boswell
has so insistently raised it, is whether medieval (and Roman)
homosexuality was predominantly pederastic or androphile? The
homosexuality of the ancient world was predominantly age-asymmetrical.
In ancient Greece, approved sexual interplay normally took place
between an (active) adult male and a (passive) adolescent between the
ages of 12 or 13 and 17 or 18.
[5]
Theorists praised such erotic relationships (which some maintained
should not lead to penetration) as strengthening male bonding and
fostering civic virtue and courage on the battlefield. On the other
hand, Hellenes and Latins interpreted effeminacy - gender-inappropriate
behavior in their eyes, such as an adult male being penetrated - as
want of male strength of character and as indicative of cowardice and
baseness.
Without social disapprobation, Romans, provided that they were the penetrators, could do as
they wished with slaves and freedmen.
[6]
The opposition heterosexual/homosexual though not unknown
[7]
was, depending as it does exclusively on object choice, usually not
emphasized in part because the Judeo-Christian taboo on sexual
relations on persons having the genitalia of the same sex was unknown
to Hellenic culture. The phenomena which the modern mind collects under
the rubric of homosexuality fell then into distinct and more or less
watertight compartments. Pagan Romans, who never approved the
penetration of freeborn Roman youths much less adult citizens, neither
knew nor cared about the legends of
Genesis
and the statutes of
Leviticus.
These texts were sacred to medieval Christians, as they are to our
contemporary fundamentalists despite all that critical scholarship has
since learned about their real date and authorship. Sodomy remains a
sin amongst almost all Christians in spite of gay Christian activists.
A further obstacle to reducing homosexuality to a single
category was the pederastic mindset,
a psyche aroused not so much by the masculinity as by the androgyny of
the male adolescent.
Many modern commentators neglect this crucial difference between
pederast and androphile.
Hellenistic and Roman artists were fond of androgynous youths, and
assimilated the eunuch to the adolescent as passive sexual partner. All
that those who are today defined as homosexual had in common or have
now is a "propensity to sin" - the urge to violate a prohibition of the
law of Moses. In spite of Plato's "against nature" (Laws), Greeks and
Romans did not as a rule think in terms of object choice rather than of
role (inserter vs. insertee). The condemnation of all malemale sex was
thus more Judaic than Greco-Roman.
"Homosexuality", an umbrella concept, covers a multitude of constitutional and personality types.
[8]
The census of those standing under it has varied through the
centuries - for reasons that have still to be elucidated. Plausibly the
same-sex sex of upperclass Greeks was ninetenths pederastic and
onetenth androphile, while that of modern Americans seems to be
ninetenths androphile and onetenth pederastic. The type predominating
in medieval society need not have been the same during all centuries or
in all areas, but fifteenthcentury evidence from Florence and Venice,
far more detailed than for any previous society, indicates that the
classical, ageasymmetrical variant remained normative, though mostly
shorn of its pedagogical aspect so touted by the Greeks. Modern
androphilia may indeed have first flourished or predominated in areas
with Germanic or Celtic populations before 1869 or even 1893 or before
1700, dates debated by social constructionist enthusiasts such as
Halperin and Trumbach for the birth of the modern homosexual identity
but they fail to perceive how much the concept of the homosexual
derived from that of the sodomite, especially of the habitual sodomite.
Persecution of Sodomites
: Defined by theologians as
"sinful behavior," all homosexual activity, as well as other forms of
sodomia, could only be the object of mounting condemnation and
repression by clerical and civil authorities. To what extent does the
Roman Catholic Church and its clergy bear responsibility for this
intolerance? Bailey's pioneering Homosexuality and the Western
Christian Tradition pleaded that "the prejudiced defenders of the
invert" had "mischievously cast slurs on the Church," which he would
have reduced almost to an innocent bystander. This is as good a time as
any to set forth our objections to those gay scholars - including even
some selfstyled "gay Marxists" - who opt, often out of expediency (there
are more Christians than gays) to evade the religious issue.
Some even maintain that "sexism", like "prejudice against
otherness" objectively existed and in fact served as an underlying
(biological) cause of the stance adopted by the primitive and inherited
by the medieval Church.
We focus upon the question of responsibility for the genesis of
medieval intolerance. Both natural and juridical persons are morally
and legally responsible for their actions. Whatever motives, conscious
or unconscious, overt or covert, may have determined their behavior,
they cannot evade or disown that responsibility, anymore than the heads
of state that conceived and executed the criminal policies of the Third
Reich and the Japanese Empire. Greeks favored decorous pederasty and
Romans tolerated most consensual homosexual acts. Hellenistic Jews
abominated both. The main difference that the Christians made when they
converted those pagans was in sexual views. After converting, Teutons
and Slavs, who like Greeks and Latins had scorned only effeminates,
also adopted Christian homophobia. Sex-negative as they were in
general, Catholics and Orthodox of whatever background became rabidly
homophobic.
Those who would exonerate medieval clerics by indicting sexism
and prejudice against otherness have missed the point. It is not as if
theologians and priests secretly detested the condemnation of sodomites
but had it forced on them by an intolerant hierarchy. They themselves
created the "sodomy delusion" and inculcated it effectively. We gays
are still struggling, often vainly, against it. Christian institutions
and authorities were implicated in every policymaking process of
medieval society. When the Church was not the instigator, it was the
accomplice; when it was not the accomplice, it was the beneficiary.
Those gay Christians who want to pretend that the "true Church" was
guiltless of the terrible wrongs which resulted from these premeditated
and purposeful crimes are simply deceiving themselves. Responsibility
of natural and juridical persons as a necessity of the legal order
exists precisely to the extent that it is prescribed and defined by
law. No evidence will ever make the Church an "innocent bystander" in
regard to the intolerance of homosexuality. From St. Paul onwards
Christians deemed sodomy sinful and, once they gained hegemony over
governments, criminal as well.
Roots of Homophobia
: The sources of Christian
intolerance were manifold. First, there was the legacy of paganism.
Greco-Roman (and primitive Germanic) culture strongly reproved any type
of homosexual (and any other) activity that was perceived as
gender-discordant.
The passive-effeminate male, designated as cinaedus in Latin and argr
in Old Norse, bore the brunt of overpowering contempt and hostility,
but only social - not legal - sanctions.
[9]
Ironically enough, to call another male an argr was itself an offense
under Lombard law. Judaism bequeathed to Christianity the model of the
Levitical clergy, which was heterosexual but not abstinent. Never in
all of its 2500 year history has Judaism had celibate priests or
virginal priestesses, never any other ideal for its religious elite or
for its laity than marriage and fatherhood. From Magna Mater religions
of Asia Minor and/or Zoroastrianism, Christianity had adopted a
different tradition, one that deferred to the Jewish prohibition of
self-castration (in rejection of Origen and other fanatics who made
themselves eunuchs "for the sake of Christ") but still embodied an
androgynous norm into which those oriented toward their own sex
conveniently fitted.
Leviticus
18:22 and 20:13, alongside
Deuteronomy
22:5 and 23:18, expressly forbade male homosexuality and cultic
crossdressing and prostitution. Furthermore, the account of the
destruction of Sodom in
Genesis
19 gave quasi-historical
example and sanction to the death penalty prescribed in the Priestly
Code. All these texts, read in the
Vetus Latina
and then in St.
Jerome's translation, gave divine sanction to intolerance. To this day
they remain the ineluctable "bottom line" in the arguments of the foes
of gay rights, cited by the Supreme Court in
Bowers v. Hardwick.
Even if at the outset the scope and purpose of these provisions of the
Mosaic Law was narrower than the blanket condemnation that later became
normative, the Judaic tradition was unambiguous; in Hellenistic
Judaism, perhaps as an abreaction to Greek
paiderasteia,
male homosex was made tantamount in gravity to murder. Palestinian Judaism did not lag behind: the
Talmud (b. Sanhedrin
73a) went so far as to ordain that one had the right to kill another
male to prevent his committing this crime, a plea still entered as
"homosexual panic" in certain gaybashing cases in the guise of a justly
enraged "victim" approached for homosex.
Early Christians adopted and ratified Hellenistic Jewish homophobia. Such passages as
Romans
1:18-32 and I
Corinthians
6:9 merely reiterate the Judaic rejection and condemnation of love for
one's one sex. In addition, from Gnostic speculation on the role of
sexuality in the cosmic process, Christians acquired a profound malaise
with sexual dimorphism (as an imperfect human condition) and the ideal
of an asexual humanity. From this standpoint heterosexual intercourse
even for reproduction within Christian marriage could be little more
than a necessary evil; homosexual intercourse of any kind a wholly
unnecessary one.
The Christian emperors, who became the head of the Church and
remained so in Orthodox lands Caesars and popes instituted the death
penalty at first perhaps only for certain, then for all, homosexual
acts. The sons of Constantine the Great decreed an antisodomy law in 341
[10]
and the decree of Theodosius the Great in 390, followed by Justinian's
novellae 77 and 141 in the sixth century, ordained death by burning for
the "sin against nature". Moreover, Justinian initiated a long
tradition of making tabooed sexuality the scapegoat for society's ills,
asserting that God sent plagues, famines and earthquakes as punishments
for sodomy.
[11]
Hence at the outset of the Middle Ages Imperial law, inspired as it was by theologians, prescribed death.
Church Fathers
: The Patristic writings, most of which
presume canonical the New Testament if not its Apocrypha, are Christian
texts from the second century until the seventh century or even until
the thirteenth, when Scholasticism took hold.
[12]
A Secret Gospel of Mark
[13]
may have treated Jesus' implied homoerotic relationship with a
catechumen before the theme was expunged from the canonical Mark. As we
know them, the gospels are so reticent that disputes still rage over
whether Jesus recommended the chastity he apparently practiced over the
marriage he praised.
[14]
More than any other evangelist, Luke portrays Jesus, who
criticized those who followed the letter of the law instead of the
spirit of love, as contradicting rabbinical conventions on sex, for
example by teaching that to follow him a man must reject his wife's
love and abandon his parents and that celibacy might be necessary for
salvation. In the early church, before tradition or texts became fixed,
though a few praised and practiced every variety of sexuality from
virginity to promiscuity, most, conscious of standing apart from and
above pagans in sexual mores, accepted the Judaic view that
homosexuality, like infanticide, was a very grave sin.
Deemed the second founder, St. Paul, whose epistles comprising
one third of the New Testament are the earliest of preserved Christian
writings, was explicit. He prescribed marriage only for those too weak
to remain chaste, but forbade divorce, available at the whim of Jewish,
Greek, and Roman husbands.
[15]
Influenced by Jewish Scripture, by pharisaic Judaism, and by the
melange of ascetic Platonism and theosophical Judaism best exemplified
by Philo Judaeus, he categorically forbade all sex outside marriage. He
singled out homosex, even between females, for special condemnation, as
well as transvestism of either sex, long hair on males and other signs
of effeminacy or softness, and masturbation.
Romans
1:1827,
Titus
1:10,
Timothy
1:10, and I
Corinthians
6:9 all emphatically condemn male homosex.
All of the Fathers were explicitly or implicitly (in their
advocation of virginity, chastity, etc.) homophobic. The earliest
post-Biblical (noncanonical) Christian homophobic writing that has been
preserved, the anti-Jewish
Epistle of Barnabas,
known in a
fourth century Alexandrine manuscript, explained that the Mosaic law
declared the hare unclean because it symbolized sodomy. The
Acts of Paul and Thecla
claimed that Paul demanded total renunciation of sex. The
Acts of Andrew the Apostle
assured a lady that her renunciation of sex with her husband would repair the Fall. In the
Acts of John
Christ thrice dissuaded the apostle from marrying. By the midthird
century, the Acts of Thomas were enthusiastic about the sexless life.
The Gnostic Gospel According to the Egyptians argued that Adam and Eve
by introducing sex brought about death.
