Scribd
Upload
394 views15 pages

Getting Medieval Sexualities and Communities, Pre and Postmodern Full Text Download

This book explores the formation of communities in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century England, particularly focusing on the Lollards and their relationship with sexuality. It examines how historical narratives and sexual identities intersect across time, utilizing a queer historical approach to connect past and present phenomena. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding the heterogeneity of sex in historical analyses and community building.

Uploaded by

ghuynhghoangro.ongn.am
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
394 views15 pages

Getting Medieval Sexualities and Communities, Pre and Postmodern Full Text Download

This book explores the formation of communities in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century England, particularly focusing on the Lollards and their relationship with sexuality. It examines how historical narratives and sexual identities intersect across time, utilizing a queer historical approach to connect past and present phenomena. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding the heterogeneity of sex in historical analyses and community building.

Uploaded by

ghuynhghoangro.ongn.am
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 15

Getting Medieval Sexualities and Communities, Pre and

Postmodern

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/getting-medieval-sexualities-and-communities-pre-and
-postmodern/

Click Download Now


for Marget
We need history for life and action,
not as a convenient way to avoid life and action,
or to excuse a selfish life and cowardly or base deeds.

Nietzsche
The Use and Abuse ofHistory
Contents

Acknowledgments Xl

Introduction
Touching on the Past I

Chapter One
It Takes One to Know One: Lollards, Sodomites,
and Their Accusers 55

Chapter Two
Good Vibrations: John/Eleanor, Dame Alys,
the Pardoner, and Foucault 100

Chapter Three
Margery Kempe Answers Back 143

Coda
Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and
the Use of the Past 183

Notes 207
Bibliography 305
Index 337
Acknowledgments

In imagining and writing this book I've been given lots of help from
many people. I'd like to name several whose advice and encourage-
ment over the years of my configuring and reconfiguring this project
have proved crucial: Sue Schweik, Paul Strohm, David Hult, David
Roman, David Halperin, Sharon Marcus, Daniel Boyarin, Caren Kap-
lan, and Eric Smoodin. Several others read parts of the manuscript in
various stages and offered welcome comments: Simon Gaunt, Steven
Justice, Colleen Lye, Anne Middleton, Ruth Nisse Shklar, Rita Cope-
land, Ann Cvetkovich, Steven Kruger, and Ralph Hexter. Thanks go
to Ralph Hexter as well for his guidance and hospitality as keeper of
John Boswell's papers. Thanks too to Didier Eribon and to Robert
Gluck for invigorating conversations; to Anne Hudson for her will-
ingness to answer a neophyte's questions; and to reviewers in the
Berkeley English department for vigorous and stimulating remarks.
I have benefited enormously from presenting these materials to
audiences-both receptive and challenging-and would like to
thank many colleagues for gracious invitations: Peter Allen, Christo-
pher Baswell, John Bowers, Gregory Bredbeck, Robert Burlin, James
Cain, Michael Camille, Mary Carruthers, Jane Chance, Theresa Co-
letti, James Dean, Susan Dunn and Keith Baker, Richard Emmerson,
Edward English, Louise Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Dolores Frese
and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Susanne Hafner and Maria Bu1l6n-
Fernandez, Jill Havens, Martin Irvine, H. A. Kelly, Clare Lees, Mary
Poovey, David Roman, Francesca Canade Sautman and Steven Kru-
ger, Elizabeth Scala, R. A. Shoaf, Paul Strohm and James Schultz,
Peggy McCracken, Karma Lochrie, and Karen Scott, in addition to
the Medieval/Renaissance Studies Program at Wellesley College and
the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. A
special word of thanks is due my students at DC Berkeley over the
years, both undergraduate and graduate, and at Stanford during the
spring of 1997 for their daily willingness to engage and their provo-
cations. I have been blessed by great graduate research assistants at
Berkeley, including Claire Kageyama and Hilary Zaid, and especially
Jim Hinch, Martha Rust, and Katie Vulic.
I'm very grateful for various grants of research support from DC
Berkeley and particularly for a President's Fellowship from the Uni-
versity of California. And I am most thankful for the Martha Sutton
Weeks Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, where I spent
a wonderfully productive year among the palm trees.
At Duke University Press, I'm happy to thank Ken \llissoker and
Richard Morrison for their editorial care. Many thanks, too, go to the
readers of the manuscript for the press, and to David Sullivan for the
index.
Portions of chapter 2 and a few paragraphs of the introduction ap-
peared in very early form in "Chaucer's Queer Touches/A Queer
Touches Chaucer," Exemplaria: Ajournal of Theory in A1edieval and
Renaissance Studies 7 (March 1995): 76-9 2 ; two paragraphs of '~
Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight," diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 2°5-26, represent an
early version of an analysis in chapter 2. A previous version of the
coda material appeared in "Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Gawain,
Foucault," in The Book and the Body, edited by Dolores Warwick
Frese and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, copyright 1997 by University
of Notre Dame Press. Used by permission of publisher. I acknowl-
edge permission to quote from Pulp Fiction: A Quentin Tarantino
Screenplay, copyright 1994 by Quentin Tarantino, reprinted with per-
mission by Hyperion.
At last, to my family goes my deep gratitude for their support.
And to Marget Long, my ideal reader, go my never ending thanks for
everything that made this book possible: touch, soul, color, spirit,
love.

