Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230(Series Number 51 Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature)

William Burgwinkle surveys poetry and letters, histories and literary fiction - including Grail romances - to offer a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Burgwinkle illustrates how 'sodomy' becomes a problematic feature of narratives of romance and knighthood. Most texts of the period denounce sodomy and use accusations of sodomitical practice as a way of maintaining a sacrificial climate in which masculine identity is set in opposition to the stigmatised other, for example the foreign, the feminine, and the heretical. What emerges from these readings, however, is that even the most homophobic, masculinist and normative texts of the period demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to separate the sodomitical from the orthodox. These blurred boundaries allow readers to glimpse alternative, even homoerotic, readings.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Part I. Locations: 1. Locating sodomy; 2. Imagining sodomy; Part II. Confrontations: 3. Making Perceval: double-binding and sieges périlleux; 4. Queering the Celts: men who don't marry in Marie de France; 5. Writing the self: Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae.

About the Author :
William Burgwinkle is Lecturer in French and Occitan in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in the University of Cambridge and fellow at King's College. He is the author of Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus Razos and Troubadour Songs (1997) and the editor of Significant Others: Film and Literature, East and West (1993).

Review :
"This elegantly understated tour de force is lucid, accessible, and appealing. It should speak to a variety of readerships, all of them fit, even if some of them are few: scholars of medieval romance, of Old French and Anglo-Norman, of the Latin prosimetrum and the so-called School of Chartres, and of the twelfth century generally and that sudden profusion in nearly ever form of cultural expression often misleadingly called the twelfth-century Renaissance." - Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University "warmly recommended" - Norris J. Lacey, Pennsylvania State University "the author provides a well-rounded look at sodomy, masculinity, and law, not to mention marriage, femininity, knighthood, courtly love, and romance in medieval English and French literature." - Dana Polanichka, History, UCLA "William Burgwinkle deserves immense credit for crafting a throughly grounded and critically refreshing argument about homophobic rhetoric and how it attempts to police the borders of gendered norms." Adam Miyashiro, Comparative Literature Studies