Painful pleasures: Sadomasochism in medieval cultures 9781526153357

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Painful pleasures

MANCHESTER MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz

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Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg and Matthew Vernon Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay ­collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the global Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: ­imaginative, historical, political, scientific and religious. Titles available in the series 31. Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama  eva von contzen and chanita goodblatt (eds) 32. Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition: Words, ideas, ­interactions  megan cavell and jennifer neville (eds) 33. From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and historical imagination  tim william machan and jón karl helgason (eds) 34. Northern memories and the English Middle Ages  tim william machan 35. Harley manuscript geographies: Literary history and the medieval ­miscellany  daniel birkholz 36. Play time: Gender, anti-Semitism and temporality in medieval biblical ­drama  daisy black 37. Transfiguring medievalism: Poetry, attention and the mysteries of the body  cary howie 38. Objects of affection: The book and the household in late medieval England  myra seaman 39. The gift of narrative in medieval England  nicholas perkins 40. Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, ­dreams  megan g. leitch 41. Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe  laura kalas and laura varnam (eds) 42. The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry  caitlin flynn 43. Painful pleasures: Sadomasochism in medieval cultures  christopher vaccaro (ed.)

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Painful pleasures Sadomasochism in medieval cultures Edited by Christopher Vaccaro

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5333 3 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Front cover—Illustration of the Crucifixion from the Rabbula Gospels (sixth century). The Yorck Project / Wikimedia.

Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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Contents

List of contributors page vii Acknowledgementsxi Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink – Christopher Vaccaro1 Part I: Spiritual and penitential (con)texts   1 Negotiating power and pleasure in The Book of Margery Kempe – Nicole Slipp37   2 Land of saints and sadists: the S/M scene(s) in ­medieval Ireland – Phillip A. Bernhardt-House68   3 Failed sadism and masochistic martyrdom in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames – Tina-Marie Ranalli93   4 The monastic pleasures of frustrated knowledge – Karmen MacKendrick129   5 The pains of being pure at heart: sadomasochism in Richard of St Victor’s On the four degrees of violent love – Christopher Michael Roman156   6 Humiliation as penance in some early penitentials – Erin Abraham179 Part II: Courtly and secular (con)texts   7 ‘I am not having what she’s having’: female sexual (un)pleasure medieval and modern – Juliana Dresvina209

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  8 Queer consolation: BDSM in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s tale, sadistic epistemology, and the ends of suffering – Masha Raskolnikov235   9 Ideological sadism or cultural enhancement: thirteenthcentury Mongols in Kievan Rus and Baghdad – Vicky Panossian267 10 Fetishising the past: Troilus and Criseyde, ­sadomasochism, and the historophilia of modern BDSM – Kersti Francis292 11 ‘My warlike grip broke his beating heart’: m ­ asochism and the deadly embrace in Beowulf ll. 2501–2508a – Christopher Vaccaro325 12 Death drive and the maiden: the queerness of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim – Philip Liston-Kraft347 Index382

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Contributors

Christopher Vaccaro is a senior lecturer at the University of Vermont, where he teaches courses on Beowulf, J. R. R. Tolkien, the history of the English language, and seminars in British literature. He has edited two volumes and published several essays on Tolkien. This is his first collection addressing medieval culture. He is currently working on two monographs, both on Old English literature: Sadomasochistic Beowulf and Remembering same-sex love. He is also co-editing a collection on queer Tolkien. He is on the editorial board of Mythlore journal and JTR, the Journal of Tolkien research, and organises sessions for the groups Tolkien at Kalamazoo and Tolkien at the University of Vermont. Erin Abraham is a visiting assistant professor in the Honors College at the University of Wyoming. She specialises in early medieval social and religious history, and her recent publications include Anticipating sin in medieval society: childhood, sexuality, and violence in the early penitentials (2018). Phillip A. Bernhardt-House (Skagit Valley College) has a BA in Medieval Studies and Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in Religious Studies from Gonzaga University, and a PhD in Celtic Civilizations from University College Cork/ National University of Ireland. He has taught history, religious studies, and Irish studies (among other subjects) for the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Brandman University (formerly Chapman University College), Skagit Valley College, and two branches of Columbia College. Their monograph Werewolves, magical hounds,

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and dog-headed men in Celtic literature was published in 2010 by the Edwin Mellen Press. Juliana Dresvina teaches medieval literary and cultural history at Middlebury CMRS, and is a member of the history faculty of the University of Oxford. She works on the history of mentality. Her recent books are A maid with a dragon (2016), Attachment and God in medieval England (2021), and Cognitive sciences and medieval studies (editor, jointly with Victoria Blud; 2020) Kersti Francis is a PhD candidate in English at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she works on the intersections between magic, gender, and sexuality in the Middle Ages and early English Renaissance. Her dissertation, ‘Queer magic: sodomy, sin and the supernatural in the later Middle Ages’, investigates discourses of naturalness vs unnaturalness in medieval understandings of sodomy, magic, and gender. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, among others. Philip Liston-Kraft received his AB at Harvard College, and studied medicine at Tufts University, completing a residency in psychiatry at McLean Hospital. He later studied law at Harvard Law School and pursued a legal career, most recently serving as in-house counsel at Biogen. He is presently a doctoral student in the Department of German Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where his research interests include medieval German vernacular medical texts and the relation between God and the individual as represented in the writings of Meister Eckhart and other mystics. His most recent publication, ‘Blind as a bat: [un]seeing the visio dei in the Granum Sinapis Diagrams’, appears in Medieval mystical theology 28 (2019). Karmen MacKendrick is a professor in the philosophy department at Le Moyne College in New York. Her recent works in and around the field of philosophical theology include Failing desire (2018) and The matter of voice: sensual soundings (2016). Her book Material mystery will be published by Fordham University Press in 2021.