xu Acknowledgments
Getting Medieyal
Introduction

Touching on the Past

"Tell me, Daddy. What is the use of history?"


Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft

This book is about several interrelated groups, real and fictional, in


late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England - groups that
in particular had some contact with the tenets of the heretical Lol-
lards.} It is about the ways these groups constituted themselves as
communities, the phenomena they necessarily cast out in those con-
stitutive processes, and the afterlives of those abjected phenomena.
And it is about ways in which some people in the late-twentieth-
century West make relations with those very phenomena from the
past in constituting ourselves and our communities now.
The focus in the analyses that follow is sex: how do communities,
then and now, form themselves in relation to sex? Sex is hetero-
geneous, multiple, and fundamentally indeterminate; such qualities
have complicated, undermined, and frustrated not only critical efforts
to define an object of study but also community efforts to build dis-
tinct and unified associations on the basis of sex. But those very
slippery characteristics, I argue throughout this book, are the con-
dition, not the failure, of historical analyses and of the formation of
selves and communities. I pursue historical analyses that embrace the
heterogeneity of sex. And I follow what I call a queer historical im-
pulse, an impulse toward making connections across time between,
on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out
of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of
current sexual categories now. Such an impulse extends the resources
for self- and community building into even the distant past.
The project of constructing queer histories that are constituted by
such affective relations across time has led me to materials that are
not usually associated with one another: I touch on traditional reli-
gious instruction for parish priests, ringing accusations of sodomy
among heretics as well as among orthodox Christians, the possibly
quite wily deposition of a male transvestite prostitute, the osten-
sibly heterosexual fellowship of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, and
the energetic verbal sparring of Margery Kempe, all in fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century England, for example, alongside obscure ar-
chival work of Michel Foucault, the culture wars in the late twentieth
century in the United States, and sodomy in the 1994 blockbuster
movie Pulp Fiction. Exactly how these materials can be related to one
another and exactly what we get by making them touch are among
my principal concerns in this book. In this introductory chapter I
shall lay out some of the empirical and theoretical problems.
I trace the contours of my wide-ranging project by discussing
several prominent - or, better, prominently symptomatic - works in
this chapter, late-medieval as well as late-twentieth-century texts.
First I allude to the immense plasticity of terms for deviant sex in
late-medieval England: I take up in particular a manual for priests
written by John Mirk and suggest some of the consequences of this
heterogeneity for queer historical projects. Since the insistence on the
heterogeneous subject (in both senses of the word) of historical study
links me with postmodern historiography, I turn next to postmod-
ern discussions of writing history; looking particularly at Homi K.
Bhabha's work, I demonstrate both its radical potential for contest-
ing legitimating narratives of the past and its problematic totalizing
of the distant past as well as essentializing of the present. I then turn
to the problem of specifying what, precisely, the nature of these pre-
ferred relations with the past might be: I discuss the concern for
community in John Boswell's historical work, which is pervasive and
fundamental to his approach to the past, both exerting a limit on his
own findings and also - perhaps surprisingly - inspiring more wide-
ranging and radical approaches to history and community formation.
I then look at such approaches that explode the categories of same-
ness, otherness, present, past, loss, pleasure. In the company of such
revisions I suggest that my queer history is contingent history in the
postmodern sense - its forms are intelligible but do not emerge out