On returning to the Near East from Rome in 172, Tatian, a
student of Justin Martyr (who had even approved another pious young
man's wish to be castrated), enjoined chastity on all Christians. Some
Syrian churches only baptized celibate males. Certain second and third
century heretics argued that marriage was Satanic. Marcionites
described the body as a nest of guilt. The Coptic
Gospel According to the Egyptians
had Jesus speak of paradise before the sexes had been differentiated.
Among libertine sects, however, the secondcentury Alexandrian
Carpocrates' teenaged son Epiphanes, who succeeded him as head of the
heretical sect, advocated holding of women and goods in common.
As early as 177, Athenagoras, characterizing adulterers and
pederasts as foes of Christianity, subjected them to excommunication,
then the harshest penalty that the Church, itself still persecuted by
the Roman state, could inflict. The Council of Elvira (305) severely
condemned pederasts. Canons 16 and 17 of the Council of Ancyra (314)
inflicted lengthy penances and excommunication for male homosex.
Head of the catechetical school in Alexandria until he fled
persecution in 202, St. Clement combined Gnostic belief that
illumination brought perfection with Platonic doctrine that ignorance
rather than sin caused evil. Borrowing from neo-Platonism and Stoicism,
Clement, who idealized a sexless marriage as between brother and
sister, like Philo, condemned homosexuality as contrary to nature.
Pseudo-Clement opined that one had to look far away to the
sinae (to China) for people who lived just and moderate lives
(Recognitions, 8, 48). The learned enthusiast Origen, prevented from
seeking martyrdom by his mother in 202,
reinforced fasts, vigils and poverty with self-castration, which he
understood
Matthew
19:12 as recommending. In 257 another fanatic, St. Cyprian, bishop of
Carthage, opined that the plague had the merit of letting Christian
virgins die intact, but no Christian invoked medical arguments about
the benefits of virginity or (as late pagan physicians did) of caution
and moderation, which was not at all the same thing. Syriac
thirdcentury forgeries ascribed to St. Clement, bishop of Rome, worried
about the celibate male virgin traveling from one community to another,
beset by unmarried females.
The Coptic Father of Christian monasticism, St. Anthony at 20
gave away his inheritance and devoted himself to asceticism, retiring
first into a tomb and then into the desert, in both of which he fought
with hordes of demons. Failing to seduce him in the guise of a woman,
the Devil reappeared as a black boy. Around 305 Anthony organized the
hermits that he had attracted into a community under a loose rule. The
end of the persecutions gave such ascetics the glory formerly gained by
martyrs. Like St. Anthony, other anchorites found sexual
desire the most difficult urge to control and ordained severe fasts to
weaken it. The Desert Fathers increased sexual negativism of other
Christians just as monasticism emerged and heightened the temptations
of homosex for the cloistered. Converted after being discharged from
the army in 313, another Copt St. Pachomius founded a monastery in the
Thebaid where he eventually presided over nine such institutions for
men and two for women as abbot general. His rule, the first for
cenobites, influenced those of St. Basil, John Cassian, Caesarius of
Arles, St. Benedict, and that of "the Master." Pachomius said that "no
monk may sleep on the mattress of another" (Ch. 40) or come closer to
one another "whether sitting or standing" than one cubit (about 18
inches) even when they took meals together.
Most famous of pillar ascetics, St. Simeon Stylites (ca.
390-459) lived on a column for about four decades near Antioch working
miracles. Such "athletes for Christ" mortified their bodies more than
Olympic athletes had ever improved theirs, but the lack of external
discipline and
scandals of other hermits encouraged the proliferation of monasteries,
where the repression of sodomy became an obsession. Much influenced by
the Desert Fathers, with whom he long sojourned, the Patriarch John
Chrysostom, the most eminent of the Greek Fathers, raved "How many
hells shall be enough for such [sodomites]? " in
Homily IV
on
Romans
1:26-27.
The long struggle against the synagogues, begun by St. Paul in Asia
Minor, the heartland of Christendom, which continued in Rome and North
Africa, stained Christianity with anti-Judaism.
Just as Latin Christians borrowed anti-Judaism from Greeks, who had
long clashed with them in Alexandria, they also borrowed homophobia
from the Jews which they
reinforced with Roman hostility to effeminacy. Catholics may have
become even more
homophobic than the Orthodox, who were after all living among the
occasionally still somewhat pederastic Greeks.
Becoming bishop of Lyons in 177 after the martyrdom of Pothinus, St. Irenaeus attacked
gnosticism. Perhaps the most influential gnostic, Valentinus was said to recommend free love
for the "pneumatics," spiritual men freed from the Law by gnosis. Unlike his Alexandrine
contemporary St. Clement, who condemned sodomy as "against nature" and brandished other
Platonic arguments, Irenaeus emphasized tradition, Scriptural canon and the episcopate in his struggle against the Gnostics.
Educated in liberal arts and in law at Carthage, Tertullian,
father of Latin theology, who converted in 197, eventually joined the
Montanists. In apologies and controversial and
ascetic tracts in Latin and occasionally in Greek, he rebutted pagan
accusations that Christians practiced homosex and cannibalism, charges
ironically which Christians were
soon to hurl against heretics. Tertullian demanded separation to escape
from the immorality and idolatry of pagan society. He may have edited
the
Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas,
whose virginity he made central.
[16]
Following Irenaeus in stressing tradition and attacking the
Valentinians, he pessimistically dwelt on original sin and the Fall.
Eschatological expectations led him to asceticism and perfectionism. In
De Pudicitia,
he condemned the laxity of Pope Callistus and of a
bishop of Carthage toward sexual sinners, urging a legalistic system of
rewards and punishments. Though influenced by Stoicism, he stressed the
literal and historical interpretation of revelation. About 250 another
Latin author, probably Novatian, wrote: "Virginity makes itself equal
to the angels."
One of the four Latin "Doctors of the Church", St. Ambrose in
his treatise on clerical ethics,
De Officiis, encouraged asceticism and Italian monasticism. After
studying at Rome, another
of the "Doctors", St. Jerome urged extreme asceticism in Against
Helvidius and Against
Jovinian, asserting that "Christ and Mary were both virgins, and this
consecrated the pattern
of virginity for both sexes". The greatest "Doctor", St. Augustine, who
towered over all the
other Latin fathers, developed doctrines that held sway throughout the
Dark Ages, that
Thomas Aquinas challenged and modified in the thirteenth century, but
that Protestants
revived again. Leaning heavily on the "Old Testament" and on the
doctrine of original sin
while rejecting Manichaeism which he had once accepted, he insisted
that all non-procreative modes of sexual gratification were wrong
because pleasure was their sole object and his condemnation prevailed
throughout the Dark Age and indeed the rest of the Middle Age.
Withdrawing from the licentiousness at Rome, where he was
educated, to a cave at Subiaco, St. Benedict of Nursia organized those
monks attracted to his hermitage into twelve
monasteries but in 525 moved to Monte Cassino, where this "Patriarch of
Western Monasticism" composed his rule by altering and shortening "The
Rule of the Master" and also drawing freely upon those of Sts. Basil,
John Cassian, and Augustine.
[17]
His chapter 22 prescribed that monks should sleep in separate beds,
clothed and with lights burning in the dormitory; the young men were
not to sleep next to one another but separated by the cots of
elders. From a noble family that fled Cartagena when it was destroyed
by the Arian Goths,
St. Isidore, who entered a monastery ca. 589, succeeded his brother as
Archbishop of Seville.
Presiding over several councils in Visigothic Spain, the only Germanic
realm whose laws
punished homosexual acts, he founded schools and convents and tried to
convert Jews. His
often fanciful Etymologies (such as miles quia nihil molle faciat,
"miles [soldier] because he
does nothing [effeminate]") became the encyclopedia of the Dark Ages.
Borrowing from
Augustine, Isidore condemned nonprocreative sexuality, approving
marriage hesitantly and
solely for the begetting of children. Adopted in toto from such
Hellenistic Jewish authors as
Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus, the homophobia of the early
Fathers, reinforced with a sex-negativism peculiar to Christianity, was
never contradicted or even questioned by any
thinker accepted as an authority by later generations of Christians
until the 1950's.
Dark Age Laxity
: The criminalization of homosex by
Christian Emperors became unenforceable when barbarians overwhelmed the
Western Empire. Over time Germanic codes replaced Roman law there.
Except in Visigothic Spain where its source in Christian doctrine is
evident, they did not refer to the crime against nature. But at a time
when the legal order and society itself were fast disintegrating,
gratified (or ungratified) homosexual urges little interested the new,
still essentially barbarian rulers.
As Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), the last of the "Doctors
of the Church", inaugurated the missions to convert Germans and Celts,
the Church developed new modes of enforcing its reprobation of the sin
against nature. Beginning in Wales and Ireland, newly won for the
faith, this role fell to the penitentials, manuals to aid priests in
giving spiritual guidance to laity by enumerating the various
categories of sin and prescribing appropriate penances.
[18]
They are striking for their broad, detailed treatment of sexual
behavior. All of the several dozen that survive have at least one
condemnation of sodomy, and several offer a relatively extended
analysis of it with typically a penance of seven to twenty years for
sins specifically ascribed to Sodom, three to seven years for
oralgenital contacts, three to fifteen years for anal intercourse, one
to three years for intercrural relations, and a mere 30 days to two
years for masturbation. Monks were often disciplined more lightly, at
least in practice and allowances made for youth. Lesbian relations are
scarcely mentioned. None of the
penitentials even implies that the secular arm should prosecute or
punish culprits but most treated homosexual offenses more severely then
heterosexual ones, prescribing greater severity for anal than for oral
sex whether
with a partner of the opposite or of the same
gender. The early canons followed the penitentials, some of which were
invested with canonical authority, in prescribing various penances
despite Leviticus' death penalty and St. Paul's fulminations.
Arguments that saints' lives showed hatred for homosex are
convincing as well as that monks were tempted by female transvestites
whom they assumed to be beautiful young males. ????? The claim
that this undermines social constructionism by positing a homosexual to
hate is, however, poorly construed because sodomy was feared and
condemned in these episodes, not the "homosexual" personality. Under
Charlemagne (768-814), a secular enactment assigned penances for sodomy
and a capitulary condemned sodomy among monks, remarking that it had
become common.
[19]
The ninth century verses of a Veronese cleric to a youth whom a rival had stolen show true feeling:
O thou eidolon of Venus adorable,
Perfect thy body and nowhere deplorable!
The sun and the stars and the sea and the firmament,
These are like thee, and the Lord made them permanent.
Treacherous death shall not injure one hair of thee,
Clotho, the threadspinner, she shall take care of thee.
Heartily, lad, I implore her and prayerfully
Ask that Lachesis shall treasure thee carefully,
Sister of Atropos - let
her love cover thee,
Neptune companion, and Thetis watch over thee,
When on the river thou sailest forgetting me!
How canst thou fly without ever regretting me,
Me that for sight of my lover am fretting me?
Stones from the substance of hard earth maternal, he
Threw o'er his shoulder who made men supernally;
One of these stones is that boy who disdainfully
Scorns the entreaties I utter, ah, painfully!
Joy that was mine is my rival's tomorrow,
While I for my fawn like a stricken deer sorrow!
The dissolution of the Carolingian Empire begun in 817 and new
waves of invasions ended
the brief renascence that it had encouraged. In the midninth century,
Hincmar of Reims asserted that lesbians are "reputed to use certain
instruments of diabolic function to excite desire." Even in later
centuries, only the use of a dildo (single or double) warranted the
intervention of the authorities.
[20]
Chaos during the ninth and tenth centuries again derailed the Christian
attacks on Sodom which had revived somewhat, as we have seen, when
Charles the Great and his immediate successors had restored order and
tried to create a Christian commonwealth.
