1 - Locating sodomy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
And even the sodomites gave witness by being exterminated wherever they were in the world on that night, as Jerome says: “A light rose over them so bright that all who practiced this vice were wiped out; and Christ did this in order that no such uncleanness might be found in the nature he had assumed.” For, as Augustine says, “God, seeing that a vice contrary to nature was rife in human nature, hesitated to become incarnate.”
In the fruitful chaos of the eleventh century, a consistent church code for human behavior did not yet exist. Before Damian could condemn homosexuality, he had to define what it was and, even more importantly, to ask the central question about what it is that attracts one man to another.
What anyone knew or did not know about sexual relations, or same-sex attraction, in 1049 or 1230 is quite impossible to ascertain, especially insofar as our only sources of information are texts which may well have been written on command, as intellectual exercises, or by authors writing in the name and persona of another. There is nothing to indicate that any of the opinions and arguments deployed in these texts were generally held in the wider culture or even that the texts themselves were widely known or disseminated. It is, nonetheless, worthwhile to consider some of the discourses on sexuality that might have been available to the scholars I will be discussing in this and the following chapter: Peter Damian (1007–72), Alain de Lille (1128–1203) or the chroniclers of early Norman England and the court of Henry II Plantagenet (1133–89).
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- Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval LiteratureFrance and England, 1050–1230, pp. 19 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004