2 Getting Medieval
of teleological necessity - as well as in the etymological sense (Latin
com- + tangere, to touch). In the final section of this introduction I
want to exemplify a queer historical touch: I touch on the texts, early
and late, of Roland Barthes, whose work displays across its variety a
consistent impulse to make contact, even finally a desire for bodies
to touch across time.

Murky Distinctions

In his Instructions for Parish Priests, a manual of basic religious in-


struction written in Shropshire sometime between the late-fourteenth
and mid-fifteenth centuries, John Mirk advises unlearned priests on
the care of their parishioners - on how they should preach to them,
what they need to teach them, and how they themselves should
behave.2 In the course of this rhymed and generally plain-spoken
treatise-reliant for its very conventional message on William of
Pagula's early-fourteenth-century Oculus sacerdotis- Mirk, an Au-
gustinian canon, discusses many concerns, from the doctrinal (belief
in transubstantiation is to be fostered, for example; the Pater Noster
and creed, articles of the faith, seven sacraments, and so on, are to
be taught) to the more practical religious knowledge that should be
imparted. 3 In the latter category, priests should teach that a pregnant
woman, for example, when her time is near, should confess and take
communion, "For drede of perele that may be-falle" (for fear of the
peril that might happen [83; such was the teaching Margery Kempe
should have heard and followed]) - and if things indeed go bad, the
midwife should be ready to cut open the mother if she dies so that
the child might be saved and baptized (87-102).
My concern here is with a passage following that one. After a brief
discussion of proper wedlock (the priest should inform his flock as
to who can marry whom, what constitutes divorce, when the banns
should be proclaimed, that lechery, as a deadly sin, should be avoided
by both single men and single women, and so on), Mirk turns his at-
tention to other modes of coupling:

Also wryten weI .1. fynde,


That of synne a3eynes kynde
Thow schalt thy paresch no pynge teche,
Ny of that synne no thynge preche ... (222-25)

Introduction 3
Also I find indeed in writing
That concerning sin against nature
You shall teach your parish nothing,
Nor preach anything about that sin ...

In the midst of a treatise that is all about what parishioners need to


know, what priests must preach, how they must teach their flocks
about religious matters, comes this admonition against any public
divulgation whatsoever: about this topic you must not teach, you
must not preach -lest, the fear conventionally runs, you give people
ideas.4
But despite that admonition to say nothing the treatise does go on
to suggest what should indeed be said on the subject:

But say pus by gode a-vys,


pat to gret synne forsope hyt ys,
For any mon pat bereth lyf
To forsake hys wedded wyf
And do hys kynde other way;
pat ys gret synne wypowte nay.
But how and where he doth pat synne,
To hys schryffader he mote pat mynne. (226-33)

But say thus, by good advice,


That it is very great sin, indeed,
For any man that bears life
To forsake his wedded wife
And have sex in another way,
That is great sin, there is no gainsaying.
But how and where he does that sin,
To his confessor he must such things relate.

The mid-nineteenth-century editorial gloss on the text narrows-


symptomatically - the topic in these latter lines, assuming that "adul-
tery" alone is at issue. The lines clearly state that this sin takes place
when a man forsakes his wife, so adultery might indeed be involved;
but the structure of the whole passage (do not preach or teach, but
say this advisedly, and let the specifics be confessed to the confessor)
indicates that the above-(not) mentioned "synne a3eyes kynde" -

4 Getting Medieval

You might also like