The University of Chicago Vile Affections: Medieval
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO VILE AFFECTIONS: MEDIEVAL LITERATURE IN REPROBUM SENSUS TRADITUS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY KEVIN M. MURPHY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Kevin M. Murphy All rights reserved ii To Steven, sine quo non iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................v Abstract..............................................................................................................................vi Introition .............................................................................................................................1 I. A Monstration.................................................................................................................53 II. Whatzit: Object Lessons from the Exeter Book Riddles ..............................................91 III. Uncertain Signs: Longing and Language in the Liber Gomorrhianus .....................139 IV. Fear of a Queer Planctu: Sexual Ambiguity in Alain de Lille .................................228 V. The Melancholy of Anatomy: Dissecting Chaucer’s Pardoner .................................289 Coda as Cauda ...............................................................................................................319 Appendix ........................................................................................................................338 Bibliography....................................................................................................................345 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my parents, who did not live to read this. Long before, they bequeathed to me intellectual unrest within an unruly, desiring body. This dissertation is the fruit of that union. I also appreciate the patience and indulgence of my brothers and sisters—then and now (but never now-and-then). My friends were unflagging in support of my graduate studies. Thanks for the encouragement and the alms offered a struggling graduate student. Morgan Ng—goad and gadfly—has been both friend and colleague. Through engagement with my research and by the example of his groundbreaking work, I have become a better scholar. The University of Chicago faculty are unparalleled in their commitment to scholarship, while fostering and furthering innovative work. In particular I would like to thank Bill, Braden, Carla, Christina, David B., James, Jay, Josh, and Lisa. Bradin Cormack and Michael Murrin offered invaluable guidance in the early stages of my dissertation research. The latter sparked my interest in allegory, a field in which he remains formidable. The first was adamant that I not hold back on making daring claims, howsoever they diverged from his own. I am obliged to David Simon for taking on my project at a late stage. His perceptive, persuasive, and personable engagement with my dissertation has improved it immeasurably. A particular “Thank you” must be tendered to Elaine Hadley, although I have never experienced the pleasure or challenge of one of her courses. At a crisis in my career, she consoled and cajoled me; her understanding and generosity made it possible to suspend my studies without stopping my scholarship. I am Elaine’s eternal debtor. Mark Miller has been with me at every stage of my graduate studies. As professor, he opened my eyes to the problematic peculiarities of medieval literature. As mentor, his blinding intelligence and insightful criticism always focused on the most promising aspects of my v thinking and writing, while never winking at my shortcomings. His enthusiasm about my work and his care about my well-being demand my undying gratitude. Mark is a marvel. At last, I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Steven Kurt Klein, whom I have known for three decades. When others would have abandoned me, Steven stayed steadfast. Neither this dissertation nor its author would be without him. Truly, he is what Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Aelred, Montaigne, and Whitman never adequately imagined: a Friend. vi ABSTRACT Is he, or isn’t he? Ambiguity and indeterminacy are powerful incitements to sexual interest for certain queer adventurers. The flamboyant and in-your-face faggot has undeniable charms; the unequivocally straight he-man is an attractive challenge; but the doubt that graces and gilds an uncertain target is a consummate come-on. For the queer reader, the enigmatic or polysemous text is a similar turn-on. Ambiguity is an invitation to approach, pursue, or persuade. This dissertation is a culmination of my encounters with sexual ambiguity in medieval literature. In my attempts to come to terms with negative representations of homoerotic desire or expression, I began a flirtation with certain texts that are usually understood to promulgate an unambiguous condemnation of same-sex erotic activity or attachment. My readings reveal these texts to be far-from-unequivocal. Their language is, itself, dubious, and insofar as language was analogized to sexual practices they are, themselves, sexually suspect. These texts present images that are open to multiple interpretation—often troublingly erotic. At the level of the word, these authors employ polysemy and dubiety that challenge a superficial understanding of their anti- sodomitical sense. My chapter on the Anglo-Saxon riddles of the Exeter Book explores how the obscene can be concealed in the commonplace. The riddle form is an elaborate type of metaphor or simile. My exploration of the mechanism at the gross level will prepare my reader for my more subtle suspicions of the sexual in later texts. Exploiting the ambiguity of Old English in his deliberately obscure descriptions, the poems invite readers to picture obscene action and objects as solutions to ostensibly benign enigmas. The unnamed is unmentionable, the unspoken, the unspeakable. vii My chapters on Peter Damian and Alain de Lille—and a preliminary excursus on exegetical practices (“A Monstration”)—demonstrate my queer interpretive method, recognizing in their use of polysemous Latin a potential for play and perversion. The anti-sodomitical texts embrace paradox and paronomasia—the potential for a word to signify multiple (sometimes contradictory) ideas simultaneously. Word-play enacts sex-play, and paronomasia, therefore, perpetrates paranomesis, transgressive conduct. The careful reader can discern an ambiguous attitude toward the topic both in what these texts say and the way in which it is said. These texts say one thing but hint at another. Rather than the oppressive polemics we imagined, the Liber Gomorrheanus and de Planctu Naturae become liberating paeans to the perverse or peculiar. My dissection of Chaucer’s pansified Pardoner lays bare a related phenomenon: How language and other signs may be adopted to obscure the patently obvious. Chaucer exploits the plasticity of Middle English to problematize the Pardoner’s predicatory (and predatory) practices. Despite all manner of misdirection, the anxious pilgrim’s constant insistence on corporal language and imagery always returns the reader to the source and site of sexual disgust: the Pardoner’s anomalous body. I figure wordplay as sex-play, fostered by the queer’s ambiguous relation to ambiguous speech. There is something in the nature of language—polysemy, plasticity—that speaks to the gay sensibility precariously situated at the margins of intelligibility or invisibility. My method combines the impulses of the eromenos (boy-lover) and the hermeneus (interpreter). This eromeneutics intends to encourage and equip like-minded readers to approach texts fearlessly. In flirting with these texts and their meanings, critics should consider the semantically tentative tempting. A queer interpretation informed by double consciousness delves the conscious doubleness of these texts. Through such tilling, the field of study becomes a playground. viii Introition “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who look beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” Oscar Wilde Paronomasia and Paranomesis In an essay on the continuities between late and early forms of the Latin language, particularly Baudri of Bourgueil’s amorous verse and its engagement with Ovid, Monika Otter writes, “Medieval Latin is ‘always parodic,’ not in the sense of being facetious or satirical, but in the sense of resisting, citing, celebrating, and fighting the Classics, and in a sense of filling old cultural forms with new content.”1 Baudri also repurposes Vergilian erotic material. In an allurement to monastic life—and the sharing of literary pursuits—Baudri (Carmen 129) sings: “Et fidibus lentis aptabimus organa nostra” (And we will fit our voices to leisured lyres). Sylvia Parsons and David Townsend observe: The seduction into a shared landscape and shared language fuses Baudri’s invitation to monastic life with the fictional allurements of the pastoral landscape. In doing so, it transforms a notoriously homoerotic school text into an inducement to a homosocial monastic praxis poised continuously at the threshold of desire. The seductive male voice of the teacher speaks through the shared culture of a scandalous classical text to incorporate the addressee into monastic culture conceived as a poetic landscape.2 1 “Renaissances and Revivals” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature,