Queering the Middle Ages

Queering the Middle Ages
Author: Glenn Burger
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816634040

The essays in this volume present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized conceptions of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of sexuality in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not denying the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how historical work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in medieval sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such instabilities. At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture from our current set of vantage points within postmodernity. The authors focus on particular medieval moments: Christine de Pizan's representation of female sexuality; chastity in the Grail romances; the illustration of "the sodomite" in manuscript commentaries on Dante's Commedia; the complex ways that sexuality inflected English national politics at the time of Edward II's deposition; the construction of the sodomitic Moor by Reconquista Spain. Throughout, their work seeks to disturb a logic that sees the past as significant only insofar as it may make sense for and of a stabilized present.

The Complaint of Nature

The Complaint of Nature
Author: Alanus (de Insulis)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 1908
Genre: Verse satire, Latin (Medieval and modern)
ISBN:

The complaint of nature, Yale studies in English, v. 36 (1908), Translation of De planctu natura. by Douglas M. Moffat. Pagination preserved in etext form.

A Cosmos of Desire

A Cosmos of Desire
Author: Thomas C. Moser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780472113798

A groundbreaking illumination of the creation and reception of extant erotic poetry written in Latin during the Middle Ages

Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition

Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition
Author: Hugh White
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780198187301

'Nature' is a highly important term in the ethical discourse of the Middle Ages and, as such, a leading concept in medieval literature. This book examines the moral status of the natural in writings by Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others, showinghow-particularly in the erotic sphere-the influences of nature are not always conceived as wholly benign. Though medieval thinkers often affirm an association of nature with reason, and therefore with the good, there is also an acknowledgement that the animal, the pre-rational, the instinctivewithin human beings may be validly considered natural. In fact, human beings may be thought to be urged almost ineluctably by the force of nature within them towards behaviour hostile to reason and the right.

Chaucer's Queer Poetics

Chaucer's Queer Poetics
Author: Susan Schibanoff
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0802090354

Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.

The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology

The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology
Author: Mark D. Jordan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1998-10-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780226410401

In this reexamination of what it means to have a tradition, Catholic and otherwise, Mark D. Jordan offers a powerful and provocative study of the sin of erotic love between men. The Invention of Sodomy reveals the theological fabrication of arguments for categorizing genital acts between members of the same sex.

Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts

Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts
Author: J. Brown
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2013-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137037415

Exploring the relation between sexuality and cosmology in a variety of literary texts from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, the essays reveal that medieval authors, whether lay or religious, Christian or Jewish, were grappling with the same sets of questions about sexuality as people are today.

On the Nature of Things

On the Nature of Things
Author: Titus Lucretius Carus
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780486434469

The Roman philosopher's didactic poem in 6 parts, De Rerum Natura — On the Nature of Things — theorizes that natural causes are the forces behind earthly phenomena and dismisses divine intervention. Derived from the philosophical materialism of the Greeks, Lucretius' work remains the primary source for contemporary knowledge of Epicurean thought.