Stigma of the Medieval Times

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Birth of the Queen

Trumbach- Birth of the Queen

                 Trumbach’s findings about the gay aristocracy differ significantly from the general trends presented by other historians. While in his other texts, Trumbach claims that with time, effeminate members of the aristocracy were barred from political power, in the first part of Birth of the Queen, he talks about how aristocrats who practiced sodomy were seen as going radically against the moral order and that many peers even looked at them with awe. These men were known as bisexual libertines. These men where often characterized as atheists. Perhaps, as was said in lecture, intellectual men who were homosexual, were turned away from the church by the anti-sodomy sermons which claimed gay men to be unnatural.

               Whether they were viewed in awe or not often didn’t save them from the law that was keen on persecuting such crimes. Also, most men of the time were still not educated or in a position to take up a risky bisexual lifestyle so while the bisexual libertines were an interesting demographic, they feel more like an anomaly that the average in terms of how homosexual men lived and were treated at the time.

               Relatively early on, homosexuality was linked to passiveness and femininity. This is an example of using two prejudices to enforce each other. The misogynistic society of the time proved that gay men were unnatural and bad because they tended to act more like women, who were the weaker sex.

               Something interesting I noticed about this reading was that it referenced a few cases that I had read about from other sources such as the Castlehaven trail. Whole essays are devoted to that particular incident. Trumbach’s text, however, simply takes one point of view and uses it as evidence for a broader claim. I wonder how often a paper might cite something without informing the reader of the different sides to the event that they are using.

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Brow on Lesbian Sexuality

Brown- Lesbian Sexuality

 When studying homosexuality in the medieval ages, one of the major obstacles is the lack of evidence on the matter recorded by contemporary scribes and authors. But while sodomy as a crime provides at least criminal record to trace its history, lesbianism was prosecuted so rarely that even those resources aren’t available. For this reason I think, Brown opens his text with at least three pages of context on what different philosophers and theologians at the time wrote about lesbians. The fact that this summary only took a few pages gives the reader a grim look into the shallow pool of information provided on the subject.

               Female sodomy was generally called the “silent sin,” in stark contrast to homosexuality which was more often discussed. Male homosexuality was also more discussed. It is strange that lesbianism was called a “sin that should not be named or written about.” Besides the different treatment of genders, this attitude had a side effect of erasing lesbians from many texts that might have otherwise mentioned such instances.

               I wonder if this misogyny worked in the favor of the lesbian women in the early modern period. Even though their sexuality was still a crime, their actions were not in the spotlight of community prosecution and many more couples were probably able to live lives close to those of a normal heterosexual couple. However, while that is how things appear on the surface, perhaps in practice the tight communities in villages or convents were actually aware of lesbianism and took their own quiet means to eradicate the sin.

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Criminal Punishment as a Secular Movement.

Kai Erikson – On Social Deviance

               This reading talked about the evolution of criminal justice in medieval Europe. It’s strange that I didn’t realize before that every single public event at the time had religious undertones. Erikson brings up this fact, however to prove that while the justice system definitely saw itself as a religious entity, the movement towards more a more strict criminal code was not because of the pull of the church but rather a secular call of local governments that were growing from regional lords to princes to powerful monarchs.

               Erikson references other historians who argued that the increasing criminal system of the early middle ages was due to a religious push to strengthen morality. Erikson proves that it was in fact the expanding governments that benefitted and thus worked to install a more stringent system of punishment. While his argument makes perfect sense in the context to many everyday crimes, I think that many of the things we have studied in this class actually don’t fall into this category.

               For example, infanticide was a rare crime that occurs in the early modern period that was punished with some of the most horrific death penalties of the period. Mutilations and other such tortures were included in the capital punishment. Interestingly, it wasn’t the life of the infant that was concerning the authorities but rather the unorthodox behavior of the usually unwed mother. In this instance, the harsher penal code was directly related to the Church seeking to control sexuality and maintain morality in the population.

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Trent 1475

Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual MurderTrial, by Hsia

The details of the Trent Jewish Ritual Murder Trial finally made me understand the different mindset of the people in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. History Professors have said that the people of those times thought very differently from us but it wasn’t until reading this account that I finally understood what they meant; namely, the almost universal belief in judicial torture as the correct way to get a confession in a trial.

The theme of the trail was the interrogations where “the logic of the torture chamber was contested until the bitter end,” (pg. 92). All the arrested Jews originally claimed completely innocent and were slowly coerced with months of torture session into admitting a fantastical tail of ritual murder. It’s easy to understand that the “bad guys” would use this kind of method to get the truth they wanted out of their victims but we see the same procedure used by those trying to save the Jews from execution. The commissioner sent from Rome got a confession out of Simon’s father by using a similar method of interrogation. “Put under judicial torture, Anzelino accused the Scheweizer of killing Simon and framing the Jews,” (pg. 77). The fact that both sides of the conflict used torture to prove their point shows that society accepted torture as a valid tool for gathering evidence during a trial. What’s fascinating is that both sides accused the other of using torture to force their prisoners into confession. This is where I start to lose the thread of their logic. However, there are plenty of governments today, including our own, who still use torture to get information. After reading this book, it shocks me that anyone would still use torture. Putting the morality of it aside, clearly torture doesn’t lead to accurate testimonies.