Contributors ix

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Vicky Panossian is an English literature and Middle Eastern history scholar from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. She is currently putting together an edited volume entitled Contemporary multicultural escapades, which is expected to be published by 2022. Her research interests range from issues of Middle Eastern social anthropology to migration studies and the resultant diaspora discourse. Tina-Marie Ranalli earned their PhD in French studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Their research interests lie in two related areas: power relations, transgression, sex, violence, the body, intersectionality, and marginalised populations in medieval literature; and ethical, equitable, accessible technology in the field of human–computer interaction within computer science. Masha Raskolnikov is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and author of Body against soul: gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory (2009) as well as co-editor, with Greta La Fleur and Anna Klosowska, of Trans historical: gender plurality before the modern (2021). Christopher Michael Roman is Professor of English and the Graduate Studies Coordinator at Kent State University. His work investigates the entangled themes of queer theory and queer theology in medieval vernacular religion, gender and sexuality in the life of anchorites and hermits, animal studies and ecology in medieval poetry, queer theory and the comic book, and the emergent field of sound studies. Following his work on Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Richard Rolle, his new projects involve queer theory and the superhero Wolverine, and sound studies as they pertain to the comic book Daredevil. His collection Medieval futurity: essays for the future of a queer medieval studies (2021) explores new theoretical directions for queer identity in the Middle Ages. He has completed a new edition of Richard Rolle’s Middle English works to be published by the Medieval English Text Series (2021). He is also the editor of the book series New Queer Medievalisms (Medieval Institute Publications).

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Nicole Slipp is a recent PhD from the department of English at Queen’s University in Canada. She specialises in British late ­medieval literature, queer and feminist theory, and comics studies.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to start off by thanking the wonderful contributors to this volume, who gave so much of themselves and who patiently responded to my comments and queries. Thank you to Manchester University Press for having faith in the contribution this volume makes to its fields of coverage. I want to thank Steven Kruger, Aaron Hostetter, and T’ai Chu-Richardson for their advice and insights. Special thanks go also to my husband, Jimmie Searle, for providing a loving environment from which I could work. Because this volume was completed in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, I would like to give special thanks to all the first responders and essential workers for keeping our world going. Lastly, I would like to thank all the Doms, Sirs, Masters, boys, slaves, and pups, who provided continuous inspiration.

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink Christopher Vaccaro

A presumed modern phenomenon that keeps changing its nature often achieves a presumed medieval analogue. The question becomes not just ‘What, if anything, is masochism?’ but ‘When is it?’ Madeleine Brainerd, ‘Stolen pain’

In her important study into the masochism of medieval romance, Madeleine Brainerd asks the question, ‘When is it?’1 When might we call a set of libidinal responses to control, pain, and submission ‘masochism’? How do medieval responses correspond to contemporary ones? And how dependent are contemporary expressions of BDSM upon a medievalism that skews modern perceptions of the past?2 Brainerd underscores the ‘stickiness’ through which the medieval adheres to modern perceptions of S/M: The stickiness of writing about masochism in the Middle Ages, then, is only partly that ‘masochism’ arrived much more recently, and it is only partly that the term keeps receiving new definition. The stickiness is primarily the present presumptions still holding masochism to be somehow essentially medieval.3

Brainerd argues that current scholarship, alongside her own work, ‘must maintain a qualified agnosticism toward the question of whether to call anything medieval, masochist’.4 Her encouragement of a cautious and staid approach to these definitions is helpful, yet caution need not become resignation. Agnosticism suggests never knowing, the inability to accurately acquire knowledge. But rigorous examination and reconsideration brings us closer and closer to a kind of knowing. The goal then becomes to carefully evaluate what medieval S/M even means and how it might have presented

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itself, utilising a certain ‘preposterous logic’ that eschews ‘normative’ (socioculturally endorsed) teleologies and formations of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.5 Any examination of sexualities is compelled to acknowledge the historical contingencies of sexual behaviours and practices. Michel Foucault’s History of sexuality was exceedingly important in the production of this understanding, and many who have followed have attempted to thoughtfully decode conceptions around ‘bodily practices’, ‘sexuality’, ‘abjection’, and ‘pleasure’.6 If, as Foucault avers, the ‘homosexual’ did not exist before 1870 (with, say, Karl Friedrich Westphal’s ‘Contrary sexual feeling’), did then the ‘sadist’ or ‘masochist’ exist before Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined these terms?7 Can ‘sadist’ and ‘masochist’ be cautiously employed today to approximate behaviours and desires manifest in other historical periods? Todd McGowan’s assertion that scholars of history need to avoid what he calls ‘the hegemony of historicism’ is a significant consideration;8 so too is Valerie Traub’s suggestion that scholars operate with what she calls a ‘teleoskepticism’, which avoids both traditional and queer teleologies.9 Might we say today that S/M pleasures are as old as sex itself? If so, what work must be done to avoid faulty inferences? Before the manufacturing of such concepts, born in a similar fashion as was the binary homo- and heterosexuality out of the sense of essential identities and sense of self, there was not a pure ‘sex’ which individuals practised.10 More likely, the ‘kink’ was then, as it appears today, at the very heart of sexual practices – something of the common everyday sexual dynamic that is amplified, magnified, extended, and sometimes rehearsed and staged.11 During her plenary talk, ‘Mastering humiliation in medieval literature’, at the 2019 international medieval conference at Kalamazoo, Bonnie Wheeler spoke eloquently of the function of shame and humiliation in the formation of masculine identity within medieval English and Scandinavian texts and cultures.12 Point after point of Wheeler’s argument was compelling, as she examined the interlocked relations between humiliation and gender, and the need to recuperate social status within this set of relations. Loss of status elicits reciprocating acts of prowess, power, and sometimes even self-abasement. And yet, one issue outside the

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 3

scope of Wheeler’s investigation was the role of pleasure, specifically masochistic pleasure, in the formation of the medieval male psyche. The conspicuous gap raises important questions. How might we begin to speak of medieval humiliation in turns of masochism? How might defamation and shame have elicited a thrill for both the victimiser and the victim? What is the effect of humiliation upon the formation of masculine identity when that humiliation causes a palpable pleasure, ranging from the subtle to the climactic? And is such a shame-filled thrill marginal to the experience of medieval maleness, or is it in fact central? Such questions showcase the need to analyse medieval culture for sadomasochistic impulses and resonances and to study S/M practices in order to expose the libidinous nature of medieval iterations of power. The medieval as it has been conceived intersects with current iterations of sadomasochistic pleasures, where jouissance, what Ummni Khan calls ‘an enjoyment that derives from the shattering of a unified self’,13 manifests from numerous and intersecting capillaries of pleasure evinced through power, punishments, and control. Theorists have quickly come to acknowledge a set of presumptions linking the modern iteration of these behaviours to an anachronistic understanding of the Middle Ages. In important ways that map themselves upon sexual practices, modern S/M behaves as a historiographic operation. Arguing that ‘we need to continue to theorize s/m, to historicize its theorizations, and, most urgently, to theorize its historicisms’, Elizabeth Freeman observes the near dependency of some S/M on historically coded signifiers: sadomasochistic sex performs the dialectic of a quick-paced modernity and a slower ‘premodern’, the latter indexed by any number of historical periods. Seen as a kind of erotic time machine, sadomasochism offers sexual metacommentary on the dual emergence of modernity and its others, on the entangled histories of race, nationhood, and imperialism as well as sexuality. Moreover, s/m does this work in simultaneously corporeal and symbolic ways, turning the queer body into a historiographic instrument.14

