Monks in Love

During my years as a professor of medieval literature, I spent a lot of time thinking about the history of sexual minorities in medieval Europe. It took me a long time to realize that, on the subject of same-sex desire and expression, I find what medieval authors don’t say–and how they don’t say it–even more fascinating than what they make clear. To recover the history of marginalized sexualities, you have to develop an ear for hints of what can't be expressed directly. In the library, just as out in the world, it’s the guesswork of cruising that’s often most engaging. 

So it was more or less a foregone conclusion that I'd write two monks quietly in love with each into my novel about Norwich in 1413.

Medieval literature includes some spectacular denunciations of homosexual attraction and behavior. One of the best-known is Dante's depiction of the sodomites in the Seventh Circle of his Inferno. When a group of shades walks toward him across the burning plain (one of whom he recognizes, to his great surprise), he describes them approaching like men who squint at each other for signs of mutual recognition on the outskirts of Florence at dusk.

At the other end of the spectrum, little in medieval literature matches the astonishing positive descriptions of same-sex attraction in the writings of a twelfth-century English abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx. In multiple works, Aelred insisted on the love of individual monks for one another as a positive value, a vehicle of spiritual growth, especially in his late treatise, On Spiritual Friendship, but also in his earlier work, The Mirror of Charity. 

This flew in the face of widespread monastic suspicion of "particular friendship." Aelred doesn't condone homosexual activity: he makes it unequivocally clear that he condemns gay sex. (Or, to be a little more wary of the scruples of contemporary scholarship, "what we at present would describe as gay sex.") But his descriptions of men longing for one another in the bonds of charity are deeply eroticized--so much so that John Boswell in 1981 asserted that Aelred was undoubtedly gay. (Much to the pearl-clutching horror of conservative Catholic scholars, as well as of gay academics equally incensed by his apologia for medieval European Christianity.)

Aelred's openness to the the love of men for one another isn't just a modern misreading of his works. It earned him censure among his contemporaries as well. His writings bear traces of his own defensiveness against detractors. 

And likewise, my two monks' chaste devotion to each other isn't lost on those around them who are ready to cast aspersions. As gay people have done for so long--as gay people are still forced to do in so many places, around the world, but increasingly as well in the United States--they're flying under the radar. (To use a very anachronistic metaphor indeed.)

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