Valerie Allen

Alan of Lille on the Little Bits that Make a Difference

Alan of Lille, writing his Latin Liber de planctu naturae (Book Concerning the Complaint of Nature henceforth Complaint) in the twelfth century, sexualizes grammatical terms to a degree unthinkable in the English language.1 Inspired by Boethius’s dream vision, the Consolation of Philosophy, Alan’s poem comprises a dialogue of alternating passages of unmetered and metered language—a prosimetrum (prose-verse)—between the narrator and Dame Natura. Natura’s complaint against all manners of (primarily sexual) human vice includes a castigation of sexual vice. It is couched in extended grammatical and logical metaphors, in which all manner of violence is done to language in the form of barbarisms, solecisms, and other verbal wrongs.2 The grammatical metaphors are certainly elaborate, even tortured (verbs behaving passively where they should be active; nouns that cannot make up their mind whether they are masculine or feminine, and so on). Although the main target of Alan’s satire is sex between men, the complaint is framed against any act that thwarts the reproductive impulse, and, as has often been noted, it is striking that the word “sodomy” never appears in the entire work. It is not enough to read the complicated grammatical circumlocutions as medieval longhand for today’s straight and queer sexuality.