The Church's Crackdown
: As soon as the Church
reorganized itself after the invasions and
other disruptions of the late Dark Age, fervent clerics assailed
sodomites. About 1051 Saint
Peter Damian, a member of the circle of papal reformers, in the Liber
Gomorrhianus, bitterly
denounced male homosex, particularly among the clergy where it deemed
it rampant and asserted that whoever practiced sodomy was "tearing down
the ramparts of the heavenly Jerusalem and rebuilding the walls of
ruined Sodom". His denunciations presaged the attitude of later
councils and canonists. He charged that such sins
were not only common, but escaped attention because those guilty of
them confessed only to
others equally compromised. But the response of Pope (later Saint) Leo
IX (1049-54) was no
more than a polite acknowledgement that Damian had shown himself a foe
of carnal
pollution. The ardent reformer had not convinced the pontiff that
sweeping measures against sodomitic clergy were necessary. Leo was
quite willing to let the moral status quo in the Church remain, perhaps
sensing that a campaign to identify and oust transgressors would only
amount to a selfinflicted wound. That so many individuals with
unconventional sexual preferences should have over the centuries served
a religion that uncompromisingly forbade their sexual self-indulgence
is, in retrospect, a political as well as a psychological problem.
The sexual abnormality of the clergy has so far unfortunately been the
object of sectarian or
anticlerical polemics rather then dispassionate study.
A new phase in the evolution of attitudes toward sexuality
began with Hildebrand (Gregory
VII, 1073-1085), the most revolutionary of all popes. He demanded
clerical celibacy; that
priests put away their wives and concubines. Although not completely
successful in enforcement, the relentless drive against clerical
sexuality gave rise to a sort of moral purity crusade which also
assailed Orthodox, Muslims, and Jews as well as heretics and sodomites.
The intensified emphasis upon asceticism and clerical celibacy was to
mark Roman Catholic
morality ever after. Priestly sexual abstinence was never again doubted
and condemnation of
"unnatural vice" even among the laity inevitably became more strident
and imperative.
[21]
Canon law, previously rather unarticulated in private collections, developed rapidly and
homophobically after 1000. "The canonical compilations demonstrate that the reformers
favored moral vigorism: as a group they considered sex and other pleasurable experiences
tainted by evil and a potent source of sin".
[22]
Following Burchard of Worms (d.1025), Ivo of Chartres (d.1115) had
canons in his Decretum that prescribed severe penalties for fellation,
bestiality, pederasty and sodomy. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the
Council of Nablus decreed in 1120 that those guilty of sodomy should be
burned. Gratian's collection, Concordia discordantium canonum, in five
books, completed shortly before 1150, superceded earlier compilations,
becoming the text for scholastics. Updating principles of Roman Law,
Gratian introduced "natural law", which became important for sodomy. In
1234 Gregory IX expanded the collection, creating the Corpus juris
canonici, to which the Liber Sextus was added in 1298 and the
Clementines in 1317. These seven books, and the two extravagantes added
later, were glossed. Increasingly homophobic theologians, including
fanatic friars from Thomas Aquinas to Luca da Penne, influenced the
glossators. They and Inquisitors inspired feudal, royal, and municipal
laws to ordain the fining, castrating, and even burning of
sodomites - all penalties that remained foreign to Canon law itself even
when revised by The Council of Trent (1545-1563).
Although Gratian devoted little space to "unnatural" sexuality,
Peter the Chanter devoted a long chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum to
it. His circle seems to have originated a fantasy that they ascribed to
St. Jerome: at the moment when the Virgin Mary was giving birth to
Jesus, all sodomites died a sudden death.
[23]
Thenceforth canonists regularly cited Justinian's Novella 77 that
famine, pestilence, and earthquake, to which many added floods and
other natural catastrophes, are God's retribution for unpunished
"crimes
against nature. " The Third Lateran Council (1179) ruled that clerics
guilty of "that incontinence which is against nature" leave the Church
or be perpetually confined in a monastery. Somewhat paradoxically,
Bernard of Pavia (d.1213) held that sodomy did not create affinity and
thus constituted no impediment to marriage.
After 1250, savage penalties were ordained. A convenient
political invective that the popes
hurled against dissidents, sodomy was also repeatedly linked with
heresy. Many ascribed
this vice to clerics - probably justifiably. Like scholastics,
canonists treated homosexuality,
bestiality, and masturbation as "contrary to nature," because they
excluded the possibility of
procreation, a touchstone of sexual morality. Such crimes by clerics
constituted sacrilege,
because his or her body was a vessel consecrated to God. These offenses
if notorious brought
infamy (infamia), a deprivation of status, unfitness for public office
and loss of the right to be a plaintiff or witness in court.
Ironically, the canonist Pierre de La Palud (ca. 1280-1342) explained
at length why two males could not marry each other to legitimize their
relationship.
Beginning at least as early as Gregory IX's commission to the Dominicans in 1232 to ferret
out heretics in southern France, Inquisitors in certain regions extended their jurisdiction to
sodomites as well, now viewed as allies of demons, devils, and witches. Those convicted
were handed over for punishment to secular authorities, which in time were independently to
prescribe and enforce death. Before execution, torture wrung confessions from victims, and
often the trial records were burnt together with them.
In the Latin and vernacular literature homosexuality played a
role, if only at times perhaps as an afterglow of classical antiquity.
[24]
It should always be remembered that almost until the end, medieval
literature when written at all circulated in manuscript among highly
elite audiences who often read and appreciated classical Latin poetry.
Neither the Latin nor indeed the vernacular texts, which were often
composed for ladies and laymen ignorant of Latin, treated much about
homosex. They were not much subject to the formal and informal
censorship that set in once the printing press had made possible a
literature aimed at mass readers of the vernacular. The Latin classics
virtually the sole "exotic" literature accessible to medieval readers
were rich enough in homoerotic language and themes to inspire any poet
or prose author. The twelfth century Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx
beautifully praised novices in Latin.
[25]
Youths in many of these medieval poems, "as in some classical poems,
are often not responsive toward their older lovers but haughty and
aloof".
[26]
In addition there were numerous Arabic and, from Muslim Spain, some Hebrew pederastic poems.
[27]
Stories of the knights and squires living without ladies in castles,
where the only women other than the lord's lady was likely to be a
serving wench, who bonded and doubtless had homoerotic feelings towards
each other, sometimes reflected, often obliquely, in vernacular poems
and romances.
[28]
Clerics routinely denounced English royals and courtiers for sodomy
from William I and the son of Henry I to Richard I and Edward II as
well as the German Emperors and their courtiers from Henry IV through
Frederick II and Conradin.
[29]
Four major themes can be discerned in the medieval literature
dealing with love for one's
own sex: 1) glorification of the physical beauty of the adolescent boy;
2) praise of
male bonding and fidelity - now often coded as selfsacrificing
friendship romantic love
now being restricted to females who, the romances put on a pedestal as
did the new cult of
the adoration of the virgin; 3) treatments in which increasingly
ambivalence, aversion, and reprobation come to the fore; and 4)
reworkings of Biblical or Christian themes that are by their very
origin negative and condemnatory, such as the much discussed passages
in Dante's Inferno.
There was more homosexual verse during the brief renascence of the twelfth century than
before or after, which Curtius deemed more of a convention (modelled on classical Latin)
than, as Boswell supposed, an indication of real life loves whether pederastic or gay.
[30]
Alan of Lille (c.1128-1202), known as doctor universalis, in the
Complaint of Nature, portrays nature as a figure ignorant of theology,
teaching not contrary, but different things but man alone of
all beings does not obey her and reserves the law of sexual love.
Baudri of Bourgueil (1046-1130)
like his contemporary Marbod, wrote love poems to both women and boys:
This their reproach: that, wantoning in youth,
I wrote to maids, and wrote to lads no less.
Some things I wrote, 'tis true, which treat of love;
And songs of mine have pleased both he's and she's.
Also neither of the two most influential works of the midtwelfth
century, Gratian's Decretum, the text for canonists, and Peter
Lombard's Sententiarum, that for theologians, was particularly harsh on
sodomites which Boswell mistakenly believed to be evidence of church
tolerance.
Baldwin (1994) whose "Five Voices" from Northern France around
1200 though disagreeing on a variety of sexual topics, "unequivocally
agreed on one common conviction: in accordance with traditional
Hebraic-Christian antipathy, they judged all homoerotic relations to be
the most reprehensible of sexual behaviors. Because of a universal
presumption of heterosexuality the issue of gender was implicit in all
five discourses".
[31]
He drew on three Latin sources written for clerics; Peter the Chanter
who composed in the Augustinian mode, the Prose Salernitan Questions, a
physician's guide in the mode of Galen, and Andreas Capellanus'
exposition of love à la Ovid. He also analyzed Old French sources of
two types, one refined for lords and ladies in Jean Renard who
developed the Romantic view of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France
(the only significant woman writer) and one bawdy for bourgeois: the
fabliaux as exemplified by Jean Bodel. Thus every literate order was
represented in his samples and at a time just before the reception of
Aristotle and the logic of the scholastics increased homophobia and
"spawned legislation that sought to obliterate homoerotic practices
from Western Europe". Even so it was then believed that "God
instituted holy matrimony to constitute the exclusive domain for sexual
relations... the
procreation of children was one of the two unproblematic goals which
the theologians
assigned to the institution of marriage. Once again... the reproduction
of children was the primary justification for intercourse".
[32]
Even married women were urged to volunteer to remain chaste henceforth
as a mulier sancta, not from the current medical theory but from
religion as increasingly priests and deacons were required to be
celibate despite protests as early as 1074 in Paris.
Mostly, it is true, however, our theme succumbed to the
Christian taboo, which was not simply a prohibition of homosexual
behavior, but also a banishment of the subject from realm of polite
discourse. It was only in the twentieth century that the topic openly
and positively returned in world literature. The late Middle Ages
however, saw another phenomenon that was to last down to the twentieth
century, namely the formation of a
linguistic code that enabled insiders to communicate their homoerotic
feelings and reveal
their true sexual orientations to one another without being intercepted
by a hostile Church
and society. This innovation marked a radical break with the explicitly
homoerotic literature
of antiquity, whose authors and public had no need of such concealment.
Much more needs
to be done to collect and interpret whatever survives of the
clandestine homosexual literature
of the late Medieval period. The positive legacy of the Middle Ages
included Edward II and
Piers Gaveston; the sole unequivocally positive homoerotic model of
adult male liaison and
commemorated as early as the Elizabethan era in Marlowe's Edward II.
The survival of a
precious body of literature about the pederasty of the ancients, for
the most part in late
medieval manuscripts, inspired Renaissance pederasts. The
Greek Anthology
is known from
a manuscript of the late tenth century, Athenaeus and Hesychius from ones of the early
fifteenth, Catullus from three of the fourteenth. The gay-positive heritage of antiquity barely
survived Christian neglect, censorship and destruction, thanks only to editors and copyists
who merit closer investigation.
We have two "debates" from the thirteenth century, between Helen
and Ganymede and between Hebe and Ganymede (Stehling 114 & 115)
about the relative merits of each type of lover. Although heterosexual
love, in accord with nature, wins, the beautiful innocent boy puts up a
good arguement in each discourse.
Demonization: Before 1200, sodomy was not normally linked with
apostasy; the role which male homosexuality had played in the sacral
prostitution of the Ishtar-Tammuz cult or other religions of pagan Asia
Minor had long been forgotten and prejudice against argrs had mostly
become dormant.
[33]
The Crusades whipped up prejudice against Muslims, believed to be given
over to homosexual vices and against Jews, assumed to be lustful.
Westerners now associated sodomy with the dualist heresy of the
Bogomils in Bulgaria and the Cathars in Provence.