Another aspect of the book that resonated with me was the gathering of evidence for the trial. All that the Trent government chose to include in the proceedings was the body of Simon. The original inspection by a Jewish physician showed that the little boy had drowned and sustained cuts from being thrown around in the ditch (pg. 28).  The Christian physician examined the boy a few days later and came to the opposite conclusion, stating that Simon had been thrown into the water postmortem (pg. 30). Both sides had their biases but it feels like the later Jewish confessions could have been easily proved impossible by the body still in the possession of the investigators. Surely any doctor would have seen that the boy didn’t suffer multiple stab wounds and other horrible injuries that were described during the trial. On the same note, the magistrate originally assumed that the Jews were guilty when he came to collect the body of the child because “people who are killed bleed openly in the presence of evil men or murders,” (pg.29). This urban myth could have surely been proven wrong on the spot because the body of the boy wasn’t bleeding a full day after it was found in the ditch where it had apparently been drifting for two days. The people in charge of the trial were blinded by their own bias. They found in the evidence only what they wished to find. Here again we see a mindset that is very different from that of the judicial system today. I like to think that modern courts attempt to let the evidence speak for itself where as in the times of the Trent trial, the evidence was tailored to fit an existing narrative with no care.

The question remains as to why the people of Trent wanted the ritual murder trial. The explanation can be seen in the interactions between the local government and the commissioner Dei Giudici who was sent to investigate the trial from Rome. The commissioner was met with such hostility that he left town and conducted all further investigation from a distant city. The incident lays bare the relationship between the King and Pope, who were generally in favor of the Jews, and the local government who wanted to exercise their independence from an absent ruler of a divided Holy Roman Empire and a distant religious figure. The method of rebelling was to start a trial against generally disliked minority under the protection of the ruling powers. On top of that, the cult of Simon must have brought in revenue for the town as well as the confiscated property of the executed Jews. However, this exercise in local power around the Holy Roman Empire at this time lead to the deaths of many Jews and destroying countless lives.

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My Thoughts on "Stigma."

Why I didn’t like Stigma by Erving Goffman.

--> narrative loose ends: Erving Goffman opens his novel with a “Dear Miss Lonelyhearts” letter from 1962 in which a teenage girl describes how she has become a social outcast because of her disability. The girl writes that she understands why she is not accepted and blames her own bad decisions in another life for her misfortune. In the end, she asks if she should commit suicide. As the appalled reader turns the page to the first chapter, they find no further mention of the teenager who signed her name “desperate” at the bottom of a letter that appeared to be her last hope. These unsettling loose ends are a favorite trope of Goffman and he continues to use the approach throughout the novel.

--> not enough evidence:In the letter by the convict’s daughter, Goffman tells us that stigma “spreads out in waves” of “diminishing intensity.” How stigma spreads from the main perpetrator who elicited the original negative reaction of society to those associated with him is a complex web that deserves a book of its own. Yet Goffman is satisfied in simply siting one letter submitted to the Berkeley Daily Gazette. Already, there is no broad statistic or clinical analysis to support this claim but even the small text he does provide paints a rather different story. The daughter doesn't write that her father, the ex-convict, or her mother are being stigmatized. So really it is just the girl who is feeling the stigma associated with her father’s social position. This close reading can easily show that this example is an outlier rather than an argument towards Goffman’s position.

--> offensive: Goffman wrote this novel in the 1960s which partly explains his insensitivity to the people he is describing. This becomes clear in the introductory chapter where Goffman establishes that those who are not affected by the stigma will be called “normals.” This insensitive and misleading word is further reinforced by the next sentence where Goffman assumes that the readers fall into this category and bonds with them by saying, “the attitudes we normals have. . .” (pg. 5). On this same wave, Goffman attempts to slip another huge and unsupported “fact,” “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human.” Maybe intentionally or maybe not, but Goffman isolates the people who are stigmatized by the labels he places on them. The result is that "normals" are able to stigmatize outlying individuals even in the book that is written about the issue.  Conclusion: My biggest disappointment with this book is that it didn't tell me anything I didn't know. Even if I hadn't previously placed stigmatized individuals into categories, Goffman doesn't really analyze the situations but simply lists them. In a way, he is like as Carl Linnaeus who invented the biological classification system of kingdoms, phylums, classes, ect. Linnaeus created an entire categorical system that was designed to apply to every living organism in the universe. However, he didn’t have a firm understanding of the animal kingdom, namely how species are related to each other so his system told us little about the actual relationships of the animals. In his attempt to organize stigma, Goffman doesn't uncover the physiological relationship between the "normals" and the stigmatized. 

What to take away from the novel. . .      That "normals" believe stigmatized people to have supernatural powers.