View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ASU Digital Repository Same-soul Desire in Late Medieval England by B. Joy Ambler A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Approved November 2017 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Robert S. Sturges, Chair Richard G. Newhauser Tracy Fessenden ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY DECEMBER 2017 ABSTRACT In this study, I explore to what extent an erotic orientation toward others’ spiritual characteristics, specifically with regard to “clean” souls, was strongly idealized in at least two medieval English locales, the central Midlands and the North Riding of Yorkshire. Where a hetero-genital orientation was pervasively considered proper with regard to erotic attraction then as today, I propose that, additionally, a desire to associate on a spiritual level with not only those of the same religion but also of like spiritual purity governed desire. As I will argue, this orientation to a spiritual sameness stemmed from a meme of preferred association in life with other Christians with clean souls. I refer to this desire for association with Christian sameness as a homo-spiritual orientation. As I will argue, this homospirituality was the primary basis of erotic desire portrayed and prescribed in the evidence considered in this study. In sum, I argue that fifteenth-century English ways of knowing and feeling desire, reflected in models of desire in romance poetry in these two locales, evidences an erotic orientation based on homospiritual lines of attraction. Moreover, in each area, the models of lay homospiritual erotics were preceded by and coincided with religious writings on the subject that contributed to an overall intellectual current. !i DEDICATION For Tony Ellis !ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As with almost any endeavor, those to whom I owe thanks for their support and contributions to the success of this study are innumerable. I must thank first Bob Sturges, the desert father whose wisdom I would not have known had I not tried the asceticisms of Phoenix. I thank also my spiritual siblings, Arthur and Juli, whose familial friendship has nurtured me past, present, and yet to come. For that critical community throughout the process, I thank my queer compatriots, denizens of Gayton Street, that reclaimed, non-binary alternative to that center of melancholic stagnation on the other side of Central; moreover, I am grateful to Susie, Dawn, Dan, Vivien, Bryan, & Lakshami, for Friendsgivings when I wasn’t able to escape East. My thanks are given, too, to Eileen, Aranye, Myra, Susie, Abe, Allan, Dorothy, Julie, Tom, Anita, Carol, Russell; Dick, Joanna, & Pam. And especially to Eve, Richard, and Liz, who’s dedication to rigor in research and writing prepared me and propelled me invaluably through this process. Collecting comprehensively the constellation of others who have sustained my soul and contributed to those attributes which made this possible would be, impossible. But I thank too my family, Robby, Kate, & Greta; Lain, Kim, Geoff, and Tracy. Jan and Alyssa. Laura, Seth. Mentors as I meandered, Stephanie, Keith, Tina, VMC, MEL. Colleagues current whose community kept me: Renée- Claire, Maya, Danny, Tara, Ben, Michelle, Jess, Jeremy. For faith & favor, Mirangela, Carole, Joe, and Rodney. Finally, all the Queers and Quakers, keep consorting. !iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1 SPIRITUAL-SEXUAL SEEKS SAME……………………………………………….. 1 2 THE MEDIEVAL “HOMO-SEXUAL”………………………………………………. 15 3 TOO CLOSE FOR CLEANNESS……………………………………………………. 50 4 LINES OF DESIRE………………………………………………………………….. 83 5 BEFORE GENDER, AFTER SEX………………………………………………….. 135 6 THE MANOR AROUND THE CORNER………………………………………….. 166 7 GHOSTS OF QUEERNESS YET TO COME……………………………………… 200 !iv Chapter 1 Spiritual-sexual Seeks Same Late in 2015, the popular online dating website OkCupid.com launched a pilot program, expanding the list of sexual orientations from which users can choose beyond their longstanding options of “gay,” straight,” and “bisexual.”1 In addition to these, users may now choose multiple identities that include asexual, pansexual, lesbian, heteroflexible, homoflexible, queer, questioning, demisexual, and sapiosexual. As news outlets note, the website’s change is in response to a growing expression of fluidity in sexuality and gender.2 More than a mere expansion of the prevailing paradigm of sexuality, however, some of these identities represent a growing categorical shift in popular conceptions of desire in the West. While identities such as homo/heteroflexible, pansexual, and even asexual define themselves relative to the binary categories of homosexual and heterosexual, the identities demisexual and sapiosexual break away from this relational dependence. The prefixes in demisexual, which describes romantic and sexual attraction stemming from a preceding asexual, emotional attraction, and sapiosexual, describing romantic and sexual attraction to demonstrated intellect, refer not to where the sexual identity falls on the continuum between homosexual and heterosexual, but instead to a non-corporeal 1 Neda Ulaby, “Sapiosexual Seeks Same: A New Lexicon Enter Online Dating Mainstream,” NPR.org, 4 December, 2014, accessed 5 January, 2015, <http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/ 2014/12/04/368441691/sapiosexual-seeks-same-a-new-lexicon-enters-online-dating-mainstream>. 