Toward the midthirteenth century the very word Bulgarus
acquired the meaning of sodomita. But most important, the earlier
reprobation was now magnified into a fullfledged obsession, which
Warren Johansson in 1978 defined and labeled as the sodomy delusion. In
its fullest formulation, it is a complex of paranoid beliefs invented
and inculcated by the Church, and prevalent in much of Christendom to
this day, to the effect that nonprocreative sexuality in general, and
sexual acts between males in particular, are contrary to the law of
Nature, to the exercise of right reason, and to the will of God and
that sodomy is practiced by individuals whose wills have been enslaved
by demonic powers. Furthermore, everyone is heterosexually oriented but
everyone is susceptible of the demonic temptation to commit sodomy, and
potentially guilty of the crime; everyone hates and condemns sodomites
but the practice is ubiquitously threatening and infinitely contagious;
everyone regards the practice with loathing and disgust, but whoever
has experienced sodomitic pleasure retains a lifelong craving for it; a
crime committed by the merest handful of depraved individuals, but if
not checked by the harshest penalties, it would become so rampant as to
occasion the suicide of the human race. A source of eternal damnation
for the individual sinner, it impairs and undermines the moral
character of those who practice it; it is so hateful to God as to
provoke his retaliation in the form of catastrophes that can befall an
entire community for the unpunished crime of a single individual in its
midst. For its own self-preservation every Christian community must be
eternally vigilant against its occurrence and spread and the parties
guilty of such abominable practices should be punished with the utmost
severity and - if not put to death in accordance with Biblical
precept - then totally excluded from Christian society.
This delusion persisted after every other form of medieval
intolerance (such as the condemnation of adultery in Leviticus and the
New Testament) had been abandoned or at least so discredited that it
could no longer enter into official policy, even if some lingered in
private attitudes. This tenacious survival of the medieval Christian
heritage remains the chief obstacle to gay rights, but it also
challenges students of medieval society and power structures. In one
respect it is even fortunate that the sodomy delusion survived
virtually
intact into the enlightenment, if modified somewhat since then, because
it can be examined in vivo with all the tools of the cultural historian
and the depth psychologist, not just from yellowing documents of the
sixteenth century couched in a language that often obscures what the
modern scholar would like to know. Future study of its dynamics and of
the social forces that still uphold it can afford precious insight into
psychopathology.
In the wake of the adoption of these beliefs, highly
questionable if not absurd notions find their way into texts on sodomia
ratione sexus. Although St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1100,
made some excuses for younger clerics who committed the sin of Sodom,
the new hard line prevailed. In his Legenda aurea (1290), Jacopo da
Varagine repeated Peter the Chanter's fantasy that all the world's
sodomites had died at Jesus' birth, adding that, according to Saint
Augustine, because human nature was defiled with this vice, the Son of
Man repeatedly postponed his incarnation and even thought of renouncing
the project altogether. Hugh of Saint-Cher, in his commentary on the
Vulgate (Paris, 1232), solemnly asserted that grass will not grow on a
place where sodomy has so much as been mentioned, and that while an
incubus may assume a man's shape, and a succubus a woman's, a succubus
would never take on male form because even devils would be ashamed to
take the passive role in sodomy. In the emerging law codes, to be sure,
the active (normally the older) partner often received harsher
penalties.
Christian intolerance enveloped homosexual behavior in a nexus
of unprovable but credible fantasies. Toward 1360 a South Italian
jurist, Luca da Penne, wrote in his Commentaria in Tres Libros Codicis,
Book XII, 60(61), 3:
If a sodomite had been executed, and subsequently several times back to life, each time he
should be punished even more severely if this were possible: hence those who practice this
vice are seen to be enemies of God and nature, because in the sight of God such a sin is
deemed graver than murder, for the reason that the murderer is seen as destroying only one
human being, but the sodomite as destroying the whole human race. . . .
Guy de Roye [Guido de Monte Rocherii], archbishop of Tours and of Reims, in 1388 in
Manipulus curatorum
(of which a French version from Troyes in 1604 under the title Le
Doctrinal de Sapience
added that the reproach of sodomy is so vile that even the enemies of
Jesus did not dare to accuse him of it at the time of his Passion,
although they heaped every other kind of abuse on him) opined:
Of the vice of sodomy Augustine declares how detestable it is, saying that the sin is far
greater than carnal knowledge of one's own mother, as shown by the punishment inflicted on
the Sodomites who perished in fire and brimstone from heaven. This sin, moreover, cries
spiritually unto the Lord, whence in Genesis the Lord says: The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah
has come unto me, for as Augustine says, by this sin the society which should be in us with
God is violated when the very Nature of which he is himself the prime mover is polluted by
the perversity of lust.... It is indeed of such accursedness that not the act alone but the
mention of it pollutes the mouth of the speaker, the ears of the listeners, and the very
elements in general.
Thomas Aquinas played a distinctive role in the onset of the sodomy delusion. In a crucial passage of the
Summa Theologiae
(III, q. 31, 7) he falsified the material which he borrowed from
Nicomachean Ethics
(VII v 34, 1148b). There Aristotle had explicitly stated that sexual attraction to males
(venereorum masculis)
could be motivated either by nature (natura) or from habit
(ex consuetudine).
In his commentary on the Latin text of Aristotle, Aquinas dutifully
admitted that such unnatural pleasures could be sought and experienced
"from the nature of the physical constitution which [certain people]
have received from the beginning"
(ex natura corporalis complexionis quam acceperunt a principio).
But in the Summa Theologiae he suppressed this concession to assert that what is contrary to human nature
(id quod est contra naturam hominis)
may "become connatural to a particular human being"
(fiat huic homini connaturale).
"Connatural" here does not mean not "inborn" but is applied to feelings
that have so fused with the personality of the subject as to become
"second nature." Later he adds what Aristotle had nowhere said, that
"such corruption can be...for psychological causes"
(quae corruptio potest esse...ex parte animae)
and exemplifies it with "in intercourse with animals or males"
(in coitu bestiarum aut masculorum)
to paraphrase the Christian notion of
sodomia.
Like Philo Judaeus, Aquinas illegitimately paired the Hellenic
conception of the "unnatural" with a Zoroastrian-Judaic commandment to
produce the scholastic condemnation which the psychoanalytic school has
served to rationalize by implicitly adopting the logic of Aquinas and
his epigones as if it were scientific - and echoing the Biblical
prohibition as if it were some universal law. His formulation could
serve as the motto of homophobic psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, who
insistently deny any genetic or constitutional basis for attraction to
one's own sex to maintain that it is acquired by psychosexual
development in childhood.
Catholic authorities frankly admit that Aristotle does not condemn
homosexual behavior as such and that Aquinas superimposed the moral
sanction from a wholly independent source:
the Biblical tradition adopted by the Church as a "mystical body."
Because "The Philosopher's" acknowledgment that homosexuality could be
innate was suppressed by Aquinas, and by the Church generally, we have
designated the late nineteenth-century reassertion of it as
neo-Aristotelian.
[34]
From the late thirteenth century onward, statutes against
sodomy, with penalties ranging from mere fines to castration, exile and
death, enter secular law. The sacral offense moved from canon to civil
law. Times and places varied, but the language and motivation are
everywhere the same. The first documented execution in Western Europe
is from 1277.
Illegality became the norm and remained so until the Enlightenment
began its work of criticizing and dismantling the Old Regime's criminal
law, believing that sodomy, like witchcraft, had been criminalized by
superstition and fanaticism.
A further weapon of the Church in its repression of sodomy was
the ascription of infamy of fact. This was the stigma attached to those
who violated specific canons and other clerical ordinances, and in the
case of the sodomite it entailed perpetual infamy, which is to say
lifelong exclusion from the Christian community. Those found guilty of
unnatural vice, or even suspected of it, suffered a civil death: even
if not prosecuted, they and their families could be completely
ostracized and economically boycotted, they could be assaulted or even
murdered with impunity, because civil authorities felt no obligation to
prosecute assailants - a mentality that has lasted in police and court
practice to this day.
The persistence of medieval infamy into modern times, not some
"instinctive aversion" to homosexual activity, underlies the ostracism
and persecution which lovers of their own sex currently encounter.
Infamy is a subject remarkably neglected by medievalists; recent works
have chiefly dwelt upon obscure technical points of canon law rather
than upon its social impact, which badly needs to be investigated in
connection with the status of sodomites.
Paranoid Delusions
: Subsumed under the "crime against
nature," sodomy became invisible to the Christian mind, yet the object
of a thousand obscene fantasies. It was nowhere, yet everywhere
threatened society with destruction. It was blotted out of the annals
of the past, unrecorded in the present, forbidden to exist in the
future. Trial records were burned along with culprits, so that no trace
should remain. Yet enveloped in the impenetrable darkness of ignorance
and superstition, it existed silent and unseen, a phantom eluding the
clutches of an intolerant world. This shift from the explicit but not
obsessive condemnation of earlier
centuries to the frantic intolerance of homosexual expression has been
a hallmark of Western civilization since the late thirteenth century.
[35]
Just recently the Stanford historian Gavin I. Langmuir,
particularly in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (1990), has
noted a similar evolution of Westerners' attitude toward the Jews
following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), when under Innocent III
the Church achieved the zenith of its power and influence. The delusion
took the form of accusations that Jews profaned the Christian host (the
consecrated wafer in the Eucharist) and
that they murdered Christian children to use their blood in unleavened
bread for Passover, along with notions such as that on Good Friday Jews
bleed through the anus in fulfillment of the cry "His blood be on us
and on our children!" The longstanding (and perhaps unresolvable)
ambivalence of theologians toward Judaism allowed authorities to
canonize supposed victims of Jewish ritual murder and to erect shrines
in their honor.
In the same way the Biblical condemnation of sorcery which
Christianity had inherited ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live")
was in the late fifteenth century magnified into the witchcraft
delusion - the paranoid belief that witches had the power by their
magical rites and practices to inflict infinite harm on society.
Because of this delusion hundreds and thousands of deranged or old
women, often themselves in the initial stages of senility, were cruelly
tortured to extract confessions and then brutally executed.
[36]
Some hold that witchcraft represented a survival of
pre-Christian fertility cults or other forms of paganism that had
survived from the mists of prehistoric ages; others that proceedings
were purely and simply invented by the inquisitors for motives to be
found within the politics of the Church itself. The modern investigator
presumes that the rites of the "witches" had no efficacy, hence the
causal nexus accredited by their Christian persecutors was an example
of paranoid reasoning. But the sodomy delusion represented a purely
imaginary construction of real behavior that indeed occurred, but was
undertaken for the mutual pleasure or sexual
relief of the participants, with no thought of harming anyone. The
catalogue of misfortunes
which the sodomy delusion compiled was solely the paranoid invention of
Christians.
If, however, sodomy occurred everywhere in medieval Christian
society, accusations brought against a particular individual or sect
need not have been grounded in reality. This is the crux of the
centurylong debate over the alleged guilt of the Knights Templar, who
were accused of sodomy and in many cases tortured into confessing it so
that their order could be abolished and its property confiscated. The
most painstaking investigators have often come to negative conclusions,
even pointing out that the charges failed to convince contemporary
public opinion that the trials had any other motive than the greed of
the French king Philip IV.
[37]
However, others, perhaps less critical, starting from some such premise
as "there are always homosexuals in an allmale organization," or that
"male bonding usually involves some form of homosexuality" have freely
accepted the charges and even elaborated on them.
[38]
It is pertinent, however, that the execution of Piers Gaveston - against
whom the evidence was far more substantive - occurred a mere two years
after the trial of the Templars and Edward II, his lover, had married
Philip IV's daughter who afterwards helped encompass her husband's
deposition and brutal murder.
The witchcraft delusion held sway from the end of the fifteenth
century to the middle of the
eighteenth, by which time it had been discredited in all but remote
backwaters. The Judeophobic delusion lasted much longer, certainly down
to the middle of the twentieth century, when revulsion at the active or
passive complicity of many Christians with the Holocaust inspired
profound guilt on the part of theologians because Christians defamed
Jews over the centuries. In the nineteenth century, it is true, older,
religiously motivated anti-Judaism gave way to economic and then racial
anti-Semitism.