Arguing for ‘the historicity of eroticism’, by which she means ‘the uses of physical sensation to break apart the present into fragments of time that may not be one’s “own” or to feel one’s present world

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as both conditioned and contingent’, Freeman links the historical performances to temporal shifts within the psyche and posits that the periodisation of sexual practices retards their tempo.15 S/M disaggregates and denaturalises time for participants through the use of bodily sensations.

Historicising S/M theory Predominated by case studies and personal interviews, sexological/psychological experts have grappled with an understanding of S/M, classifying its erotogenesis and specifying its sources of pleasure. Richard von Krafft-Ebing was likely the first to employ the terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’, stemming from the literary productions of the French Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (­1740–1814) and the Austrian Baron Leopold SacherMasoch (1836–95). Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis explored the production of sadomasochistic sexual fantasies.16 Sadism was defined thusly in relation to cruelty and punishments: ‘the experience of sexual pleasurable sensations (including orgasm) produced by acts of cruelty, bodily punishment afflicted on one’s own person or when witnessed by others, be they animals or human beings’.17 Krafft-Ebing defined masochism in relation to submission and willing abuse as, ‘a peculiar perversion of the psychical sexual life in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused’.18 In his Studies in the psychology of sex, Havelock Ellis ultimately argues that love not cruelty was the sustaining emotive response behind the sadomasochistic play of his patients. Here sadism and masochism are two complementary behaviours centred around ‘eroticallymotivated pain’.19 This recognition of love’s prominence over pain, of an erotically charged endurance, speaks true to what will later be articulated by members of the BDSM community. In his Three essays on the theory of sexuality and On the pleasure principle, Sigmund Freud spoke of sadism and masochism as ‘sexual aberrations’. In what Freud called ‘sadomasochism’, a

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 5

self-annihilating instinct (primary masochism) is directed outwardly in the form of a sadistic aggression. What is not successfully directed turns inward and becomes a masochistic pleasure in pain.20 Here masochism appears to be a form of sadism against the self. In ‘The economic problem of masochism’, Freud writes of the three modes of masochistic expression: erotogenic, the feminine, and the moral. The first two revolve around a libidinal valence, not so much the third, where a masochistic ego submits to a strict, sadistic superego. In ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’, Freud argues that in erotogenic masochism, a subject may willingly experience the unpleasantness of pain when the pain, entering into a condition of sexual excitation, produces pleasure.21 And in ‘A child is being beaten’, Freud explores the shifts in response from a non-sexual to a sexually sadistic aggression.22 Kaja Silverman argues with Freud’s notion that the male subjectivity strives for the mastery of an unpleasure as seen in the ‘fort/da game’, where a boy seeks to relive the pain of losing his mother by tossing away his toy. Identifying both a perpetual ‘negation of passivity’ and a masochism within male subjectivity, Silverman argues that the pleasure comes not from a mastery of unpleasure but from a passivity that Freud refuses to recognise.23 In Masochism in sex and society, Theodor Reik agrees with Freud that masochism is a transformation of sadistic behaviour, a product of impatience and lust: The masochist is a person of strongly sadistic disposition, who has been diverted from its instinctual aim by the vision of punishment … It is not an original longing for pain and torment that determines the path of the masochist, but the anxiety built up in front of pleasure. … His hastening toward punishment and shame is a sign of an ungovernable and ungoverned desire for the sexual aim.24

But self-punishment and shame, for Reik, are not initial objectives: ‘Pleasure is the aim, never to be abolished, and the masochistic staging is but a circuitous way to reach this aim.’25 For Reik, such microcosmic psychological phenomena are independent of the grander biological instincts laid out by Freud. For Gilles Deleuze, the two pleasures remain essentially discrete from one another.26 The sadist’s cruelty derives from his own vanquished ego, the masochist’s coldness from an imaginative ego that

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fantasises on some ideal experience.27 Deleuze insightfully argues that, contrary to what might be expected, the more powerful ego belongs to the masochist, the stronger superego to the sadist. Following the psychologists, later philosophers and theorists began to investigate the permeability and performability of the categories. One noticeable trait was the fluidity and reversibility of roles and the centrality of role-play. Deleuze argues that these roles can be switched with the right relationship to atonement: ‘The masochist is able to change into a sadist by expiating, the sadist into a masochist on condition that he does not expiate’.28 And Victor Taylor argues that power may flow between Dominants and submissives in S/M play: This reversibility of the power relationship contradicts the general understanding of the S&M dynamic, in which the masochist is viewed as being at the mercy of his or her master. In these moments of reversal, it is the masochist who emerges as the one with power.29

Michel Foucault finds within S/M play a sizeable degree of innovation and inventiveness. In the interview ‘Sex, power, and the politics of identity’, he argues for the improvisational and polymorphous nature of S/M sex, stating, ‘the S&M game is very interesting because … it is always fluid. Of course, there are roles, but everybody knows very well that those roles can be reversed’.30 Through his work, Foucault remained cognisant that S/M sex is ‘the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure … a kind of creation, a creative enterprise’31 that introduces ‘a perpetual novelty’32 within the sexual arena. For him, these erotic positions are, as Nikki Sullivan summarises, ‘simply roles, that is, ways of being that are intentionally donned for particular purposes and at specific times’.33 Extending further the notion of fluid categories leads to a scrutiny over the rigidity of their boundaries and the integrity of the ego. In Homos, Leo Bersani recognises in the dynamic a ‘jouissance of self-loss’, which suggests that the pleasure derived from exercising power might emerge out of a desire for self-negation, ‘as if the excitement of a hyperbolic self-assertion, of an unthwarted mastery over the world and, more precisely, brutalization of the other, were inseparable from an impulse of self-dissolution’.34 This masochistic self-shattering stands in contrast to the sadistic ego-centric self and

