I want to hear about gay knights. Please.
Ahaha. So this is me finally getting, post-holiday, to the subject that was immediately clamoured for, when I volunteered to discuss the historical accuracy of gay knights if someone requested it. It reminds me somewhat of when my venerable colleague @oldshrewsburyianâ volunteered to discuss lesbian nuns, and was immediately deluged by requests to do just that. In my opinion, gay knights and lesbian nuns are the mlm/wlw solidarity of the Middle Ages, even if the tedious constructionists would like to remind us that we canât exactly use those terms for them. It also forces us to consider the construction of modern heterosexuality, our erroneous notions of it as hegemonically transhistorical, and the fact that behaviour we would consider âqueerâ (and therefore implicitly outside mainstream society) was not just mainstream, but central, valorized, and crucial to constructions of medieval manhood, if not without existential anxieties of its own. Because medieval societies were often organized around the chivalric class, i.e. the king and his knights, his ability to make war, and the cultural prestige and homosocial bonds of his retinue, if you were a knight, you were (increasingly as the medieval era went on) probably a person of some status. You had a consequential role to play in this world, and your identity was the subject of legal, literary, cultural, social, religious, and other influences. And a lot of that was also, letâs face it, what the 21st century would consider Kinda Gay.
The central bond in society, the glue that made it work, was the relationships between soldiers, battlefield brotherhoods, and the intense, self-sacrifical love for the other that is familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war movie, and dates back (in explicitly gay form, at least) to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Medieval society had a careful and contested interaction with this ideal and this kind of relationship between men. Because they needed it for the successful prosecution of military ventures, they held it up as the best kind of love, to which the love of a woman could never entirely aspire, but that also ran the risk of the possibility of it turning (homo)sexual. Same-sex sexual activity was well-known in the Middle Ages, the end, full stop. The use of penitentials, or confessorsâ handbooks, as sources for views or practices of queer sexual behaviour has been criticised (you will swiftly find that almost EVERYTHING used as a source for queer history is criticised, shockingly), but there remains the fact that in Burchard of Wormsâ 11th-century Decretum, a vast compilation of canon law, mentions same-sex behaviour among its list of sins, but assigns it a comparatively light penance. (I donât have the actual passage handy, but itâs a certain amount of days of fasting on bread and water.) It assigns much heavier penalties for Burchardâs main concern, which was sorcery and the practice of un-Christian beliefs, rituals, or other persistent holdovers from paganism. This is not to say that homosexuality was accepted, per se, but it was known about, it must have happened enough for priests to list in their handbooks of sins, and it wasnât The End of The World. Frankly, I am tired of having to argue that queer people existed and engaged in queer activity in the Middle Ages (not directed at you, but in general). Of course they did. Obviously they did. Moving on!
Anyway. Returning to gay knights specifically, the fact remained that if you encouraged two dudes to love each other beyond all other bonds, they might, you know, actually bang. This was worrisome, especially in the twefth century, as explored by Matthew Kuefler, âMale Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century Franceâ and Ruth Mazo Karras, âKnighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomyâ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. by Matthew Kuefler (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179-214 and 273-86. I have written a couple papers (in the ever-tedious process of one day being turned into journal articles) on the subject of the Extremely Queer Richard the Lionheart, some material of which can be found in my tag for him. Richardâs queerness has been argued over for a long time, we all throw rotten banana peels at John Gillingham who took it upon himself to deny, ignore, or minimize all the evidence, but anyway. Richard was a very masculine and powerful man and formidably talented soldier who could not be reduced to the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, or impotent sodomite, and the fact that he was a prince, a duke, and a king was probably why he was repeatedly able to get away with it. But he wasnât alone, and he wasnât the only one. He was very much part of his culture and time, even if he kept running into ecclesiastical reprisals for it. It happened. If you want a published discussion that covers some of my points (though not all of them), there is William E. Burgwinkle, âThe Curious Case of Richard the Lionheartâ, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73â85. Also on the overall topic, Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).Â
Peter the Chanter, a Parisian cleric, also wrote De vitio sodomitico, a chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum, fulminating against âmen with men, women with women [masculi cum masculis [âŠ] mulieres cum mulieribus]â which apparently happened far too often for his liking in twelfth-century Paris (along with cross-dressing and other genderqueer behaviour; the Latin version of this can be found in âVerbum Abbreviatum: De vitio sodomiticoâ in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: 1855), vol. 205, pp. 333â35). Moving into the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, this bond only grew in importance, and involved a new kind of anxiety. Richard Zeikowitzâs book, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), explores this discourse in detail, and points out that the intensely homoerotic element of chivalry was deeply embedded in medieval culture â and that this was something that was not queer, i.e. unusual, to them. It is modern audiences who see this behaviour as somehow contravening our expected stereotypes of medieval knights as Ultra Manly No Homo Men. When we label this âmedieval queerness,â we are also making a judgment about our own expectations, and the way in which we ourselves have normalized one narrow and rigid view of masculinity.