Only in the wake of the Holocaust did the Roman Catholic Church
formally absolve the Jews of the charge of deicide. But the sodomy
delusion was in full vigor longer. It explains why the homosexual
victims of National Socialism received no sympathy or reparations, why
as late as 1957 the Federal Constitutional Court in West Germany,
without a trace of remorse, not merely upheld the Nazi laws but even
suggested that the penalty be doubled - from five to ten years
imprisonment. Even in its last decade this baleful legacy of the Middle
Ages allows the Religious Right, or if you prefer, the radical right,
to win votes by their denunciation of gay rights. It metamorphosed into
the belief (almost as tenaciously voiced as the previous one) that
homosexuals are mentally ill, or are a source of social conflict and
disorganization, or cause the decline of civilization.
All three of these belief systems, the sodomy delusion, the Judeophobic
delusion, and the witchcraft delusion, were conceived and propagated by
the clergy. Theologians and jurists invented them and disseminated
among the laity. None of them can simply be attributed to "sexism," to
"prejudice against otherness" or some other abstraction dear to the
hearts of social psychologists. Over the centuries, Christian
homophobia has blighted millions of lives.
The Closet and Clandestine Subculture
: A crucial
difference, however, separates the policy of the Church in regard to
the Jews and its sanctions affecting those oriented toward their own
sex. Down to the last third of the eighteenth century, Western and
Central European Jews lived visibly in separate ghettos. This status
was not only desired by their members but reinforced by the Jew badge
instituted by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and by the ghetto
first formally established at Venice in 1516. Both of these
institutions had as their object the prevention of sexual intercourse
between Jews and Christians.
[39]
The ghetto was not simply a quarter in which Jews were compelled to
reside by the collusion of real estate agents (such as are alleged to
conspire to put all the Blacks in "ghettoes" in American cities), it
was a walled area in which every Jew was curfewed. However, these
communities had an officially recognized political and legal status,
with a leadership that could negotiate on their behalf with the
Christian authorities. The sodomy delusion, on the other hand, forced
homosexuals to live in a state of outward assimilation and
invisibility. The only social organization which they could devise was
that of a criminal subculture that hoped for and desired to be
invisible to the authorities of an intolerant church and state, and not
everyone could discover or gain access to this underworld. Less than a
ghetto, they had at most, known solely to initiates, clandestine
rendezvous for furtive sexual encounters, attested from London,
Cologne, and many Italian cities, particularly during the fifteenth
century.
[40]
Forced separatism on the one side, forced assimilation on the other:
these were the political strategies which the Church adopted.
A further problem is the failure of resistance by sodomites to
the Judeo-Christian condemnation and its intensification in the
thirteenth century. At least four factors were involved. Atomized
individuals could not normally make contact with the underground
subculture, and were doomed to frustration and helplessness. The
"initiatory rebirth" of those who were introduced into the freemasonry
of forbidden pleasures made them unwilling to reveal its secrets to a
hostile and intolerant world. The ideology ground them between two
millstones: the substratum of aversion and contempt for those who
inverted the norms of gender-appropriate behavior, and the superstratum
of Judeo-Christian condemnation of sexual activity between persons
having the genitalia of the same sex. Finally, the absence of any
positive religious sanction for homosexual activity prevented appeal to
any religious tradition other the Christian one, and this was
uncompromisingly negative.
In response to the onset of the sodomy delusion, lovers of
their own sex were forced into dissimulation as the only way of
survival. Marginalized by the dominant culture, they could only take
refuge in a subculture that hid not just from the authorities but from
Christian society as a whole. A protohomosexual personality type
resulted for which deception and hypocrisy were second nature. The
conversion of the religious taboo into an administrative process of
repression required the innovation of police procedures - and here the
delusional world of the religious mind collided head-on with the real
world. The enormity of the offense was matched only by its
ubiquitousness.
The stunning dissertation by Michael J. Rocke, "Male
Homosexuality and its Regulation in Late Medieval Florence" a sort of
Kinsey Report for the fifteenth century,
[41]
concluded that as in other Italian cities at least, if not elsewhere,
it remained "an integral and apparently ineradicable part of the
society of late medieval and early modern Florence." Efforts to
suppress homosexual activity were to no avail, even though in fifteenth
century Florence, up to a third of males were accused of sodomy,
because the belief system could not suppress the cultural traditions
(and biological forces) underlying it. The officials charged with
policing sodomy quickly became aware that to inflict the death penalty
upon every sodomite would wound society. When the penalties were too
harsh, magistrates simply refused to convict very often, as in Venice
which imposed the death penalty occasionally but spectacularly. In
Florence they were gradually reduced as the number of those convicted
rose. Other north Italian and Tuscan communes had policies somewhere
between those of Florence and Venice.
[42]
Italian and to a lesser extent Northern communes developed a
strategy of repression. It
hovered between two poles: toleration in the sense of not prosecuting
activity which the police kept under surveillance, and sporadically
rounding up offenders in droves to punish them with death, mutilation,
exile, fines or other less drastic sentences.
With all the vagaries of police administration over the centuries, this
remained the pattern, even in modern times, even in Nazi Germany.
[43]
Monter (1974) documented a wave-like pattern of several dozen trials
for sodomy in Switzerland from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century
and Carrasco (1985) detailed the ubiquitous actions of the Inquisitors
in Valencia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Moral
crusaders could, of course, make life wretched for sodomites and other
denizens of the sexual underworld, but after their usually brief
campaigns, life went back to normal or, if you prefer, abnormal.
Hypocrisy, corruption, and moral ambivalence became the norm, while
homosexual activity became the invisible one - the screen behind which
forbidden urges enacted their dramas of lust and gratification.
It was theologians and clerics, often rabid friars like St.
Bernardino of Siena, who denounced homosexual desire as a form of
madness, and Savanarola, who inspired municipal laws and administered
the Inquisition. Clandestine homosexual subcultures such as those in
London and Cologne arose that survived more than six centuries of
repression and defamation to become the basis of our modern movement.
Police developed procedures for surveying and repressing sodomy. (None
had been needed in classical antiquity, because homosexuality as such
was not then illegal). They continued refining them in metropolitan
areas down to the twentieth century with regular if capricious
harassment. A homosexual personality type evolved and survived in a
hostile milieu by virtue of dissimulation and hypocrisy ("the closet").
All the efforts of Church and state failed to eradicate the forbidden
tendencies and the outlawed behavior, even if they could drive these
underground. Old French literature which effectively began around 1100
with the Chanson de Roland has almost nothing explicitly homoerotic,
while Italian, which began over a century later at the court of the
Hohenstaufen with the Sicilian poets and then the Tuscans, long before
the Renaissance encouraged admiration for and imitation of classical
pederastic models which did undoubtably reinforce the trend, abounds
with homoeroticism or allusions to sodomites from its start to the
repression of the Counter Reformation during the later sixteenth
century.
Antonio Becadelli's jocular
Hermaphroditus
(1425) and Pacifico Massimo of Ascoli's
Hecathalegium
(1489) as well as the invectives that Italian humanists hurled at one
another echo the frequent charges recorded in the police blotters.
Domatello, Boticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo, homosexuals themselves
and admirers of the antique, restored homoeroticism and nudity in art
which had been virtually absent except for St. Sebastian and Jesus and
St. John since the fall of Rome. Beginning with that of the
neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, in numerous treatises on live, discussed
the permissibility of love between males, include one by Girolamo
Benivieni (1453-1542) and Giovanni Picodella Mirandola (1463-1494).
Finally, then Western society adopted the sodomy delusion, a complex of
irrational beliefs that made sodomites scapegoats for society's
ills - and implicitly for the failure of the Church's own prophylactic
and apotropaic rites.
Byzantium and Orthodoxy
: Byzantium, like China and Egypt
known for its stability and conservatism, remained faithful to Orthodox
Christianity and Roman Law as well as to the Greek language.
[44]
Though declining and shrinking over eleven centuries, losing provinces
to Islam, it preserved until its fall in 1453 significant portions of
classical literature and culture in spite of bitter quarrels between
monks and heretics. From first to last however, Byzantine authorities
outlawed sodomy and excoriated sodomites, usually prescribing death.
Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, founded his new
capital, Constantinople, on the ancient site of Byzantium (now
Istanbul) and summoned the first Ecumenical Council.
Like his successors he ruled the Church as well as the state. Latin
remained the official language until Justinian (527-565), but from the
start, Greek was used for commerce as well as religious and
intellectual life. The administration never wavered in its policy of
anti-homosexual repression, beginning in 340's with Constantine's sons
and managed to drive same-sex love underground, a major cause of the
dearth of our current knowledge.
Monks and scholars did occasionally copy ancient pederastic
texts, a few even being composed as late as Justinian's reign.
Lexicographers and antiquarians also recorded rare ancient terms for
homosexual acts but from the time of Constantine himself, nude figures
disappeared from art, and nothing is heard of gymnasia after 380. Those
who overthrew Constantine's son, Constans, alleged that he was an
exclusive homosexual who surrounded himself with barbarian soldiers
selected more for looks than for military ability (in spire of his
concurrence in laws proscribing death).
Byzantine terms for male homosexuality included
paiderastia, arrhenomixia
("mingling with males") and
anhenokoitia
("intercourse with males"). Their general legal designation for sexual immorality was
aselgeia
("lasciviousness").
Malakia,
"effeminacy" in Classical Greek, came to mean "masturbation," so that
Byzantines translated I Corinthians 6:9 as "masturbators . . . shall
not inherit the kingdom of God." Homosexual behavior is also styled the
"sin of the Sodomite" (e.g. the Desert Father, Macarius the Great (d.
391)
Patrologia Graeca,
(34:2243).
In the "First Golden Age of Byzantium", Justinian who recovered
Italy and North Africa from the Germans, adorned his cities with
splendid churches, above all the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in his
capital, and reorganized Roman law in the
Corpus Juris Civilis,
the ultimate basis of the civil law tradition that today dominates
legal systems in about half the world and from the eleventh century,
became the basis of the legal curriculum in Western schools, fatefully
because it prescribed burning sodomites. Even before assuming full
power in 527, Justinian seems to have been implicated in an
antihomosexual trial of 521. The chronicler John Malalas described the
trial of two bishops: Isiah of Rhodes exiled after being subjugated to
cruel tortures and Alexander of Diospolis in Thrace castrated and
dragged through the streets in ignominy.
Not surprisingly, the
Corpus
retains the antihomosexual
laws promulgated by Justinian's predecessors. Justinian shrewdly
perceived, however, that like divorce, sodomy could not be extirpated
by a stroke of the pen. Tenaciously, he issued new laws in 538-9 and
again in 559 which reiterated the death penalty already ordained in 390
by the Theodosian Code 9.7.3. In the first of his novellae (no. 771),
he ascribed homosexual lust to diabolical incitement and claimed that
"because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes and
pestilences," inferring that sodomy endangered the very physical basis
of the empire. Such reasoning was a superstitious regression, a point
conveniently ignored by Christian apologists who would have Justinian
act only out of "sincere concern for the general welfare." The second
(no. 141) was the first law ever to cite Sodom, a land supposedly still
burning with inextinguishable fire. Mingling magnanimousness with
severity, Justinian appealed to such sinners to confess themselves
humbly and penitently to the Patriarch of Constantinople, consigning
those not repenting "to the avenging flames."
With his consort Theodora he conducted a witch hunt, publicly
disgracing several sodomites, whether penitent or not. The rulers
alleged sodomy to persecute those "against whom no other crimes could
be imputed," (Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or
whose fortunes offered tempting adjunct to the imperial treasury
(Procopius, Secret History, 11:34-36).
The Eclogue of Leo III (d 741) reduced the penalty to
castration but later codes such as the mid-ninth century Basilica
reaffirmed death. Other emperors themselves were nevertheless reputed
to have indulged. Theophanes the Confessor lists the "impious lust for
males" among the crimes of the iconoclast Constantine V (741-775), who
sought to limit the monks' power.
