Robert Mills

Troubled vision : gender, sexuality, and sight in medieval text and image

Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture. The volume represents an exciting array of scholarship dealing with visual and textual cultures from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth centuries. Bringing together a range of theoretical approaches that address the troubling effects of vision on medieval texts and images, the book mediates between medieval and modern constructions of gender and sexuality. Troubled Vision focuses thematically on four central themes: Desire, looking, representation and reading. Topics include the gender of the gaze, the visibility of queer desires, troubled representations of gender and sexuality, spectacle and reader response, and the visual troubling of modern critical categories.

Seeing Face to Face: Troubled Looks in the Katherine Group

Avisual hermeneutic can be perceived throughout the cluster of thirteenth-century religious prose works known collectively as the Katherine Group; indeed, it could be argued that vision is one of the Group’s unifying features. Acts of looking and metaphors of sight are central features in the three saints’ lives that appear in the collection, those of Katherine (after whom the Group is named), Margaret, and Juliana.1 What these texts have in common, however, is not a focus on vision per se but a desire to organize or to structure vision as it is manifested in various textual identities or “positions.” Sight, the legends imply, is something that can be manipulated, appropriated, or exchanged by the various protagonists within an economy that associates it with power and subjectivity. At the same time, by mobilizing vision within a framework that is itself discursive and rhetorical—a framework that becomes especially apparent when viewed against the backdrop of the virgin martyr’s verbal eloquence—these texts also have the capacity to generate zones of ambivalence and contradiction. Seinte Margarete, for instance, is structured around a conflict between several different fields of vision: the look of the martyr, who prays to God that she may lay her “ehnen o Qe luðre unwiht Þe weorreð aeein me” [eyes on the wicked devil who is waging war against me] (SM, 56); the look of the devil himself, who appears in the form of a dragon with eyes that “steareden steappre Qen Qe steoren ant ten eimstanes, brade asce bascins” [gleamed brighter than stars or jewels, broad as basins]; the look of the pagan tormentor, Olibrius, who announces that, when Margaret has been torn limb from limb, he will count all her sinews “in euchanes sihðe Þe sit nu ant sið Þe” [in the sight of everyone sitting here now] (SM, 56); the look of those same spectators, who express sorrow when they “seoð” [see] the saint’s soft, lovely body cruelly ripped to pieces (SM, 52), and gasp with horror at the sight of the dragon “glistinde as Þah he al ouerguld were” [glittering all over as if he had been gilded] (SM, 58); and, of course, the imagined looks of the author and audiences of the narrative, who are afforded the option of identifying with any or all of these positions of viewing.

“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom

Abstract “Whatever you do is a delight to me!” Life of St. Lawrence “What shall I do with you?” she asked. “Do what you will,” I replied with resignation, “whatever you please.” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisees

It has long been remarked by historians of sexuality that sodomy is an incoherent category. Michel Foucault has insisted on the concepts “utterly confused” status; Jonathan Goldberg has mediated between highlighting sodomys categorical confusions in Renaissance England and deployments of the category in modern contexts (especially in North America) that continue to be precarious; Alan Bray has emphasized how sodomy emerges into visibility only through discursive performance, on the bodies of those who disrupt social and religious stability; and Mark Jordan has traced the categorys development in the moral theology of the Church and draws attention to its incoherences and illogicalities, even at the moment of its invention. Yet impossible as it might seem, under the circumstances, to pin it down to particular bodies and pleasures, scholars continue to be drawn to the question of sodomys relationship to what we now call homosexuality, whether as a distinct identity or as a variety of erotic practice. This article considers a cluster of images in a set of medieval illuminated manuscripts that expose what is at stake when we address such issues with reference to visual as well as textual examples.

Gender, Sodomy, Friendship, and the Medieval Anchorhold

This essay confronts the relative lack of attention paid by scholars of the Middle Ages to friendship between women, and the possibility that female friendship might possess, or be thought to possess, an erotic or even ‘sodomitical’ component. Focusing in detail on a devotional handbook now called Ancrene Wisse, which was designed originally as reading matter for female solitaries or anchorites in thirteenth-century England, I trace discourses of female fellowship in the text; show how these discourses are occasionally susceptible to the kinds of anxiety more regularly associated with male friendship in the period (notably regarding accusations of sodomy); and uncover precedents for a language of specifically female sodomy in writings designed for enclosed religious. The argument is firmly situated within recent historiographic debates concerning the significance of female amity in medieval and early modern Europe (notably studies by Alan Bray and Valerie Traub).

Introduction: Troubled Vision

Trouble, in its more conventional deployments, betrays a range of negative associations. It communicates a sense of worry or annoyance (“That’s the trouble”), a state of being blamed (“She’s always getting into trouble”), diagnoses of ill health or malfunction (“She’s got heart trouble”), or a more than usual amount of exertion (“I had real trouble finding you”); the word also often designates moments of political and social unrest or cultural disorder (“The trouble spilled out onto the streets”). So when Judith Butler appropriates the term in the context of gender, in her by now classic study Gender Trouble, she self-consciously goes against the grain of conventional usage, by suggesting the fruitful and dynamic possibilities of trouble—its place in practices of subversion and moments of rehabilitation.1 The argument she makes is that gender is a product of discursive repetition, a process that provides the opportunity both for the naturalization of gender, in the context of performative citationality, and for its subversion, in the context of parodic re-presentation.

