Abstract
This article explores the ongoing development of studies in medieval sexuality as a discipline within the broader fields of medieval studies and medievalist studies. After outlining the influence of the first and fourth volumes of the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) history of sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité), and the valuable contribution of two recent publications (Ruth Mazo Karras and Katherine Pierpont’s Sexuality in medieval Europe: Doing unto others, 2023, and Katherine Harvey’s The fires of lust: sex in the Middle Ages, 2021), several considerations in the continuing development of studies in medieval sexuality are discoursed.
In the first and fourth volumes of Histoire de la sexualité (La volonté de savoir, 1976, and Les aveux de la chair, published in February 2018 at Gallimard in Paris under the editorship of Frédéric Gros), Foucault concludes that views on sex in the medieval Latin West became “the seismograph of modern subjectivity”. This dense deduction was brought into the spotlight again after the recent publication of Les aveux de la chair, in which Foucault explores several church and desert fathers’ views on sex, concluding the work with a thorough exposition on Augustine, who can be considered the first medieval philosopher. With his reading of the church fathers and the early Middle Ages in Les aveux de la chair, Foucault supplements references to medieval sexuality in the central Middle Ages in La volonté de savoir, specifically regarding the sacramentalisation of confession after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.
After exploring the immediate effect of La volonté de savoir and Les aveux de la chair on the development of studies in medieval sexuality, especially regarding the relation between the repressive hypothesis of the 19th century and the formalisation of confession in the early 13th century, sexuality being a “recent invention”, the development of scientia sexualis from the 17th century onward, and the development of a post-medieval sexual vernacular, an appreciative review of the recent works of Karras and Pierpont (2023) and Harvey (2021) is offered.
While acknowledging the contributions of several pioneering scholars in the early development of studies in medieval sexuality after the publication of La volonté de savoir in 1976 (inter alia Peter Brown’s The body and society: men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity [1988], Vern Bullough and James Brandage’s Sexual practices and the medieval church [1982] and Handbook of medieval sexuality [1996], Albrecht Classen’s Sexuality in the Middle Ages and early modern times [2008], Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James Schultz’s Constructing medieval sexuality [1997], Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler’s Desire and discipline: sex and sexuality in the pre-modern West [1996], Pierre Payer’s The bridling of desire: views of sex in the later Middle Ages [1993], and Joyce Salisbury’s Medieval sexuality [1990] and Sex in the Middle Ages[1991]), the article draws on the recent inputs of Ruth Evans, Bruce Holsinger, Ivica Raguž and Irvin Resnick to complement the author’s latest analyses of sodomy and female same-sex relations from the early to the later Middle Ages and the author’s dismissals of sexual medievalisms in, for instance, neomedievalist contexts.
Five considerations in the advance of studies in medieval sexuality, grounded in what could be depicted as topics of consensus in the existing literature, are henceforth promoted. These pertain to the positioning of studies in medieval sexuality in a Venn-diagrammatical relation of medieval studies and medievalist studies, the estimation of a dual body perspective in medieval sexuality, maintaining the concept of medieval sexuality as a useful anachronism, the critical countering of sexual medievalisms, and the complex process of the identification, editing and translation of the by default concealed medieval sources.
Keywords: Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Histoire de la sexualité; Middle Ages; medieval philosophy; medieval sexuality; medieval studies; medievalism; medievalist studies; neomedievalism; studies in medieval sexuality
- The painting by Henri Fantin-Latour on this article’s featured image is in the public domain (available on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henri_Fantin-Latour_-_Tannh%C3%A4user,_Clevelandart_1916.1038.jpg).
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