A particularly tragic case was the alcoholic Michael III
(842-867) who fell in love with a macho courtier, Basil the Macedonian,
whom he made coemperor in 866. Basil, a bold soldier, promptly murdered
his patron and founded the Macedonian dynasty. Also deemed sodomites
were Basil II (976-1025), slaughterer of the Bulgarians, Constantine
VIII, joint ruler with his brother (976-1025) and sole ruler
(1025-1028), and the Empress Zoe's husband, Constantine IX (1042-1055)
Whatever their sexual proclivities and acts, eunuchs played a major
role at imperial courts, reaching their zenith under the Macedonians
(867-1057).
Accusations of homosexual vice, long standard in Byzantine
polemics, became rarer after the ninth century. After 1081, the Comneni
created a much reduced state that the Latins ruled from the Fourth
Crusade (which captured Byzantium in 1203-04) until their expulsion in
1261. Then Palaeologi restored a decentralized state ruled by "feudal"
magnates on the Western model with commerce dominated by the Italian
maritime republics. Cities shrank, Turks from the East and Bulgars,
Serbs and Franks in the Balkans encroached and barbarized the
provinces, and culture declined precipitously. In the last centuries of
Empire, complaints about sodomy again surfaced (e.g., in the Patriarch
Athanasius I and Joseph Bryennius). The vice flourished in both male
and female monasteries. The typicon of Prodromos (tou Phoberos,
80.3182.1) denied access to the monasteries to beardless youths and
eunuchs in an effort to shield monks from temptation. An
eleventhcentury text attests sodomitical clerics.
The Penitential of pseudo-John IV, the Faster, instructed the
confessor to inquire about the sin of arrhenokoitia, which in this
texts means "anal intercourse". Ecclesiastical law punished the "sin of
the Sodomite" with two or three years of epitimion, while the Eclogues
prescribed decapitation by the sword. Among the Orthodox, "white
clergy" (priests) could marry, but not the "black clergy" (monks or
bishops). Today still staple reading for the Orthodox, the Cappadocian
Fathers, whose admonitions to those who could not resist sex to marry
young probably helped lower the age of marriage from the age of thirty
common to upper class pagan Greek males, denounced sodomy as most
heinous, but nothing could prevent it in the monasteries. At the most
renowned establishments on Mount Athos, from which even female animals
were banished, sodomy must have flourished early on, becoming notorious
there in later centuries.
Immediately on taking Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman
Sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror, purportedly requested the most beautiful
Christian aristocratic youths for his harem. When he attempted to rape
the fourteenyear-old son of the noble Licas Notaras, both father and
son perished for resisting; the sons of the historian George Phrantzes
were also killed for refusing to yield to the sultan's lusts. Interface
with Islamic homosexuality must have begun centuries before.
Officially, the greater vigilance of the Byzantine authorities against
"the vice" would have served to distinguish them from their
adversaries. In practice, there was undoubtedly a good deal of
borrowing from Islamic pederastic customs in Greece as in Albania and
Serbia where the blood-brotherhoods of the 19th century may have had
Islamic rather than Byzantine roots and models.
Boswell's attempt to find medieval precedents for gay marriages
is misleading. True, he has assembled neglected documents in Greek and
Old Slavic tongues from various archives that bless male couples. Not
one of his "many" Orthodox liturgies, however, sanctions carnal unions;
in fact, they always specify "spiritual brotherhood" or "absence of
scandal." This clearly implies that they are not, unlike heterosexual
marriages, to be carnal. Churches which demanded celibacy for monks and
bishops and allowed matrimony only for those too weak to abstain from
sex altogether would hardly have sanctioned what they called
"unnatural" sex or the "abominable sin against nature." In neither the
Jewish nor the Christian scriptures is there a single endorsement of
samesex sex. "The Old Testament", on the other hand, imposed death on
"males who lie with males as with females" and St. Paul condemned not
only men who slept with men, but lesbianism, thus going beyond the
Jewish scriptures. Not a single Christian Father, Penitentialist,
Scholastic or Canonist, Protestant Reformer or Catholic
Counter-Reformer or even any Orthodox, Coptic or Nertorian ever wrote
even a neutral, much less a kind, word about sodomites.
Boswell's new tome,
Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe
follows the same pattern as his
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.
[45]
Both have frequent, complex footnotes in numerous languages. Both
exonerate Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, from guilt for
persecution of gays, for which they have not apologized as they have
for their anti-Semitism.
Instead of detailing the denunciations, trials, tortures and executions
of sodomites by the Church itself and by lay authorities inspired by
Christian homophobia as Bullough, Compton, Goodich, Dynes, Lauritson
and Johansson have done, Boswell has perversely tried to whitewash the
homophobia of Christians who lived before 1200.
Christian marriage was designed to reduce concupiscence and to
provide heirs, not to give mutual pleasure or even to provide
companionship. Boswell imagined that these same-sex unions, as he
described them, that he found in Greek and Slavic had parallels in
Latin for Catholics but that they have been lost. That may be, but such
asexual brotherhoods can serve as precursors for modern (homosexual)
gay marriage only by a wide stretch of the imagination and with blatant
disregard for both scripture and tradition.
Boswell was honest enough to translate in one of his liturgies
for spiritual brotherhood a prohibition against sodomy but then he
twisted the facts by claiming unconvincingly that sodomy was "not
understood by Jews or Christians of the Middle Ages as a reference to
homosexual love".
[46]
Despite Boswell's assertion that there was not much criticism of his
earlier work, his tired old argument, following the disputed Ezekiel
16:49, that Sodom was destroyed for inhospitality has been amply
refuted by all competent scholars, Christian, Jewish and atheist. In
the battle of gays and lesbians for equality, distorting the past by
"uncovering" liturgies for samesex carnal unions will do no more good
than blaming homophobia or even homosexuality itself on capitalist
oppression as many Marxists have done. Instead of trying to rewrite
history to justify their current desires, gay scholars must recognize
Christianity and Judaism as sources of homophobia. Christian
denunciation of sodomy has been continual.
All Boswell's erudition and hairsplitting can't make a gay
marriage out of a spiritual bonding. The modern redefinition of
marriage as primarily for companionship and as a source of mutual
pleasure, support, or comfort which he discusses would have been
incomprehensible to medieval (clerical) theorists. Boswell can't name a
single pair, except perhaps Basil I who assassinated his lover Michael
III, blessed by the liturgies that he found.
Some couples, even those so blessed, may indeed have had homosexual
relations, but the Orthodox Church, which condemned sodomites to death,
did not, as he implies, intend for them to. Although some medieval
Christians deemed the sins of the flesh whether lust, sloth or gluttony
less grave than those of the spirit anger, envy, greed and pride none
ever condoned any sexual act outside marriage and even within it
permitted it only for procreation. Even if one lusted after one's own
wife, one committed adultery. Churches with such antisexual attitudes
did not conceivably authorize homosex of any sort, under any condition,
much less construct liturgies to sanctify the joining together of two
sodomites for sex.
Of course, Christians now eat pork and shellfish and disallow
slavery, nowhere criticized in Scripture. We might argue that the time
has come for gay marriages (especially in these days of AIDS) but it
will not help to distort history in an overenthusiastic attempt to find
precedents.
[47]
Whether there were gays in the Middle Ages as Boswell stated in his earlier book and insisted in an article,
[48]
or even homosexuals (understood as a type of person), as opposed to merely persons indulging in sodomy,
[49]
is an ongoing debate. But that established churches condoned such
"sins" and created liturgies to bless couples so engaged (the love so
decadent and unnatural it was not even supposed to be mentioned among
Christians) is an anachronistic twist not heretofore imagined and
should not be taken seriously.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahern, John (1990). "Nudi Grammantes: The Grammar and Rhetoric of Deviation in Inferno
XV."
Romanic Review,
82: 466486.
Armour, Peter (1991). "The Love of Two Florentines: Brunetto Latini and Bondie Dietaiuti."
Lectura Dantis
9: 1133.
d'Avack, Pietro Agostino (1953). "L'omosessualità nel Diritto Canonico."
Ulisse
3/18: 680697.
Bailey, Derrick Sherwin (1955).
Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition.
(London: Longmans, Green).
Baldwin, John W. (1994).
The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Baranowski, Bohdan (1955).
Sprawy obyczajowe w sdownictwie wiejskim w Plsce wieku XVII i XVIII.
[Morals Cases in the Rural Judiciary in Poland of the 17th and 18th Centuries] [= Prace Wydziau II, No. 16].
Bein, Thomas (1990). "Orpheus als Sodomit: Beobachtungen zu
einer mhd. Sangspruchstrophe mit (literar)historischen Exkursen zur
Homosexualität im hohen Mittelalter."
Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie
109: 3355.
Biener, Friedrich August (1824).
Geschichte der Novellen Justinian's.
(Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler).
Bloch, Iwan (1908). "Die Homosexualität in Köln am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts."
Zeitschriftfür Sexualwissenschaft
1: 528-535.
Boswell, John (1980).
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in
Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.
(Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Boswell, John (1982/3). "Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories."
Salmagundi
5859: 89113.
Boswell, John (1994).
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
(New York: Villard Books).
Braeger, Peter C. (1985)."The Portrayal of Lot in the Middle English Cleanness."
Mediaevalia
11: 83100.
Brall, Helmut (1991). "Geschlechtlichkeit, Homosexualität,
Freundesliebe: Über mann-männliche Liebe in mittelalterlicher
Literatur."
Forum Homosexualität und Literatur
13: 527.
Broughton, Lynne C. (1993). "Bibliographical Texts and Homosexuality: A Response to John Boswell."
Irish Theological Quarterly
pp 141-153.
Brown, Peter (1988).
The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity
. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Brundage, James A. (1974).
Richard Lion Heart.
(New York, Scribner).
Brundage, James A. (1987).
Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe.
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
Brusegan, Rosanna (1992). "Le secret de la Flors enversa."
Revue des langues romanes,
96: 119-144.
Bullough, Vern L. (1974). "Transvestism in the Middle Ages."
American Journal of Sociology
79: 138-194.
Bullough, Vern L. (1976).
Sexual Variance in Society and History
. (New York: John Wiley).
Bullough, Vern L. and James A. Brundage (eds.) (1982).
Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church.
(Buffalo: Prometheus Books).
Burrows, Toby (1965). "The Templars' Case for their Defence in 1310."
Journal of Religious History,
13: 248259.
Canosa, Romano (1991).
Storia di una grande paura: La sodomia a Firenze e a Venezia nel
Quattrocento
. (Milan: Feltrinelli).
Cantarella, Eva (1988).
Seconda natura: La bisessualità nel mondo antico
. (Roma: Editori
Ruiniti).
Carrasco, Rafael (1985).
Inquisicion y Represion Sexual en Valencia: Historia de los Sodomitas (1565-1785)
. (Barcelona: Laertes).
Chadwick, Owen (1981).
The Making of the Benedictine Ideal
. (Washington D.C.: St. Anselm's Abbey).
Collinge, Anna (1989). "The Case of Satyrs." Pp. 82-103 in Mary Margaret Mackenzie and Charlotte Roueche (eds.),
Images of Authority: Papers Presented to Joyce Reynolds on the Occasion of her Seventieth Birthday.
(Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society).
Crompton, Louis (1980-81). "The Myth of Lesbian Impunity."
Journal of Homosexuality
6: 11-26.
Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953).
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
(New York: Pantheon).
Dalla, Danilo (1987). "Ubi Venus mutatur": Omosessualità e diritto nel mondo romano. (Milano: Dott. A. Giuffrè Editore).
Dall'Orto, Giovanni (1990). Articles on 14th and 15th century Italy, passim.
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality
, Wayne R. Dynes (ed). (New York: Garland Publishing).
Darmstaedter, Ernst (1933). "Anthemios und sein künstliches Erdbeben' in Byzanz."
Philologus
88: 477-482.
de Damhoudere, Joost (1646).
Praxis rerum criminalium.