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can lead possibly to what Bersani and Philips call ‘impersonal narcissism’, whereby one’s ego takes second place to that of others.35 Feminism has had a complicated history with S/M, particularly concerning issues of pleasure, power, and consent. While the National Organization for Women condemned S/M practice in 1980 as reinforcing patriarchal relations of power, no small number of feminists have come to its defence.36 Pat Califia, for example, debates those who were anti-S/M, claiming they were swiftly foreclosing sexual possibilities for women. Califia argues that S/M threatens ‘the established order’ and recognises ‘the erotic underpinnings of our systems’.37 In relation to the subject of consent, Patrick Hopkins strives to clarify the distinctions between consensual power-play and participants of patriarchy: ‘SM participants do not rape, they do rape scenes … do not enslave, they do slave scenes … do not kidnap, they do capture and bondage scenes. … Core features of real patriarchal violence, coercive violence, are absent’.38 Practitioners too afford a greater space for female consent and agency. The authors of Different loving: an exploration of the world of sexual dominance and submission collected testimonies from their interviewees who felt that it was necessary to be given the freedoms concerning their own bodies: ‘Our female interviewees agreed that real sexual freedom implies freedom of choice. One should be free to decide for oneself what kind of sexual activity affords the maximum of sensual pleasure’.39 They speculate that female Dominants may be the ultimate act of agency, ‘the final frontier in the empowerment of women’.40 In Thinking kink: the collision of BDSM, feminism and popular culture, Catherine Scott emphatically asserts the differences between S/M and coercion: ‘It’s only BDSM when it’s consensual, and power can only be consensually surrendered if you have it in the first place’.41 Likewise, gay S/M disrupts conceptions of gender, power and bodies,42 and women of all colours can find power and agency in their freedom to enjoy kinky sex. To see a woman, and particularly a Black woman, pleasure herself in the way she desires can be challenging for critics of S/M sex, who are quick to locate sexism and racism where sometimes Black women find empowerment.43 In contemporary BDSM, it all comes down to choice; regardless of one’s sex, gender identification, or race, a person has the right to

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choose and to enjoy consensual power dynamics. This is a radical feminist position: ‘Power willingly surrendered can be an erotic fantasy for both sexes’.44 The issue of ‘normativity’ looms large within the psychological discourses on S/M. The roles of submission and domination within sexual practices appear normative within the broader kink–vanilla, bad sex–good sex continuum; that is to say, they conform to a culturally endorsed discourse. There is ample evidence to suggest that human sexuality accommodates and even fosters not only a thrill of the chase but a thrill too of the capture, with all the aspects of control and discipline related to it. And what are labelled today ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ are in fact amplified features of what could be understood as very normative behaviours.45 While Krafft-Ebing considers all non-reproductive activities as deviant, he paradoxically reports that a level of painful play (teasing, biting, pinching, wrestling), what he called ‘atavistic manifestations’, appeared within normative parameters of sexual activity among many lovers.46 Both Krafft-Ebing and Freud find some natural basis for a sadist approach to sexuality, but are less understanding regarding masochism. In both Three essays and ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, Freud explores this particular realm of human sexuality. Employing the term ‘sadomasochism’, he argues that a sadistic style of aggression is often present through a sexualised aspect of the death drive (or primary masochism) turned outwards.47 German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) argues that sadism and masochism are exaggerations of behaviours typically found in ‘normal’ sexual relationships. Havelock Ellis likewise finds such pleasures fit within normal parameters of sexual activity.48 Paul Gebhard wrote the influential essay ‘Fetishism and sadomasochism’, which addresses the normativity of aggression and dominance/submission within culture at large. Seeing S/M as more a social and scripted behaviour, Gebhard highlights the cultural production of sexual lifestyles.49 Regarding the prevalence of S/M behaviour, Gebhard remarks that ‘arousal from sadomasochistic stimuli are not rare. … [O]ne in eight females and one in five males were aroused by sadomasochistic stories’.50 And Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual behavior in the human male finds that, ‘twenty percent of

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 9

the men and twelve percent of the women who participated in the original surveys expressed some degree of arousal in response to sadomasochistic stories’.51 Additionally, Pat Califia makes the case that the eroticisation of power is not exclusive to S/M: ‘Force is not a part of the province of sadism and masochism, not part of the territory of leather and latex, bondage and discipline. It is normal’.52 In ‘A secret side of lesbian sexuality’, Califia argues on behalf of S/M as a method of exposing the centrality of the sexual within our culture: There’s an enormous hard-on beneath the priest’s robe, the cop’s uniform, the president’s business suit, the soldier’s khakis. But that phallus is powerful only as long as it is concealed, elevated to the level of a symbol, never exposed, rejected, or used in literal fucking … In an SM context, the uniforms, roles, and dialogue become a parody of authority, a challenge to it, a recognition of its secret sexual nature.53

The more one is open to experiencing sadomasochistic pleasures, the clearer it becomes that such pleasures are frequently part of the erotic fantasy within the psychosexual imaginary. Of course, not all of this is BDSM where one can expect safe, sane, and consensual transactions.

Mainstreaming kink and modern S/M Following the publication in 2011 of E. L. James’s novel Fifty shades of Grey, conversations around Dominants and submissives, about Masters and Mistresses, and slaves have become more frequent. In June of 2019 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hosted a two-hour event, Iron fist in a velvet glove, for the city’s leather community during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Stonewall riots.54 Today there exist numerous local S/M communities alongside and within a vibrant global S/M subculture; from San Francisco to Berlin, thousands assemble throughout a calendar year full of events. Those whom David M. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott would call ‘sexual outsiders’ depend, to an extent, on this subculture for resources and tools, shared values, shared views on consent, and a collective wisdom.55 Practitioners

