Courses

What did it mean to be queer in the francophone Middle Ages? Was there such a thing? The term ‘sodomy’ was used in the period to describe a wide variety of acts (not all sexual), and the term would seem to foreclose the possibility of female same-sex eroticism. In an era in which all non-procreative sex was conceived as sinful, does the opposition between homosexual and heterosexual still hold? Was male and female homosexuality conceived symmetrically? Topics include the construction of gender (binary vs. spectral, natural vs. cultural), gender variance (transgender and nonbinary people), sodomy and the contours of “sex,” and sadomasochism. Our readings will take us through a broad range of genres—from penance manuals to lyric poetry to romance. Texts include selected lais by Marie de France, troubadour songs, Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, the Roman d’Enéas (a medieval French rewriting of the Aeneid that makes Aeneas gay), Heldris of Cornwall’s Le Roman de Silence and selected saints’ lives. Class taught in English, although some readings may be available only in modern French translation (reading knowledge of French required).