(Antwerp: apud Petrum Bellerum).
Dover, Kenneth J. (1978).
Greek Homosexuality.
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press).
Dynes, Wayne R (1985).
Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality.
(New York: The Scholarship Committee, Gay Academic Union).
Dynes, Wayne R.; Warren Johansson, and William A. Percy (eds.) (1990).
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality
. (New York: Garland Publishing).
Eglinton, J. Z (1964). [Pseudonym of Walter Breen].
Greek Love.
(New York: Oliver Layton Press).
Ellis, Havelock (1915).
Sexual Inversion,
third edition (Philadelphia: Davis).
Evans, Arthur (1978).
Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture.
(Boston: Fag Rag Books).
Finke, Heinrich (1907).
Papsttum und Untergang des Templerordens.
(Münster in Westfalen: Aschendorff).
Flandrin, J.L. (1969). "Contraception, mariage et relations amoureuses dans l'Occident
chrétien."
Annales. Sociétés, économies, civilisations
24: 1370-90.
Flandrin, J.L. (1972). "Mariage tardif et vie sexuelle: Discussions et hypothèses de recherche."
Annales. Sociétiés, économies, civilisations
27: 135178.
Foucault, Michel (1984a).
Histoire de la sexualité.
vol.2 L'usage des plaisirs. (Paris: Gallimard).
Foucault, Michel (1984b)
Histoire de la sexualité.
vol.3 Le souci de soi. (Paris: Gallimard).
Fox, Robin Lane (1987).
Pagans and Christians.
(New York: Knopf).
Gaunt, Simon (1994). "Straight minds / "queer" wishes in Old French hagiography."
GLQ
1:3.
Goodich, Michael (1976a). "Sodomy in Medieval Secular Law."
Journal of Homosexuality.
1: 295-302.
Goodich, Michael (1976b). "Sodomy in Ecclesiastical Law and Theory."
Journal of Homosexuality
1: 427434.
Goodich, Michael (1979).
The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval
Period.
(Santa Barbara, CA: RossErikson).
Grayzel, Solomon (1966).
The Church and the Jews in the
XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations during the Years 1198-1254,
Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period,
revised ed. (New York: Hermon Press).
Greenberg, David F. (1988).
The Construction of Homosexuality.
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).
Halperin, David M. (1986). "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality."
Diacritics
16: 3435.
Hamilton, J. S. (1988).
Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, 1307-1312: Politics and Patronage in the Reign of Edward II.
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press).
Hamilton, William (1883).
The Worship of Priapus.
(London: George Redway).
Harley, Marta Powell (1986). "Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis: Ovidian Lovers at the
Fontaine d'Amors in Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la rose"
PMLA
101: 324337.
Harries, Jill and Ian Wood (eds.) (1993).
The Theodosian Code.
(Ithaca: Cornell University
Press).
Hill, Bennet (1983). "Aelred." In Joseph R. Strayer (ed.),
Dictionary of Medieval History.
(New York).
Holmes, Urban Tigner (1937).
A History of Old French Literature from the Origins to 1300.
(New York: F.S. Crofts).
Hyatte, Reginald (1991). "Recoding Ideal Male Friendship as fine amor in the Prose
Lancelot."
Neophilologus
75: 505518.
Jackson, F. J. Foakes (1921).
An Introduction to the History of Christianity, A.D. 509-1314.
(New York: Macmillan).
Johansson, Warren (1984a). "London's Medieval Sodomites."
Cabirion
10: 67, 34.
Johansson, Warren (1984b). "Whosoever Shall Say to His Brother, Racha (Matthew 5:22)."
Cabirion
10: 24.
Reprinted in
Homosexuality in Religion and Philosophy.
New York: Garland 1992 (Studies in Homosexuality 13).
Johansson, Warren; Wayne R. Dynes, and John Lauritsen (1985).
Homosexuality,
Intolerance, and Christianity: A Critical Examination of John Boswell's Work.
Second,
enlarged edition (New York: The Scholarship Committee, Gay Academic Union). [Gai Saber
Monograph No. 1].
Kamiat, Arnold H. (1928). "A Psychology of Asceticism."
Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology
23: 223-231.
Kay, Richard (1969). "The Sin of Brunetto Latini."
Medieval Studies
31: 262-286.
Kluncker, Karlhans (1989). "Die Templer: Geschichte und Geheimnis."
Zeitschrift für
Religions- und Geistesgeschichte
41: 215-247.
Kuster, Harry J. (1975). "Gelijkgeschlachtelijke liefde in de middeleeuwen."
Spiegel
Historiael
10: 232-237.
Kuster, Harry J. (1976). "Homoërotiek in de middeleeuwse poëzie."
Maatstaf
24/1: 4048.
Kuster, Harry J. (1976). "L'Amour physique unisexuel au Moyen Age."
Arcadie
pp. 665-670.
Kuster, Harry J. (1977).
Over Homoseksualiteit in Middeleeuws West-Europa: Some Observations on Homosexuality in Medieval Western Europe.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Utrecht.
Kuster, Harry J. and Raymond J. Cormier (1983). "Old Views and
New Trends: Observations on the Problem of Homosexuality in the Middle
Ages." S
tudi medievali
3rd ser., 25: 587610.
Lafont, Robert (1992). "Ar resplan la flors enversa: La Fleur du gay savoir."
Revue des
Langues Romanes
96: 105-117.
Langmuir, Gavin I. (1992).
History, Religion, and Antisemitism.
(Berkeley: University of
California Press).
Langmuir, Gavin I. (1991).
Toward a Definition of Antisemitism.
(Berkeley: University of
California Press).
Lea, Henry Charles (1966). In Gershon Legmon (ed.),
The Guilt of the Templars.
(New
York: Basic Books).
Legmon, Gershon (ed.) (1966).
The Guilt of the Templars.
(New York: Basic Books).
Leibbrand, Werner and Annemarie Wettley (1961).
Der Wahnsinn: Geschichte der
abendländischen Psychopathologie. (Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich: Karl Alber).
Lenzen, Rolf (1972). "»Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene« Kritische Edition mit Kommentar."
Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch
7: 167-186.
Leonhardt, W. (1912). "Die Homosexualität in den ältesten deutschen Dichtkunst."
Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen
12: 153165.
Lissarague, Francois (1987). "De la sexualité des satyres."
Mêtis
2:1.
Maaz, Wolfgang (1985). "Angstbewaltigung in mittelalterlicher Literatur." Pp. 5177
in Jürgen Kühnel, Hans-Dieter Mück, Ursula Müller, and Ulrich Muller (eds.),
Psychologie in
der Mediävistik. Gesammelte Beiträge des Steinheimer Symposions.
(Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag).
McGuire, Brian Patrick (1994).
Lover and Brother: Aelred of Rievaulx.
(New York: Crossword).
Marchello-Nizia,
Christiane and Michèle Perret (1990). "Une Utopie homosexuelle au
quatorzième siècle: L'Ile sans femmes d'Agriano."
Stanford French Review
14: 231241.
Mason, H. A. (1992)."A Journey through Hell: Dante's Inferno Revisited."
Cambridge Quarterly
21: 150169.
Meier, Matthias (1912).
Die Lehre des Thomas von Aquino De passionibus animae in
quellenanalytischer Darstellung.
(Münster in Westfalen: Aschendorff).
Monter, E. William (1974). "La Sodomie a l'epoque moderne en Suisse romande."
Annales.
Societes, economies, civilisations
29: 102-333.
Monter, E. William (1990).
Frontiers and Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque
Lands to Sicily.
(Cambridge: CUP).
Mott, Luiz (1988). "Pagode português: a subcultura gay em Portugal nos tempos
inquisitóriais."
Ciência e Cultura
40: 2.
Obolensky, Dmitri (1948).
The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Ochocki, Jan Duklan (1857).
Pamitniki..., z pozostaych po nim rkopismóv przepisane i wydane przez J. I. Kraszewskiego.
[Memoirs, transcribed from his extant manuscripts and published by J. I. Kraszewski] (Vilnius).
Pagels, Elaine (1988).
Adam, Eve and the Serpent.
(New York: Random House).
Paglia, Camille (1994). Review of John Boswell's
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
Washington Post
July 17.
Parker, Thomas W. (1963).
The Knights Templars in England.
(Tuczon, Arizona).
Pavan, Elizabeth (1960). "Police des moeurs, société et politique à Venise à la fin du Moyen
Age."
Revue historique
264: 241288.
Payer, Pierre J. (1984).
Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550-1150.
(Toronto: Toronto University Press).
Pequigney, Joseph (1991). "Sodomy in Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio."
Representations
36:
2242.
Percy, William A. (forthcoming).
Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece.
(Champaign-Urbana:
University of Illinois Press).
Petkanov, Ivan (1954). "Bulgar(us) e suknja nelle parlate italiane e neolatine."
Ricerche
slavistiche
3: 4350.
Petkanov, Ivan (1960-61).
Slavianski vliianiia v romanskite ezitsi i dialekti (do XVI v.).
[Slavic Influences in the Romance Languages and Dialects (to the 16th century)],
Godishnik na Sofiiskiia universitet, Filologicheski fakultet 55/1: 193316.
Petkanov, Ivan (1984). "Le nom Bulgare dans les langues et les dialectes romans."
Bulgarian
Historical Review
12/3: 97107.
Petkanov, Ivan (1988).
Slavianski vliianiia v romanskite ezitsi i dialekti.
[Slavic Influences in
the Romance Languages and Dialects] (Sofia: Izdatelstvo na Bulgarskata akademiia na
naukite), pp. 92120 (bulgarin), pp. 133-134 (bogomil).
Praetorius, Numa (1912). [Pseudonym of Eugen Wilhelm]. "Ein homosexueller Ritter des 15.
Jahrhunderts."
Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen
12: 207-230.
Price, Richard M. (1990). "The Distinctiveness of Early Christian Sexual Ethics."
Heythrop
Journal
31: 257-276.
Primov, Borislav (1970).
Bugrite: Kniga za pop Bogomil i negovite posledovateli.
[The
Bougres: A Book about Pop Bogomil and His Followers] (Sofia: Izdatelstvo na
Otechestveniia Front).
Primov, Borislav (1975).
Les Bougres: Histoire du pope Bogomile et de ses adeptes,
trans.
Monette Ribeyrol (Paris: Payot).
Raby, F. J. E. (1957).
A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages.
2 Vols. (Oxford: OUP).
Richlin, Amy (1983).
The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor.
(New Haven: Yale University Press).
Rocke, Michael J. (1987). "Il controllo dell'omosessualità a Firenze nel XV secolo: gli
Ufficiali di Notte."
Quaderni storici
44: 70123.
Rocke, Michael J. (1988). "Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Views of Bernardino of Siena."
Journal of Homosexuality
16/12:731.
Rocke, Michael J. (1990).
Male Homosexuality and its Regulation in Late Medieval
Florence.
2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY at Binghamton.
Roth, Norman (1982)."Deal Gently with the Young Men: Love of Boys in Medieval Poetry
in Spain."
Speculum
57: 2051.
Rouselle, Aline (1988).
Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity.
(Oxford: OUP).
Ruggiero, Guido (1975). "Sexual Criminality in the Early Renaissance: Venice 13381358."
Journal of Social History
8: 1837.
Ruggiero, Guido (1985).
The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance
Venice.
(New York: Oxford University Press).
Russell, Kenneth C. (1982). "Aelred, The Gay Abbot of Rievaulx."
Studia Mystica
5/4: 5164.
Schjelderup, Kristian (1928).
Die Askese. Eine religionspsychologische Untersuchung.
(Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter).
Shaw, Brent D. (1994). "A Groom of One's Own?"
New Republic
July 28 and 25.
Smith, Morton (1973).
Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark.
(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Snell, Otto (1891).
Hexenprozess und Geistesstörung. Psychiatrische Untersuchungen.
(Munich: Verlag von J. F. Lehmann).
