Lecture Notes, Dr Vicky Gunn © 2007
Body and Belief: Handout 5
Conversion of the Body:
Homosexuality and Corruption
29th October 2007
“Therefore shameful acts which are
contrary to nature (a shameful
act of transgression against God’s law),
such as the acts of the Sodomites,
are everywhere and always to be
detested and punished….Indeed the
social bond which should exist between
God and us is violated when the nature
of which he is the author is polluted
by a perversion of sexual desire.”
Augustine, Confessions[1]
Alan Cummings as Dionysius in
The Bacchae: Sacred or profane?[2]
OPENING REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS:
- How does slander/defamation undermine authority?
Is the generation of suspicion enough to tie into a more general fear of bodies that deviate from the norm within any given context? Insinuation can be almost as powerful as evidence, especially where contrary evidence is absent.
How do members of late Antique and medieval Christian communities defame? On what do they focus? Why?
“Slander’s ability to produce oppositional discourse rested on its capacity to signify in multiple and even conflicting ways: it is both the malicious imputation of a false crime and the true report of ill-doing. In the first sense of the word, one is undeservedly victimized; while in the second, one is deservedly exposed.”[3]
- Is sexual slander just a form of rhetoric?
- Generation and maintenance of insider/outsider status in groups?
“Outsiders are accused of being sexually deviant in some way while insiders are described as sexually pure.”[4]
- Furthering the interests of an elite?
- Reporting of actual sexual depravity or examples of the ‘rhetorical and discursive functions of accusations’ of it?[5]
- Why do the clerics of late Antiquity, the early medieval and medieval periods use ‘defamation’? What outcomes are they hoping to achieve? What do these desired outcomes suggest about contemporary concepts of bodily corruption?
- How are cultural assertions about sex and morality illuminated through the charges of sexual impropriety we find in our texts from Late Antiquity and Medieval history? Are these just representations of Christian culture or something more complex?
- Who regulates what is acceptable and not acceptable as forms of sexual slander?
- What role does the rhetorical fashioning of character play in transmitting patristic and early medieval concerns about what is and what is not appropriate behaviour, particularly for those who hold power within a medieval Christian society?
- Are forms of slander and insinuation ultimately about the regulation of bodily desires within Christian belief systems? (For example, is it sexual activities that are used to defame or other aspects of the person?)
- Why does the possibility of a lack of sexual restraint generate such fear? Is Bataille of use in understanding the power of sexual invective? (To what extent, however, is his thinking dependent on his immersion in the patristic works of late antiquity? Does this undermine his arguments?
CASE STUDIES
(1)Augustine on sexuality
(2)Effeminacy as evidence of corruption
(a) Accusations in the Gospel of Judas
What does an accusation of effeminacy ‘do’? Does this change in different historical periods? (Why do such accusations become more or less important in the establishment of authority?) Why is effeminacy profane rather than sacred? When can it be sacred within a Christian tradition?
(b) William Rufus’ Court in Orderic Vitalis’ Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 1140):
“They [William’s courtiers] rejected the traditions of honest men, ridiculed the counsel of priests, and….frivolled away their time, spending it as they chose without regard for the law of God or the customs of their ancestors. They devoted their nights to feasts and drinking-bouts, idle chatter, dice, games of chance, and other sports, and they slept all day……
Then the effeminates [effeminati] throughout the realm ruled supreme, and carried on their debaucheries without restraint, and loathsome Ganymedes [catamitae], who ought to be consumed by flames, abused themselves with foul sodomite-things [sodomitica].”[6]
- Conflation of political corruption with bodily corruption – can one exist without the other?
- How did William Rufus die? What implication does this have for how contemporaries come to explain what happened?
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
“He was very harsh and severe over his land and his men, and with all his neighbours; and very formidable; and through the counsels of evil men, that to him were always agreeable, and through his own avarice, he was ever tiring this nation with an army, and with unjust contributions. For in his days all right fell to the ground, and every wrong rose up before God and before the world. God's church he humbled; and all the bishoprics and abbacies, whose elders fell in his days, he either sold in fee, or held in his own hands, and let for a certain sum; because he would be the heir of every man, both of the clergy and laity; so that on the day that he fell he had in his own hand the archbishopric of Canterbury, with the bishopric of Winchester, and that of Salisbury, and eleven abbacies, all let for a sum; and (though I may be tedious) all that was loathsome to God and righteous men, all that was customary in this land in his time. And for this he was loathed by nearly all his people, and odious to God, as his end testified: -- for he departed in the midst of his unrighteousness, without any power of repentance or recompense for his deeds.”
What role do such characterizations play in these texts? (Vice or virtue)
How are memories of vice used to regulate the body by the clergy?
William Rufus was followed by Henry I (the son of William Rufus’ brother, Robert Curthose). Why might Henry have wished to see Rufus’ memory slandered? How might you go about proving links between the clergy who produced the texts and Henry I?
[1]Saint Augustine Confessions, trans H. Chadwick (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1991), p. 46. How does this tie in with what we know of the use of sexual slander to generate power, exclusivity, authority in early Christian, Late Antique western societies?
[2]
[3] M. Hanrahan, ‘Defamation as Political Contest during the reign of Richard II’, Medium Aevum, 72 (2003)
[4] J. Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (Columbia University Press: New York, 2006), p. 2.
[5] Knust, Abandoned to Lust, p. 3.
[6] Orderic Vitalis quoted and discussed in: M. Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2006), p.194 ff. Other 12th Century writers also added their suspicions of debauchery to their descriptions of William Rufus’ court and behaviour. See, for example, Henry of Huntingdon The History of the English People, trans. D. Greenway (Oxford World Classics: Oxford, 2002), pp. 48-49; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, volume I, trans. R. Mynors et al (Oxford Medieval Texts: Oxford, 1998), iv: 314-315.