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today purchase equipment and accessories such as cages, restraints, and paddles, participate in regional kink/leather group meetings and workshops, share a basic lexicon, and create profiles on apps such as Fetlife and Recon where members can list community identifications and behavioural preferences. Unlike earlier theorists, some modern practitioners define S/M as, ‘a variety of sexual behaviors that have an implicit or explicit power differential as a significant aspect of the erotic interaction’.56 To these practitioners, ‘sadomasochism is a thoughtful and controlled expression of adult sexuality that holds the promise of intense intimacy and sharing’.57 Today, the term BDSM has come to reference each of the major traits of the eroticised behaviour: bondage and domination (BD), dominance and submission (DS), and sadism and masochism (SM). S/M provides an erotic thrill through fantasisation. Scenes might include Master/Mistress and slave, handler and pet, and many others. These ‘consensual psychodramas’ have a set start and finish, with such limits providing physical and emotional safety.58 The successful fulfilment of the fantasy relies heavily on a mutually recognised semiotics. While perpetually negotiated, refined, and exceeded, the gestures, terms, the very mise en scène must mean something to the participants. Safe words and contracts often assist in keeping the scenes within acceptable and consensual parameters for all participants. Going well past someone’s boundaries is inimical to the dynamic. The role of consensual and performative play within modern S/M is of tremendous importance, even as participants endeavour to ‘forget’ for a time the existence of such conditionality. Today, S/M is as much about expressing, crossing, and extinguishing identity boundaries as it is about a psychosomatic arousal through the use of power and control.59 S/M play frequently involves defined sessions in which, with mutual satisfaction and consensual role-play, participants act out potentially therapeutic narratives. Some individuals contain such roles within certain parameters of time, others spend their adult lives living in one role or the other, never ‘switching’, while some see ‘switching’ of roles as integral to their queer identities. There are even surveys on bdsmtest.org one can take to establish one’s proclivities, providing

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 11

percentages for labels such as Dom, submissive, predator, prey, slave, Master, and brat. In some fascinating instances, this test will reveal an individual to be simultaneously a brat and a brat tamer, a slave and a Master. And while many individuals see S/M as having a queer and gender- or power-fluid versatility, many participants in contemporary S/M have found it most erotic to stick to their roles. Eroticism and thrill come through a discourse that essentialises identity. Doms tell their submissives that they are ‘natural’ slaves, born for this very purpose. These rigid roles and the corresponding verbal play may last for years or only minutes. Some Doms have no interest in switching roles, so their positionality in relation to their submissives remains unchanged; other Doms will use essentialising language in the moment but then have no problem switching roles so that they become ‘natural’ slaves in the next scene. A variety of thrills emerge in contemporary S/M play. One pleasure coalesces around the blurring of boundaries and the extinguishing of the self/other divide through verbal and physical means. Darren Langdridge addresses the role of pain within modern S/M, assisted by the work of Elaine Scarry (The body in pain, 1985) who speaks of a blurring of inside/out, between self and other, a double experience of agency, disintegration of consciousness during torture.60 According to Scarry, torture potentially conflates public and private, providing then no safety and no privacy.61 In contrast, Langdridge argues S/M play offers instead ‘the possibility of absolute privacy made all the more safe by the loss of agency and the presence of a trusted other and self-exposure’. Through the play of S/M, the boundaries of inside/outside and private/public may be dissolved in such a way ‘that peace and sanctity of isolation or threat and thrill of exposure can be experienced in relation with an/other/s’.62 The thrill of pain links to power, submission, and egolessness. Whipping and flogging are performed often ritualistically, with the Dom ordering that the sub count out the strokes with appreciation. The eroticisation of power is, however, the most common sadomasochistic pleasure. Practitioners experience power as ‘as part of an enticing allure’, where powerlessness is erotically charged, whether it be that of the self or of the other.63 Submissives/slaves deliberately

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give, for however long, their own agency and ­self-governance, to somebody else, rendering themselves helpless. It is understood that the power is theirs to give. Submission to power is a tremendously important aspect of masochism and, as a desired outcome of control, of sadism. Perhaps even beyond pain, the jouissance related to the submission of one’s body and will to another provides a powerful thrill: Often, it is the notion of being helpless and subject to the will of another that is sexually titillating. It is the illusion of violence, rather than violence itself, that is frequently arousing to both sadists and masochists. At the very core of sadomasochism is not pain but the idea of control – dominance and submission.64

Part of this relates to bondage, which requires that one has ‘no options but to accept one’s physical helplessness’.65 The thrill of submission is evinced today, as it was in the past, through humiliation and degradation, accomplished through insults, embarrassing and shameful positioning, clothing, or the mise en scène of a cage or chains: ‘verbal humiliation or abuse, cross-dressing, being tied up (bondage), mild spankings’.66 Paradoxically, submissive men yearn to be at the mercy of their Doms while frequently feeling humiliated by their position. Despite this, the shame felt provides an additional arousal.67 From its earliest manifestation as cultural phenomenon, S/M defied and, in many instances, fed off of social judgement, disgust, and societal abjection. Today, abjection can become a source of ‘jouissant antisocial power’,68 or what David Halperin describes as ‘the alchemical transmutation of social humiliation into eroticoreligious glorification’.69 Of course, humiliation is erotic to many submissives, so being helpless not only provides a respite from being in control most of the time but also provides an erotic thrill. Khan avers: ‘With its resignification and sexualization of hierarchical relationships and painful sensations and its use of orifices and bodily fluids for non-reproductive purposes, s/m – regardless of sexual orientation – provokes abject disorientation and incites taboo delights’.70



Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 13

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Medieval iterations/modern analogies Carolyn Dinshaw’s field-defining book Getting medieval borrows its title from a line in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp fiction, which relies on a cultural familiarity with a centuries-old association between the Middle Ages and brutality. Despite scholars such as Larissa Tracy having effectively argued that violence in the Middle Ages was condemned as much as it is today,71 it is safe to say that the medieval has become synonymous with eroticised violence.72 While today’s S/M communities explore through consensual role-play the intersections of pleasure, pain, power, ego-shattering, and humiliation, such thrills are not limited to the present; behaviours and lexicons corresponding to what is practised today are found within medieval European cultures. Prior to its association with trauma by nineteenth-century sexologists, the derivation of pleasure through pain, ‘algolagnia’, was not pathologised but rather ‘accepted as an unusual vice that might, at most, excite gossip or speculation’.73 So what were the sexual networks available to medieval Europe, broadly speaking? Was there something like a sexual culture, say, for those who used brothels? Kathy Sisson defines sexual culture as ‘a system of meanings and practices that emerge from historically specific social and psychological conditions’. Sexual cultures are subcultures; they emerge, fade away, linger, and perform certain functions for their members.74 Sisson goes on to list the stages of evolution leading to contemporary sexual cultures. The first is ‘contacts’: ‘discrete individuals sharing common desires locate and establish contact with each other’. The second, ‘networks’: ‘contacts expand to form loosely linked assemblages of like-minded individuals’. The third, ‘communities’: ‘networks emerge and coalesce into unaffiliated, regional associations based on face-toface interactions, sharing common interests, ideology, and public spaces’. Fourth, Sisson provides ‘social movements’: ‘communities grow and, often galvanized by the harassment and discrimination that accompany increasing social visibility, gather the economic, political, and social momentum necessary to support effective activist campaigns’. Fifth and last is ‘sexual cultures’: ‘ultimately, the