Spreitzer, Brigitte (1988).
Die stumme Sünde: Homosexualität im Mittelalter. Mit einem
Textanhang.
(Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag).
Stehling, Thomas (ed.) (1984).
Medieval Latin Poems of Love and Friendship.
(New York: Garland Publishing).
Stehling, Thomas (1985). "To Love a Medieval Boy." Pp. 151170
in Stuart Kellogg (ed.),
Essays on Gay Literature.
(New York and Binghamton: Harrington Park Press).
Storfer, Adolf J. (1929). "Askese und Sadomasochismus." Die psychoanalytische Bewegung 1: 163-166.
Stümke, Hans-Georg (1988).
Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte.
(Munich: C.H.Beck).
Symonds, John Addington (1897-1900).
The Renaissance in Italy.
(London: John Murray).
Tilley, Maureen A. (1991). "The Ascetic Body and the (Un)Making of the World of the
Martyr."
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
59: 467-479.
Topentcharov, Vladimir (1971).
Boulgres & Cathares: Deux brasures une même flamme.
(Paris: Seghers).
Twomey, Michael W. (1985). "Cleanness, Peter Comestor, and the Revelationes Sancti Methodii."
Mediaevalia
11: 203217.
van Windekens, A. J. (1986).
Dictionnaire étymologique complémentaire de la langue
greque: Nouvelles contributions á l'interprétation historique et comparée du vocabulaire.
(Louvain: Peeters).
von Verschuer, Undine Freiin (1906). "Die Homosexuellen in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie'."
Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen
8: 353-363.
White, Andrew Dickson (1896).
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom.
(New York: Appleton).
Williams, Craig (1990).
Homosexuality and the Roman Man: A Study in the Cultural
Construction of Sexuality.
2 vols, PhD dissertation, Yale University.
Winkler, John J. (1988) "Unnatural Acts." In David Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I.
Zeitlin (eds.),
Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek
World.
(Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press).
Wright, David (1994). "Do You Take This Man..."
National Review
August 29: pp 59-60.
My thanks to Wayne Dynes for his sage advice, to Ed Boyce for
his incomparable editorial and computer skills and to Tom Sargant for
help with typing and editing.
See Lissarague (1987) and Collinge (1989). A. J. van Windekens has proposed a convincing etymology for
satyros
from Greek for "seizing the female genitalia", van Windekens (1986), pp. 203-204.
Joost de Damhoudere (1646), caput XCVIII, does not, however, regard this departure from the Christian ideal as true sodomy.»
Baranowski (1955), p. 64, citing Ochocki (1857), pp. 117-118.
Greenberg's assertion that the medieval group was founded by a priest Bogomil is but one tradition.
See Percy (forthcoming).
Williams (1992), who somewhat laboriously refutes the common opinion that the
mos majorum
condemned homosexuality as such rightly insisting that it censured all forms of
luxuria
including expensive slave boys and also excesses that might distract from
gravitas
or from certain civic responsibilities, in a chapter entitled
"Alternative Models: Spouses, Brothers, Friends and Lovers" (pp.
321-67) follows Boswell into the error of asserting that there were
serious Roman gay marriages like ours between adults.
See Plato's
Symposium, Firmus Maternicus
, the
Problems
of the Pseudo Aristotle,
Dialogues on Love
and various epigrams in the
Greek Anthology
Foucault (1984a) and
(1984b), Winkler (1988) and Halperin (1986), unlike Dover (1978),
failed to acknowledge the ancients' conception of homosexuality and
disdained to use it about ancient or medieval people.
If the famous quote
in Tacitus' Germanicus (xii) did not call for passives or even
homosexuals to be drowned in bogs, as many have maintained, but
prescribed that death only for cowards and deserters, as we believe,
Dynes (1990), II 1275-6.
The text which
prescribes an "avenging sword" seems ambiguous. Boswell (1980) pp.
123-4, claimed a "lack of any penalty" in this "curiously phrased
statute" which he interpreted as outlawing "gay marriages". In Dalla's
interpretation, however, it applied to any man acting as the passive
partner, Dalla (1987) pp. 167-8. Eva Cantarella, Professor of Roman Law
at the University of Pavia, agreeing with Dalla, further observed that
until the sixth century the death penalty applied only to
molles
and not the active sodomite, Cantarella (1988) pp. 265-6.
Novella 77 = 538
See Brown (1988),
Brundage (1987), Fox (1987) and Pagels (1988). Too extensive for any
one person to digest, Migne's collections of the Church Fathers,
perhaps one hundred times longer than all surviving Greek and Latin
pagan texts together, needs to be scanned and searched by computer for
key words to further illuminate Patristic attitudes. After 1200, vast
official archives as well as unpublished scholastic works and other
literature survive, providing about another hundred times as much as
Migne. After the development of printing, sources increase
exponentially again
As reconstructed by Morton Smith (1973).
If Jesus himself ever addressed the topic he may have advocated tolerance: i.e. don't
denigrate your brother by calling him "queer" or "racha": Warren Johansson (1984b).
Polygamy was then
practiced among Jews who married at a young age and it remained so even
among those in Christian Europe until the eleventh century and levirate
marriage of a brother's widow had been mandatory.
Incredible as it
may seem, Boswell (1994) pp. 139-41, deemed that Roman lady and her
maid, holy martyrs that they were, as potential models for lesbian
marriage.
It was only in 500
in Gaul that a common dormitory was instituted in place of the solitary
cells (Benedict, Ch. 22) after the old building burned. See Chadwick
(1981).
The most extensive treatment is by Payer (1984) but see also Bullough (1976).
See Bullough (1976) p.353 and Boswell (1980) p.177.
See Crompton (1980-1).
Flandrin (1969) and
(1972) detected a faultline between high medieval practice and theory
and suggests that for most, everyday practice fell somewhere between
the two extremes of clerical erotophobia and courtly libertinism.
Brundage (1987)
p.182. Brundage, now the standard authority, devotes a section in each
chronological chapter to homosex and homoeroticism.
Baldwin (1994) however found no mention of this fantasy in the works of either Peter or St. Jerome, pp. 44 and 282
See Stehling (1984)
and (1985). In a phone call to the authors, David Greenberg thinks he
is on to some heretofore undetected in the Lais of Marie de France and
some of the
romances.
See McGuire (1994) and Hill (1983) - the only positive reference to homosexuality in the whole of J.R. Strayer's multi-volume
Dictionary of Medieval History.
Stehling (1984) p.
xxi. See also the poem by Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035-1123) where
speaking as a boy he teases his lover with threats of infidelity; "He
is even-tempered now but with further delays he'll turn wicked", p. 31.
See Roth (1982).
See Greenberg (1988).
Dynes (1990) I 345-6, I 428-9, I 525-6, II 1109-10 and II 1195.
Curtius (1953) is
the pioneer work on sodomy in medieval literature, a subject which the
standard works by Holmes (1937) and Raby (1957) ignore.
Baldwin (1994) p.229.
Baldwin (1994) pp. 46, 211 and 225-6.
Pagan survivals are attested inter alia by Hamilton (1883) and Evans (1978), neither to be sure unimpeachable sources.
Thanks to Aquinas,
and no doubt other Christian moral "authorities," Western civilization
lost the knowledge of exclusive and involuntary homosexuality (known to
Plato, Aristotle and other Greek writers, including astrologers, even
in a society that was predominantly bisexual).
Jackson (1921), p.
161, claimed that in the thirteenth century "the high water mark of
medieval civilization was attained. Judged by the men who were born or
flourished within
it, the age is one of the most glorious in history... but judged by its
fruits it is one of the most disastrous in history." This assertion is
certainly true of the Church's relations with women, Jews, heretics and
homosexuals, where the legacy of the thirteenth century lasted intact
into the twentieth.
In connection with
the witchcraft trials, the German psychiatrist Otto Snell more than a
century ago observed that it was not the defendants, but the
prosecutors and witnesses for the prosecution who, like our present day
homophobes, were mentally ill. The delusion existed in their minds, not
in their victims'. See Snell (1891).
The best example of
this is Finke (1907). In their defense the Templars had alleged that
any Templar found guilty of homosexual behavior "which was one of the
principal charges against the order" would be expelled and imprisoned
in fetters for the rest of his life; such was their rule. See Burrows
(1965) and Parker (1963).
Typical of these
lines of reasoning are Legman (1966) - his contribution is solidly
opposed by Lea (1966) - and Kluncker (1989).
See Grayzel (1966), pp. 60-63.
Johansson (1984a)
and Bloch (1908) proved the existence of such communities in northern
cities. By the fifteenth century, they certainly existed in the much
better documented Florence and Venice.
More detailed than
anything before or afterwards until the Parisian police records of the
early eighteenth century and the records of the Portuguese Inquisition
exploited by Mott (1988).
Recent works (Rocke
(1990) on Florence and Ruggiero (1985) on Venice where sodomy was
treated as a major crime on a par with poisoning), using police reports
and judicial records so plentiful in the archives of those
municipalities, have confirmed Goodich (1979) about the terrible
persecutions of sodomites in late medieval and Renaissance communes,
and Dall'Orto's brilliant articles on late medieval Italy in Dynes
(1990), especially "Italian Renaissance", II 1103-6, have documented
nearly a hundred artists and authors in various genres but no one has
yet combined the two streams.
See Stümke (1988).
The best account of
Byzantine homosexuality is to be found in Bullough (1976) though
Boswell (1994) has the longest. Greenberg (1988) slights it.
Paglia (1994) found
that Boswell "lacks advanced skills in several major areas, notably
intellectual history and textual analysis... Speculative reasoning is
not his strong suit...
Boswell's treatment of the Middle Ages, ostensibly his speciality, is
strangely unpersuasive."
She
concluded that Boswell has "not remotely established that [these
ceremonies] were originally homosexual in our romantic sense... The
cause of gay rights is not helped by this kind of slippery,
self-interested scholarship, where propaganda and casuistry impede the
objective search for truth." Shaw (1994) found texts mistranslated and
evidence misconstrued throughout
Same-Sex Unions
and a
brotherhood ceremony from the Grottaferrata manuscript mistakenly
conflated with an actual marriage ceremony from later pages. Wright
(1994) wrote that Boswell's "extraordinary skills and industry are
deployed with such tendentiousness, exaggeration, special pleading, and
occasional banality that the book deserves, at the very best, the
distinctive verdict of the Scottish courts: not proven." Wright
disproved Boswell's assertion that he had not received much criticism
for his earlier book, citing his own critique of it where Boswell
mistranslated two key words as Johansson (1985) independently pointed
out.
Boswell (1994) p.293.
Boswell also
discussed other sorts of male-male bondings as if they might provide a
model. Greek pederasty (an adult male with a teenage male), which was
usually physical, is not a precedent because it was temporary and the
partners went on to marry women. Few Christians would approve of that
sort of conduct today. Whereas gay marriages supposedly last forever
and exclude simultaneous heterosexual marriage, Roman same-sex
marriages were not only extra-legal, but usually camp. For example,
Nero, who was married to a woman, simultaneously became the bride of a
freedman and the husband of a eunuch. Such unions are reported with
astonishment and contempt by the Latin sources. Neither the controlled
pederasty of the Greeks nor the wanton excesses of the Romans form an
accurate model for modern gay marriages, nor can they be seen as
precursors of the spiritual brotherhoods of medieval Christians.
Modern
gay marriages would not occur if the partners did not intend to have
sex with each other. Boswell walks a well trodden path with 19th
century Albanian and Serbian Blood Brotherhoods, which may often have
involved homosexual activity, but this is not relevant either even
though these countries touch Greece. (They had been dominated for
centuries by Turks and their customs in this regard and had nothing to
do with the gymnasia of Classical Greece, nor with the spiritual
bondings of the Orthodox during the middle ages). Furthermore, no one
would claim that our modern ideas of gay marriage came from Albania.
See Boswell (1982/3).
As social constructionists maintain.
Retrieved from