My Gay Middle Ages

My Gay Middle Ages
Author: A. W. Strouse
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2015-05-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0615830005

In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse's "gay lifestyle." Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would "get in from behind" on cultural history, Strouse instead does a "reach around." He eschews academic "queer theory" as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of "gross indecency"). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval. "Today, almost nobody reads Boethius, which if you ask me is a crying shame. Because Boethius is so gay. First of all, the heroine of the Consolation is this great big fierce diva, whose name is Lady Philosophy. She's a Lady, and she doesn't stand for anybody's crap. At the beginning of the book, Boethius is crying, all alone in prison, depressed that he's lonely and loveless and is going to be killed. Lady Philosophy descends from the heavens, a la Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. The first thing Boethius notices about her is that she's wearing an amazing dress with Greek letters embroidered on it-they stand for practical and theoretical philosophy. Her dress has been torn to shreds by the hands of uncouth philosophers. They didn't know how to treat a lady." (from "My Boethius") TABLE OF CONTENTS // The Most Famous Medievalist in the World - My Boethius - Memory Houses - The President of the Medieval Academy Made Me Cry - My Medieval Romance - The Formation of a Persecuting Society - The Medieval Heart is Like a Penis - Jilted Again - My Orpheus - Medieval Literacy - My Cloud of Unknowing - The Post-Medieval Unconscious - Coda: The Dedication"

Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages

Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages
Author: Francesca Canade Sautman
Publisher: New Middle Ages
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2001-10-19
Genre: History
ISBN:

The essays treat same-sex desire and life choices among medieval women by covering a diverse cultural domain and a wider range of fields, disciplines, and approaches than ever attempted in this context before.

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
Author: John Boswell
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2013-08-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804150958

Both highly praised and intensely controversial, this brilliant book produces dramatic evidence that at one time the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex, but sanctified them--in ceremonies strikingly similar to heterosexual marriage ceremonies.

A Gay History of Britain

A Gay History of Britain
Author: Matt Cook
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2007-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

"A Gay History of Britain tells the extraordinary history of male-male sex and love in Britain, in all its diversity, from the Middle Ages to the present.

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages
Author: Robert Mills
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2015-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022616926X

During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled “sodomitical” or evoked the use of ambiguous phrases such as the “unmentionable vice” or the “sin against nature.” How, though, did these categories enter the field of vision? How do you know a sodomite when you see one? In Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills explores the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture, on the one hand, and those categories we today call gender and sexuality, on the other. Challenging the view that ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form in the Middle Ages, Mills demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period—and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took. Among the topics that Mills covers are depictions of the practices of sodomites in illuminated Bibles; motifs of gender transformation and sex change as envisioned by medieval artists and commentators on Ovid; sexual relations in religious houses and other enclosed spaces; and the applicability of modern categories such as “transgender,” “butch” and “femme,” or “sexual orientation” to medieval culture. Taking in a multitude of images, texts, and methodologies, this book will be of interest to all scholars, regardless of discipline, who engage with gender and sexuality in their work.

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.

Homoeroticism and Chivalry

Homoeroticism and Chivalry
Author: R. Zeikowitz
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137094567

Zeikowitz explores both affirming and denigrating discourses of male same-sex desire in diverse fourteenth-century chivalric texts and describes the sociopolitical forces motivating those discourses. He attempts to dethrone traditional heteronormative views by drawing attention to culturally normative 'queer' desire. Zeikowitz articulates possible homoeroticized spectatorial interactions between male readers and imagined or actual model knights, dramatized accounts of same-sex unions, and mutually stimulating - or competing - forces of homosocial and heterosexual desire in chivalric texts, such as Charny's Book of Chivalry , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and Troilus and Criseyde . He also examines how intimate male bonds are rendered sodomitically-inflected, dangerous attachments in chronicle narratives of the reigns of Edward II and Richard II.

Medieval Futurity

Medieval Futurity
Author: Will Rogers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501513974

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

Homosexuality in Medieval Europe

Homosexuality in Medieval Europe
Author: Tobias Lanslor
Publisher: Cambridge Stanford Books
Total Pages: 97
Release:
Genre: History
ISBN:

Although the church condemned homosexuality in the late Middle Ages, they had not been too worried about homosexual behavior, and such an attitude also prevailed in the secular world. However, around the thirteenth century, these tolerant attitudes changed dramatically. Some historians relate this change to the climate of fear and intolerance that prevailed in the century against minority groups that departed from the norm of the majority. This persecution reached its peak in the medieval Inquisition, when the Cathars and Waldenses sects were accused of obscenity, sodomy and Satanism. In 1307, accusations of sodomy and homosexuality were important during the Knights Templar trial.