England then had two queer kings in the 14th century, Edward II and Richard II, both of whom ended up deposed. These were for other political reasons, but their queerness was not irrelevant to assessments of their character and the reactions of their contemporaries. Sylvia Federico (âQueer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century Englandâ, Medium Aevum 79 (2010), 25â46) has studied the corpus of queer-coded historical writing around Richard, and noted that while the Lancastrian propaganda postdating the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399 obviously had an intent to cast his predecessr in as unfit a light as possible, the accusations of queerness started during Richardâs reign, âwell before any real practical design on the throne [âŠ] and well before the famous lapse into tyranny that characterized the reignâs last few years. In poems and chronicles produced from the mid-1380s to the early 1390s, and in language that is highly charged with homophobic references, Richard II is marked as unfit to ruleâ. E. Amanda McVitty (âFalse Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388â1415,â Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458â77) examined how the treason trials of high-status individuals centred on a symbolic deconstruction of his chivalric manhood, demoting and exiling him from the intricate homosocial networks that governed the creation and performance of medieval masculinity.
This appears to have been a fairly extensive phenomenon, and one not confined to the geopolitical space of England. Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst (âKings and Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europeâ, Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017), 298â319) traced the use of âdiscursive sodomyâ as a rhetorical tool employed against five late medieval monarchs, including Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward II, John II and Henry IV of Castile, and Magnus Eriksson of Sweden. In all cases, the ruler in question was viewed as emotionally and possibly sexually dependent on another man, subject to his evil counsels and treacherous wiles, and this reflected a communal anxiety that the body of the king himself â and thus the body politic â had been unacceptably queered. Nonetheless, as a divinely anointed figure and the head of state, the accusations of gender displacement or suspected sodomy could not be placed directly on the king, and were instead deflected onto the favourites themselves, generally characterised as greedy, grasping men of ignoble birth, who subverted both social and sexual order by their domination of the supposedly passive king.Â
None of this polemic produced by hostile sources can be read as direct confirmation of the private and physical actions of the kings behind closed doors, but in a sense, this is immaterial. The intimate lives of presumably heterosexul individuals are constructed on the same standards of evidence and to much greater certainty. In other words, queerness and queer/gay favourites could not have functioned as atextual metaphor or charged accusation if there was not some understanding of it as a lived behaviour. After all, if the practice did not physically exist or was not considered as a potential reality, there could have been no anxieties around the possibility of its improper prosecution.
This leads us nicely into the deeply vexed question of adelphopoiesis, or the âbrother-makingâ ceremony argued by some, including John Boswell, as a medieval form of gay marriage. (Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, published the landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980, and among other things, controversially argued that the medieval Catholic church was a vehicle for social acceptance of gay people.) Boswellâs critics have fiercely attacked this stance, claiming that the ceremony was only intended to join two men together in a celibate sibling-like relationship. A Straight Historian who participated in a modern version of the ceremony in 1985 actually argued that since she had no sexual inclinations or motives in taking part, clearly it was never used for that purpose by medieval men either. (Pause for sighing.)Â
The problem is: we canât argue intentions or private actions either way. We can understand what the idealized and legal designation for the ceremony was intended to be, but we cannot then outrageously claim that every historical individual who took part in it did so for the party line reason. Maybe medieval men who joined together in brother-making ceremonies did live a celibate and saintly life (this would not be surprising). It seems ludicrous to argue, however, that none of them were romantically in love with each other, or that they never ever ever had sex, because surprise, formulaic documents and institutional guidelines cannot tell us anything about the actions of real individuals making complex choices. Even if this was not always a homosexual institution (and once again with the dangerous practice of equivocating queerness with explicitly practiced and âprovableâ sexual behaviour), it was beyond all reasonable doubt a homoromantic one, and one sanctioned and organised according to well-known medieval conventions, desires (for two men to live together and love each other above all) and anxieties (that they might then have sex).
The medieval men who took a âbrotherâ would probably not have seen it as a marriage, or as the kind of household formation or social contract implied in a heterosexual union, but as we have also discussed, the definition of marriage in the Middle Ages was under constant contestation anyway. The church was constantly anxious about knights: their violence, their (oftentimes) lack of religiosity, their proclivity for tournaments, swearing, drinking, and other immoral behavour, the possibility of them having sexual affairs with each other and/or with women (though Andreas Capellanus, in De amore, wrote an entire spectacularly misogynistic handbook about how to have the right kind of love affair with a woman and dismissed same-sex relationships in one sentence as gross and unworthy, so he was clearly the No Homo Bro Knight of his day). So, as this has gotten long: gay knights were basically one of the central social, religious, and cultural concerns of the entire Middle Ages, due to their position in society, their necessity in a warlike culture, the social influence of chivalry and their tendency to bad behaviour, their perceived influence over the king (who they may also have given their Gay Cooties), their disregard of the churchâs teachings, and the ever-present possibillity that their love wasnât celibate. So yes. Gay knights: Hella Historically Accurate.