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communities and social movements expand and merge within a shared system of meaning and practices; a new sexual culture takes its place alongside the dominant sexual culture as one of an increasing number of twentieth-century sexual cultures’.75 There appears to be little evidence in medieval texts of a ‘sexual culture’ or ‘sexual community’ aware of itself as such. There is no counter-cultural assembling around sexual proclivities unless one considers monastic houses to be organised around a queer refusal of heterosexual activity. But there are medieval examples of ­personalised or dyadic jouissance. And while evidence to suggest a sexual network of ‘like-minded individuals’ is sparse, there seems little doubt that at this level of interaction, ‘discrete individuals sharing common desires’ could ‘establish contact with each other’. Whether a passing hint of control and pain during normative sexual practice, or an edgier ‘scene’, these behaviours likely existed in the past just as the desires did. As Ruth Mazo Karras cogently points out, sexuality in the Middle Ages was not based on neutral or mutual positions of power and agency; sex was primarily seen as a dynamic of active and passive partners. Power and action were generally held by the active partner. The passive partner was acted upon.76 Medieval sex was predicated upon hierarchies; power and control were at the very heart of normative sexual practice. Sarah Salih’s important work locates a female masochistic energy not in the margins but at the very heart of heterosexual coupling, in marriage itself: ‘Conformity and obedience in marriage offer women a sexuality with its own perverse pleasures, a masochism with social and individual rewards’.77 The experience of unpleasure within sexual activity distinguishes the genders and provides a satisfaction within ‘the erotics of power’ that undergirds medieval marriage.78 Specific medieval correspondences to modern S/M practices exist in various texts and contexts. Experiences of Christian mystics and saints more than approximate those of modern S/M scenes, where a pleasure is derived from surrender amid a physical trial. A saint’s vita and passio archive premodern experiences of martyrdom and ecstatic visions in which pleasure accompanies torment. Interestingly, evidence exists that such narratives function today as sources of S/M fantasy. Psychologist Theodor Reik describes an interview with a client who ‘frequently referred to a “martyr cycle”,

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 15

the core of which was the agonizing death of Christian martyrs’.79 The patient found a medieval image of St Laurentius being tortured and used it to manifest his masochistic pleasure. Whipping and flogging are eroticised practices recorded within hagiographic narratives. Kathy Sisson argues that ‘S/M-type’ literature of the past ‘associated flagellation with sexual pleasure’, pointing to seventeenth-century medical literature, which referenced flagellation ‘as a remedy for erectile dysfunction and female lack of desire’.80 In his In praise of the whip, Niklaus Largier investigates the manifold ways in which the whip provided religious and erotic pleasure, pointing to such sites as ‘the dormitory, schoolroom, monastic cell, church, parade ground, marketplace, prison, and brothel … where we encounter flogging in the course of human history’.81 In his coverage of the nuns of Colmar, Largier highlights the link between joy and the body in pain – a link ‘that stages finitude, mystic death, the transcendence of nature, and the return homeward into unity with God’.82 In Suspended animation, Robert Mills highlights the erotic relation of punishments to spiritual advancement as seen in hagiographic texts and thusly offers rich material to consider the painpleasure nexus:83 In a way, the martyr assumes the subversive potentiality of the masochist: he inhabits a world where pain results in ‘pleasure’ and torment in ‘joy.’ Pain, experienced as delight by the saints, is not a symbol of the fleshliness that they wish to disavow, so much as a symbol of their willingness to embrace the flesh as a source of power and subjectivity.84

This discourse on pain continues to run through S/M scenes today, as Doms teach their submissives how instructive and transformative pain will be to their development and growth as slaves. Much like the parameters of an S/M session, where a submissive finds pride and accomplishment in the display of physical perseverance, the  tortured body is a source of agency for a saint, capable of a production of pleasure within a system of objectives relating to spiritual advancement.85 Contemporary practitioners often use consensual whipping and flogging more theatrically and build up from light to more intense

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sensations. The erotic excitement stems more from the control, power, and discipline than the pain itself: ‘With each blow, the reality of the dominant’s power is impressed upon the submissive, who may in response grow more sexually excited’.86 Interviewees attest that whipping leads to a profound and sometimes spiritual ecstasy even as it leaves upon the submissive’s body a powerful imprint of power and punishment. Typical scenes involving schoolrooms, prisons, brothels, market places fit squarely into the perceptions of the medieval past. Alongside religious texts, medieval courtly love narratives frequently display sadomasochistic themes of a paradoxically sweet anguish and suffering. Eroticised power disparities define a number of medieval and early modern amorous relations: the beloved is expected to be capricious and imperious, often demanding much before austerely giving attention.87 The boundaries between romance and hagiography often overlap, particularly when addressing the martyr-type masochism of the individual in love with one she or he holds to be a personage deserving of devotion. And the relationships are predicated on erotic hierarchies. In The metastases of enjoyment, Slavoj Žižek provides his now famous opinion: ‘It is only with the emergence of masochism, or the masochistic couple, toward the end of the [nineteenth] century that we can … grasp the libidinal economy of courtly love’.88 The nineteenth century serves as an important culmination of the investigatory discourses on sexuality that emerged through the gothic medievalism of the eighteenth century. In ‘Stolen pain’, Madeleine Brainerd explores the effects of gender and class on the redistribution of pain in late twelfth-century romance narratives where a competitive martyrdom marks a new style.89 The hero, in the eyes of the romance narrators, experiences more suffering than has any other. Within a competitive martyrdom, there appears a hyperbolised description of the hero’s suffering and a concomitant pleasure. Paul Megna employs Žižek’s idea of historicity to argue that the masochistic behaviour of the medieval courtly lover actually strengthens patriarchal structures.90 The sadomasochistic role(-play) reversals bring to relief the intense male aggression undergirding courtly love. In their analysis of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Holly A. Crocker and Tison Pugh

