Medieval France
. The exuberant homosexuality for which the ancient Gauls, like other Celts, were famed seems to have survived or even increased during the Roman occupation but was dampened by Christian conversion. The Germanic invasions demolished imperial and weakened Christian authorities, and the Germans themselves seem to have practiced pederasty but to have disapproved of effeminacy and adult passivity. Neither Franks nor Burgundians legislated against homosexuality, but the Visigothic code of Reccesvinth (ca. 654) stipulated castration as a penalty. Although the Franks adopted Catholic Christianity with its morality that pilloried as the “crime against nature” all nonreproductive forms of sexual expression, including homosexuality, the later Merovingians, and probably their nobles, indulged their sensual appetites freely.
Considerable sexual license continued under the Carolingians (751–987). An erotic element appears in the circle of clerics headed by Alcuin, the “friend of Charlemagne.” Alcuin directed his feelings toward his pupils, even bestowing on one a “pet name” from one of Virgil’s Eclogues. Walafrid Strabo’s affection for Liutger was more specifically Christian, presaging Elizabethan love sonnets. His exiled friend Gottschalk penned a tender poem to a young monk, probably at Reichenau.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, in the rude early castles, knights and squires, often sleeping on pallets in the same room and depending on one another for survival, must have formed erotic attachments, a type of situational homosexuality known to armies. Anglo-Norman nobles were particularly reprimanded for homosexuality.
Pederastic poems were part of the renaissance of the 12th century. Marbode of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123), master of the school of Chartres, loved a boy who loved a beautiful girl who was herself in love with Marbode. Marbode’s disciple Baudri of Bourgueil (1046–1130) shifted to more openly erotic poetry, with some verses extolling the moral qualities and others the physical charms of the addressee. Hildebert of Lavardin (ca. 1055–1133) reiterated conventional moralizing arguments against the “plague of Sodom,” implying that homosexuality was common in his age, but another of his poems boldly denied that male love is a sin and faulted “heaven’s council” for calling it one. Allegorical poetry was less favorable to homosexuality. Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae (ca. 1170) indicted humankind for inventing monstrous kinds of love and perverting Nature’s laws. Jean de Meun’s sequel to the Roman de la Rose (ca. 1270) had Nature’s Genius liken practitioners of nonreproductive sex to plowmen who till stony ground.
In the 11th century, with Peter Damian condemning sodomy, the church moved to regulate private conduct. The term sodomia, which appeared at the beginning of the 13th century, often covered bestiality, homosexual practices, and “unnatural” heterosexual relations of all kinds. Late 11th-century theologians, who advocated the same penalty for all three, associated what came to be called sodomy with heresy and magic. Scriptural commentators in Anselm of Laon’s circle linked heresy and sodomy as forms of sacrilege punishable by death.
Before 1200, southern France became a stronghold of heretical Cathars (Albigensians). Because of their similarity to the Bogomils of Bulgaria, they came to be stigmatized as bougres, a term that meant first heretic and then sodomite. Catholic authorities charged them with sexual heterodoxy, claiming that unrestrained sexual hedonism was part of their cult. The word itself survives to this day in English as “bugger.”
In northern France, Chrétien de Troyes, like the troubadours of Languedoc, sang of love—and its clandestine homoerotic culture. In Lanval, Marie de France has Queen Guenevere accuse Lanval of homosexuality after he refuses her advances. In Paris, already a center of academic and political life, Jacques de Vitry denounced the students at the university for practicing sodomy. In 1270, Guillot, in his Dit des rues de Paris, cited the rue Beaubourg as an area favored by sodomites. Again in the 15th century, the poet Antonio Beccadelli alluded to the continued homosexual practices of the intellectuals in Paris, and the still obscure jargon of François Villon has also been cited as evidence of that Parisian subculture.
Politics have occasioned accusations of sodomy in many epochs, none more notorious than the trial of the entire order of Knights Templar, Europe’s great bankers. The first charges of sexual heterodoxy against the Templars date from 1304 or 1305 in the Agenais. Many witnesses, including some whose testimony is suspect, claimed that the order tolerated as sinless “acts against nature” between members, who were accused of the osculum infame at their initiations. Philip IV the Fair pressured Pope Clement V to take action against the Templars, and they were arrested throughout France in October 1307. Hundreds of episcopal and royal tribunals tallied the wealth of the order, gathered witnesses, heard testimony, and passed judgment. Eventually, about 120 Templars met their deaths in Paris. Only a few of the many who were accused actually confessed to sodomy, but many more confessed to blasphemy and heresy. The guilt of the Templars remains moot to this day. Some may have been involved in homosexual liaisons, but the political atmosphere and controversy surrounding the investigation made impartial judgment impossible.
Philip IV’s daughter, Isabella, with the help of her lover, Mortimer, imprisoned and tortured her sodomitical husband Edward II of England.
Prosecutions for sodomy continued sporadically in late-medieval France. In 1317, Robert de Péronne, called de Bray, was burned, and his brother Jean received an unknown sentence the following year at Laon. Arnaud de Vernioles, a subdeacon of Pamiers, was accused of sodomy as well as heresy in 1323–24 and was consigned to a monastery for life. In 1333, in Paris, Raymond Durant was condemned for sex with his male servants but managed to escape. In 1334, Pierre Porier was burned in Dorche. Guillaume Belleti, in Chambéry, escaped with a fine in 1351. Jacques Purgatoire, charged with violent assault, was burned at Bourges in 1435. If his confession is genuine, Gilles de Rais cannot be labeled a victim. The same is true of Benjamin Deschauffours: since the time of Voltaire, his trial has been seen as a classic example of persecution of homosexuals.
A persistent fear of sexuality and the inability to stamp out its proscribed manifestations even, or especially, within the strictly regulated confines of the cloister plagued medieval society, with its celibate clergy. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas condemned sodomites to death, and Lucas da Penna (ca. 1320-ca. 1390) even declared that “if a sodomite had been executed, and subsequently several times returned to life, each time he should be punished even more severely if this were possible….” The medieval state, however, lacked the means of carrying out the mass arrests and executions of homosexuals that were to occur in later periods.
William A.Percy, Jr.
[See also: LATIN LYRIC POETRY]
Stehling, Thomas, trans. Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship. New York: Garland, 1984.
Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Courouve, Claude. “Sodomy Trials in France.” Gay Books Bulletin 1 (1979).
Goodich, Michael. The Unmentionable Vice. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1979.
Payer, Pierre. Sex and the Penitentials: the Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
This is the complete article, containing 1,169 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Homosexuality