Cary Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature

It is difficult to summarize a study as radiant, entrancing, and fundamentally disorienting as this in a scholarly review. Spending a day enclosed within its pages, I found myself by turns energized, moved, stimulated, and confused by the book’s meditations on the love of enclosure in medieval devotion and modern theory. This is certainly not easy reading, piling on as it does layer after layer of literary, cultural, philosophical, and phenomenological reference; but if one approaches the book with an openness to encountering surprise in scholarly endeavors, momentarily laying aside that critical imperative ‘‘always to historicize’’ that continues to pervade the study of premodern literature, the rewards are potentially manifold. Embracing the potential for a bringing together—or as Howie would have it, ‘‘chafing’’ (141)—of Old French and Latin saints’ lives, thirteenthcentury Italian devotional poetry, fourteenth-century English mystical revelation, contemporary American gay lyric, and philosophical citations that extend from Saint Augustine to Erich Auerbach, Claustrophilia is a study that takes aim at the seemingly pervasive and, at times, stultifying climate of historicist ‘‘rigor’’ that tends to define the discipline of medieval studies as well as literary scholarship more generally. Supplementing reading practices that, in the last analysis, seem like nothing more than an ‘‘agon of reducible and competitive texts and bodies and disciplines’’ (144)—research emphasizing the pre-eminence of history over literature, for instance, or the ‘‘context-specific solidity’’ (145) of a scrupulously historicized interpretation—Howie offers his readers the concept of ‘‘claustrophilia’’ (literally, love of enclosure) as a means of grappling intensively and affectively with

Havelok’s Bare Life and the Significance of Skin

The points of departure for this chapter are twofold. First, I wish to explore the significance of skin in the context of its removal. When does flayed skin provide a support for symbolic activity, say in the context of medieval viewing or reading practices or by virtue of its deployment as a judicial penalty? When, conversely, does it operate only as an abject, material residue? As Sarah Kay has demonstrated in a series of recent articles, medieval narratives about flaying potentially trouble the practice of reading. The coincidence of flayed skin as a textual motif with the skin of the parchment on which the text is inscribed may even have served for readers and patrons as an unconscious point of identification with the book itself, whereby the book’s pages uncannily functioned as a double of the reader’s own skin (or, in the words of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, as an enveloping “Skin Ego”).1 Furthermore, moving beyond the implications of flayed skin for human identity, Kay has sought to foreground ethical questions raised by medieval book production. Much as medieval accounts of flaying tend to be invested in maintaining a distinction between humans and (other) animals, there is also something profoundly unsettling about this process of constructing artifacts of human culture from the skins of slaughtered livestock.2

Talking Heads, or, A Tale of Two Clerics

This chapter analyses the phenomenon of talking heads begins with an evocation of two narratives that developed in the decades around 1000. One head communicates a message about truth and beauty; the other sets out, through its speech, deliberately to deceive. Both tales convey a sense of the multivocality of detached heads in medieval cultures. For the purposes of the chapter, the political and intellectual threads connecting Abbo of Fleury with Gerbert of Aurillac are fortuitous, given that both men are also associated with narratives of talking heads. If talking head stories have contributed to narratives about periodization and the divide between medieval and modern, there is also evidence that medieval Christians themselves experienced confusion when it came to divining the messages conveyed by talking heads. Keywords:Abbo of Fleury; Gerbert of Aurillac; medieval christians; talking heads

Cary Howie,Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval LiteratureClaustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature. Cary Howie . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xii+196.

It is difficult to summarize a study as radiant, entrancing, and fundamentally disorienting as this in a scholarly review. Spending a day enclosed within its pages, I found myself by turns energized, moved, stimulated, and confused by the book’s meditations on the love of enclosure in medieval devotion and modern theory. This is certainly not easy reading, piling on as it does layer after layer of literary, cultural, philosophical, and phenomenological reference; but if one approaches the book with an openness to encountering surprise in scholarly endeavors, momentarily laying aside that critical imperative ‘‘always to historicize’’ that continues to pervade the study of premodern literature, the rewards are potentially manifold. Embracing the potential for a bringing together—or as Howie would have it, ‘‘chafing’’ (141)—of Old French and Latin saints’ lives, thirteenthcentury Italian devotional poetry, fourteenth-century English mystical revelation, contemporary American gay lyric, and philosophical citations that extend from Saint Augustine to Erich Auerbach, Claustrophilia is a study that takes aim at the seemingly pervasive and, at times, stultifying climate of historicist ‘‘rigor’’ that tends to define the discipline of medieval studies as well as literary scholarship more generally. Supplementing reading practices that, in the last analysis, seem like nothing more than an ‘‘agon of reducible and competitive texts and bodies and disciplines’’ (144)—research emphasizing the pre-eminence of history over literature, for instance, or the ‘‘context-specific solidity’’ (145) of a scrupulously historicized interpretation—Howie offers his readers the concept of ‘‘claustrophilia’’ (literally, love of enclosure) as a means of grappling intensively and affectively with