Carolingians gay
2. Cloistered Queers
Brother Anselm to Dom Gilbert, brother, buddy, beloved lover
. . . sweet to me, sweetest friend, are the gifts of your sweetness, but they cannot open to console my desolate heart for its long for of your love. Even if you sent every scent of perfume, every glitter of metal, every precious gem, every texture of cloth, still it could not make up to my soul for this separation unless it returned the separated other half.
The anguish of my heart just thinking about this bears witness, as do the tears dimming my eyes and wetting my face and the fingers writing this.
You recognized, as I do now, my affection for you, but I did not. Our separation from each other has shown me how much I loved you; a man does not in fact have knowledge of good and evil unless he has experienced both. Not having experienced your absence, I did not realize how sweet it was to be with you and how caustic to be without you.
But you have gained I dont consider myself primarily as a historian of sexuality, although Ive touched on the topic in my work on masculinity. To the extent that I have researched sexuality, moreover, its largely been looking at early medieval laity and heterosexuality. And yet I somehow sound to have acquired a reputation for discussing lgbtq+ monks, on the basis of a couple of posts. Rather than running away from this reputation, however, given that its still (just) LGBT history month, its time to point out why other historians ought perhaps to try considering gay monks sometimes. And that is because they’re good to think with. First of all, they’re good to believe with because they encapsulate a lot of issues about ahistorical versus historically contingent human factors. As far as we comprehend, every society has had some proportion of people who are sexually attracted predominantly to their possess sex, rather than the opposite sex. Yet although gay people exist in every society, there are many societies without monasticism, or any comparable institution. History does show switch as well as continuity. The existence of gay monks also reveals historical transform in other ways. One is how socia “Firstly, the suggestion that one shouldn’t exploit anachronistic categories is in many ways ridiculous. If you discuss proto-Indo-European, the Roman upper classes, the Carolingian economy, medieval anti-semitism or whether King Alfred had Crohn’s disease, you’re using an anachronistic category, in the sense of a concept that didn’t exist at the historical period under discussion. The question is whether a modern category is actually useful for a discussion of a particular historical period, whether it can be defined in a way that makes sense. I believe it may be true that ‘homosexual’ is not a useful category for dealing with the Middle Ages, but that isn’t the main category that Boswell actually used. What Boswell talked about was ‘gays’, and he had a simple definition of them: people with an erotic preference for their own sex. (In CSTH he made this ‘conscious preference’, but later removed the qualifier).” I reflect the money quote from this very good post is actually this one: But such a refusal needs to be handled very carefully, because it’s not symmetric. If you say there are no ‘h LOCATING HOMOSEXUALITY IN CAROLINGIAN MONASTIC LIFE James Mitchell 2 Scholars researching same-sex sexuality in the Middle Ages have loyal far less attention to its being in the Carolingian period rather than in later centuries for at least two reasons: the practice does not emerge as a significant theological issue until the middle of the eleventh century,1 and it is not treated as a civil crime until after then, when it began to be prosecuted only sporadically and inconsistently. A third reason has proved perhaps more atmospheric in character, namely a tendency to accept without further analysis the position advocated by John Boswell, who argued, as an important element of the “Boswell thesis,”2 that homosexuality, although criminalized in the early sixth century by Justinian, was not a matter of much interest in the preliminary Church, and that it remained in this condition throughout the early Middle Ages. Boswell maintains that homosexuality did not initially qualify as a worse sexual sin than others, given the repressive nature of the Church’s attitude toward human sexuality in general, and that it was the later medieval Ch In the 19th century, a sword from the 9th century was found in the bottom of the Seine near Paris, which was equipped with an exceptionally well-preserved scabbard and fittings. The set, which is not very well acknowledged in the literature, is a crucial find for understanding the wider context regarding the emergence of new progressive types of swords, the construction of scabbards and the exploit of Carolingian fittings. The sheathed sword that is the subject of this article belongs to a group of militaria poised by the French architect, passionate researcher, member of the French Society of Antiquities and collector Victor Gay (1820-1887). This researcher’s lifelong interest in medieval and Renaissance material culminated in the writing of a monumental work, more than eight hundred pages long Glossaire archéologique du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (Archaeological Glossary of the Middle Ages and Renaissance), published in 1887, in which he listed a number of items from his collection. After Gay’s death, the art component of the collection moved to the Lo
LOCATING HOMOSEXUALITY IN CAROLINGIAN MONASTERIES
The sheathed sword from the Gay collection
A re-evaluation of an old weapon
The Lgbtq+ Collection and its fate