2 Ibid. !1 characteristic to which someone is attracted. Where sexual epistemology since the end of the nineteenth century has understood sexual attraction primarily, often exclusively, in terms of primary and secondary sex characteristics to which someone is attracted, the introduction of terms like sapiosexual and demisexual into mainstream use signals, on the one hand, a destabilizing of the dominance that attraction to sexed bodies has held not only in our popular and scholarly epistemology of sexuality, but in our lived, sexual ontology. On the other hand, it marks a resurfacing of noncorporeal bases of desire, ones from which we might learn how to envision, enact, and embody our current frontiers of noncorporeally based erotic attraction. In this study, I explore to what extent an erotic orientation toward others’ spiritual characteristics, specifically with regard to “clean” souls, was strongly idealized in at least two medieval English locales, the central Midlands and the North Riding of Yorkshire. But particularly because this study aims precisely to deconstruct and reassemble our own ways of knowing medieval desire, a note first on terminology. In twenty-first century English, we most commonly categorize our desire for other humans in terms of “sexual orientation” — when in fact we know well from each of our individual experiences that far more than the “sex” assigned to bodies determines our desires for those occupying them. This is in part the first premise of this study: that there is far more to how we orient our desire for intimacy with other humans than their “sex.”3 But in order to call into 3 It is worth noting, further, that this study depends on the knowledge that not only gender identity but the “sex” of bodies is socially constructed, and thus the distinction between sex and gender loses its edge. For this I do not so much use them interchangeably as I do discuss sexed bodies — bodies assigned a particular sex by others — or more often simply refer to gendered bodies. !2 question how we talk about desire in the first place, let me set some basic terms, and how you may expect them to be used throughout this study. On the one hand, this study necessitates some specificity when it comes to the terms “sexual,” “romantic,” and “physical.” In line with prevailing understandings of identity and interpersonal attraction, I understand these three to be distinct from one another: “sexual” or what I will sometimes call genital arousal of one human for another can occur independent from romantic attraction for them. Each of these, in turn, can operate separately from appreciation for their physical form: their body in its totality, including but not limited to primary and secondary sexed characteristics. These distinctions are illuminated, in part, by the contemporary identity category of asexual, a person who may feel fully a romantic affinity for another, but with no genital arousal whatever — even as they may appreciate the physical form of that person. On the other hand, while this study necessitates specificity with regard to distinguishing genital arousal from romantic attraction from physical appreciation, it also demands room for ambiguity. Thus in the following chapters, I employ the terms erotic and desire with some liberty. As I have argued elsewhere, even through thousands of years of debate and philosophizing about the true meaning of eros in our lives, no clear, definitive sense has emerged.4 The erotic can include one, two, or all three of the above: the “sexual,” romantic, and physical. Moreover, eroticism can include spiritual affinity, as I will argue throughout this study. But it is certainly not limited to these four, beyond a 4 Ben Ambler, Ana Do"en, and Kristina Ko#an, “Introduction,” PanEroticism (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015). !3 certain je ne sais quoi, nor is it always clear which of them pervades or prevails. Thus throughout this study I make an effort to speak of genital, romantic, physical, and spiritual desire with distinction as necessary — and speak of erotic desire either when it is unclear which or how many of these are present,