![]() In the Middle Ages, Mills argues, Orpheus is not a figure of failure primarily, but functions as a symbol of praiseworthy homosocial (and misogynistic) desire. Mobilizations of Orpheus often ignore his sodomitical tendencies and focus on the ambivalence of his backward gaze. Mills’s close reading of Orpheus in image and text troubles Heather Love’s ( Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History ) and Kaja Silverman’s ( Flesh of My Flesh ) mobilization of Orpheus as a symbol of, or model for, queer history, and so ought to be particularly interesting for historians of sexuality. Mills then compares Orpheus to Lot’s wife, as two symbols of moral backsliding. His loss of Eurydice leads Orpheus to turn toward men, causing Durer to label him as the “first sodomite.” In the Ovide moralisé, this turn toward men for pleasure is condemned but allegorically the move from the corrupt feminine to the rational masculine is figured as praiseworthy and pleasing to God. Orpheus’s glance back at Eurydice, which sends her back to hell, means that he is strongly associated with the pleasures and dangers of the gaze. He proposes that thinking through the lens of transgender draws attention to the implications of cross-gendered behaviors in medieval visualizations of sodomy.Ĭhapter 3 concentrates on the Orpheus myth and its various permutations in the Middle Ages. Reading Hildegard’s Scivias (Knowings) alongside the Ovide moralisé, Mills demonstrates the potential of transgender as a category of theoretical analysis “for interpreting certain medieval responses to the idea of unnatural sex” (p. Mills investigates the legibility and visibility of sodomitical vice in these texts: how and why do they depict “sodomites”?Ĭhapter 2 addresses the transgender possibilities of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, and how these possibilities were embraced or avoided in medieval rewritings. Chapter 1 focuses on Bibles moralisées, which are Bible texts in which the moral sense is highlighted through annotation and illustrations. Within these parameters, Mills’s analysis extends from sculpture to manuscript illuminations, and poetry to anchoritic guidance texts. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages focuses on high and late medieval England, France, and Italy, with occasional examples from the rest of medieval Europe. This kind of destabilizing analysis is typical of Mills’s impressive book, which combines theoretical insights with attentive close reading of texts, images, and material culture. Through a nuanced close reading of the medieval context, Mills argues instead that the attempt to associate Jerome with the fleshly bodies of women “would have been interpreted as an attack on Jerome’s chastity” (p. Jerome’s effeminate dress, in this reading, is a sign of his homosexuality. Mills notes that, despite attempts to uncouple sexuality and gender in some modes of political activism, to a “twenty-first century viewer, conditioned by long-standing associations between gender-variant behaviour and sexual dissidence, it may well look as though the gossiping monks are being covertly homophobic” (p. ![]() Jerome that Robert Mills begins his wide-ranging discussion of sodomitical sin in the Middle Ages. The saint is shown in church wearing a long, blue, figure-hugging dress, being discussed by two watching monks. Jerome in which he is tricked into donning female attire. This devotional manuscript includes a miniature of St. In the early fifteenth century, the three de Limbourg brothers illustrated a lavish book of hours for Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Reviewed by Kathryn Maude (King's College London) Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages.Ĭhicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
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