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 17

locate in the construction of Troilus’s male identity a masochistic and potent passivity, ‘which offers Troilus a way to locate and refine his masculinity’.91 Drawing on Susan Sontag’s notion of religious suffering in Regarding the pain of others, they underscore the ways in which pain can lead to a form of exultation. Tison Pugh’s chapter ‘Mutual masochism and the hermaphroditic courtly lady in Chaucer’s Franklin’s tale’ explores ‘the anti-eroticism latent in relationships predicated upon hierarchy’.92 Courtly masochism, for Pugh, evinces itself through subservience and mutual obeisance, through ­masochistic instances, ‘in which cruelty can never be fully renounced because the anti-erotic play of both knight and lady now requires that each beloved demand his/her partner to instigate masochistically cruel rituals to test each other’.93 Interestingly, Jeffrey J. Cohen eloquently argues that chivalric masochism exposes the deeper power structure of medieval courtly life; it is an enduring but historically specific … assemblage, an intersubjective sexuality that almost always involves a transposition of institutionalized dominance and submission into unexpected arenas of performance; a subsequent estranging or queering of that structure through magnification, exaggeration, and sexualization, rendering visible normally unseen operations of power.94

In his reading of Chrétien de Troyes’s well-known Le Chevalier de la Charrete (‘The knight of the cart’), Cohen argues that both Lancelot and Chrétien appear to submit to various power formations within the ‘masochistic conjointure’ of the poem and find ‘strength through disappearance, self-assertion through self-abnegation, an excess of visibility through a technology of vanishing’.95 The sadomasochistic nature of chivalric behaviour is something readers, both medieval and modern, could experience vicariously. Richard Zeikowitz argues that the reader is able to imaginatively participate in the brutal fight scenes between the knights Lancelot and Gawain and others: ‘By imagining a protracted fight scenario described in a chivalric text and identifying with one or both of the protagonists- each of whom occupying at some point the positions of attacker and attacked – male readers can experience the eroticized pleasure of pain’.96 Zeikowitz borrows from Freud’s

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‘A child is being beaten’ in order to imagine the manifestation of sadistic desire as a reader imagines the violence between protagonists, particularly when the initial aggressor is himself placed in the masochist position by being wounded, then entering the sexualised sadistic position: In the third phase, the reader might identify with whichever knight gains the upper hand, thus forming a sadomasochistic identification with the beater; for, having previously identified with the beaten knight, the reader identifying now with the beater derives masochistic pleasure by also identifying with the one being beaten.97

Zeikowitz posits a link between the ‘love that unites the wounded knight with his attacker’ and the reader’s emotional investment in the characters,98 a link which is relevant to both medieval and modern readers. And so do we find various S/M possibilities within medieval court culture.

About this book This book is about pleasures. Pleasures have a way of transforming and being transformed by culture, some extending beyond what is culturally normative while others appearing squarely within prescribed parameters. Networks and communities are often built around shared enjoyments; people come to identify with others with whom a pleasure is shared. According to Sara Ahmed, ‘pleasure involves an opening towards others; pleasure orientates bodies towards other bodies in a way that impresses on the surface, and creates surface tensions’; she argues pleasures are about ‘the contact between bodies that are already shaped by past histories of contact’.99 And so, this volume is also about bodies and the reshaping of bodies, bodies constituted through their painful pleasures, queer and otherwise. Ahmed makes the accurate distinction for queer pleasures found ‘in the enjoyment of forbidden or barred contact’ which ‘engender the possibility of different kinds of impressions’.100 Out of the cold empiricism of the eighteenth century, de Sade discloses the pleasures of causing pain. Out of the romantic ­medievalism

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 19

of the nineteenth century, Sacher-Masoch orchestrates his own servitude. Out of the pathologising impulse of the same century, KrafftEbing recorded through a clinical mode the pleasures of suffering. And out of a queer movement of the early twenty-first century, a global BDSM culture resists essentialising categories and celebrates fluid and playful scenes of eroticised violence. BDSM depends on stagings of violence, humiliation, and control, and it does so through a material culture recognised as part of the medieval past. Ropes and chains tether participants to beds and gurneys. Neck collars, blindfolds, restraints, and leashes secure a semiotics of erotic slavery. Paddles, whips, clamps, and stretching devices leave submissives in heightened states of awareness while simultaneously rendering them (willingly) bereft of rational means of communication. Sadomasochistic pleasures make visible through queer performances the normativity of eroticised power disparities, through their excesses and magnifications, through unanticipated disclosures and gender performances. A masculine submissive could express pleasure over being humiliated and subservient, and this pleasure queerly impresses itself upon cultural perceptions. Disclosing the pleasures of pain or submission creates waves and ripples wherein normative performances of gender and sex can be disrupted. Clearly, this volume is also about pain, but not always that of a whip on skin, though certainly the body in pain looms large in many ­investigations into S/M. Sometimes, pain refers to a dissolution of the ego, the constraint of personal agency, the anguish from a broken heart (figuratively and literally), or the agonising postponement of desires. While the scholarship referenced above has made headway into examining the subject of S/M in medieval cultures, Painful pleasures is at this point in time the only volume dedicated to making the subject its primary focus. As such, it goes further than many of the earlier discrete studies.101 Its contributions share multiple connections and numerous friction points that will surely spark theoretical and critical conversations. They have been organised along specific points of contact, but they could easily be rearranged alongside any number of axes. They examine their respective medieval texts under the light of contemporary ideas and theories on S/M, including roles and role-play, consent and contracts, control and power exchange, submission and denigration/­ humiliation.

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Each chapter also contributes an appertaining lexicon, which acquaints readers with the erotic terms used in the Middle Ages and provides rigorous philological comparisons to our own modern erotic vocabulary. Painful pleasures organises its investigations into two parts, based on distinctions between religious and secular (con)texts. Of course, one finds hagiographic resonances within secular romances and amorous elements (such as the sponsa Christi motif) in religious texts, but religious and secular contexts present different priorities; eroticisation arrives from different points of origin. The Roman Catholic Church was the ideological backbone of Western medieval Europe, so it is useful to highlight examples of S/M within monastic, mystical, and ecclesiastic contexts where they cluster around issues of spiritual tempering, healing, and advancement. It is equally important to underscore the intersections of power/control and eroticism in bedrooms, on battlefields, and in books. Part I, ‘Spiritual and penitential (con)texts’, explores the sadomasochistic pleasures of medieval monastic and mystical life, highlighting religious devotion, bodily renunciation, humility, and submission. Investigations into religious discourses expose the libidinal possibilities within penitential and correctional activities such as fasting and whipping. Within a swath of early medieval hagiography, antique narratives provided eroticised examples of the will (and failure) of Roman magistrates to dominate the Christian martyr. In Chapter 1, Nicole Slipp provides a focus on consent. Her argument centres around Margery Kempe’s navigation away from the non-consensual pain of earthly relationships towards a consensual and empowering devotional masochism with Christ, who serves as her loving Master. Modern Dom/sub dynamics serve as a lens through which Slipp examines Kempe’s relationship to God’s power. In Chapter 2, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House speaks to the sadistic possibilities of Irish legends. Through his readings of the tales Fingal Rónáin, ‘The Kin-slaying of Rónán’, and Serglige Con Culainn, ‘The Sick-bed of Cú Chulainn’, Bernhardt-House closely examines the use of the horsewhip and riding crop within scenes of punishment. He likewise addresses correspondences between S/M flogging and the erotic ascetic practices one can trace in the late seventh-/early eighth-century Hiberno-Latin hagiography of

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 21

St Colum Cille (alias Columba) written by Adomnán of Iona. Ultimately, Bernhardt-House highlights the erotic connections between purgation, submission, and spiritual advancement. In Chapter 3, a multitude of misogynistic narratives inform the work of Tina-Marie Ranalli in which they argue that an economy of violence exposes the sexualised nature of the passios. Ranalli defines the female body as palimpsest for the textual production of violence and sex; however, female agency and power also emerge in a battle for control. Ironically, it is the scopophilic persecutors who are subjugated. Focused around monastic communities, Chapter 4 hinges upon the recognition that Christians are obligated to know (and correct) themselves, to know their truth. A painful joy, pairing love of learning and desire for God, structures monastic life in a manner similar to contemporary masochistic practice. In this chapter, Karmen MacKendrick insightfully recognises a desire for failure and the power surrounding Truth within the cultural imaginary, while exploring the sadomasochistic epistemologies of confession. In Chapter 5, Christopher Michael Roman argues that Richard of St Victor’s ‘programme of disciplinary love’ is bent on creating a love out of domination, submission, bondage, and obedience through truth-games and paressia concerned with the expression of truth and self-knowledge. Roman reads the text as an S/M manual for the soul and recognises a shared discourse of the Master and disciple. In Chapter 6, Erin Abraham provides critical evidence of a penitential creed: ‘contraries are cured by contraries’. Through an examination of the Penitential of Cummean and the Penitential of Columbanus, Abraham investigates the nature of sexual sins within the lay and clerical communities and details how social and physical pain of offenders, through fasting, exile, and service, healed the community and repaired the soul. Part II, ‘Courtly and secular (con)texts’, traces instances of dominance and submission within secular discourses, those more appertaining to life at the court, in the marriage bed, and on the battlefield. Behaviours in this sphere might be in tension with the Church, evolving from more regionalised or even familial-­kinship patterns. Chivalric romances told at court tell of pleasures that

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resonate with those of the S/M world today, and describe scenarios that fuel sadomasochistic fantasies. In Chapter 7, Juliana Dresvina explores the moral pleasures of female suffering during and after coitus, paying particular attention to the ‘icliterate’ nature of medieval cultures. Dresvina points to the sadomasochistic nature of medieval women’s sexual experience: the lack of fulfilment and the failure to achieve orgasm. Dresvina’s research unveils a sadistic indifference of and callous ignorance towards female sexual pleasure and a masochistic acceptance of perpetually deferred pleasures. In Chapter 8, Masha Raskolnikov explores how consent functions in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century The Clerk’s tale, reading that narrative as an engagement in the fantasy of an endlessly capacious masochism capable of sustaining maximum suffering. Raskolnikov examines how the hyperbolic heterosexuality of the tale’s violent marriage is marked as impossible and forbidden, arguing that its excesses ultimately work to queer Griselda’s wifely submission. In Chapter 9, Vicky Panossian explores the unique and culturally specific ‘ideological sadism’ employed by the Mongols throughout their invasions of Kievan Rus and Persia. She argues that the Slavs internalised such a sadism in a way that the Arab cultures could not. Pointing to a Kantian sadistic law, which becomes externalised and internalised by its victims, Panossian ultimately argues that a cultural enhancement leading to a coherent Russian identity is the result of Mongol sadism rather than a cultural masochism that one might expect. In Chapter 10, Kersti Francis explores the erotic titillation evinced through temporal dissonances, especially in works of fiction both medieval and modern. Through what she calls ‘historophilia’, Francis locates a masochistic jouissance within the literary anachronisms of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and E. L. James’s Fifty shades of Grey. Looking back to a historical period where pleasurable pain was acknowledged and celebrated, the study provides validation to modern-day practitioners of S/M. Chapter 11 borrows from Christopher Vaccaro’s forthcoming monograph project Sadomasochistic Beowulf. Focusing on the scene of Beowulf’s victory over the champion Dæghrefn, this analysis explores the queer pleasures associated with the dispersal of the self, the extinguishing of the ego, and the public submission to a more

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 23

dominant individual, specifically here a male to a more dominant male. Ultimately, it recognises a catharsis in which the reader or listener’s search for dissolution and negation is ‘resolved’ vicariously through the hero’s superhuman embrace. Lastly, Chapter 12 relies significantly upon a Freudian d ­ escription of the life and death drives and their relation to sadomasochistic pleasures. Philip Liston-Kraft points to an excessive sexuality that appears as a martyr’s masochism and Hrotsvit’s restructuring of the masochism of the death drive to establish a quasi-utopian homosocial community. Through the chapters that follow, Painful pleasures compiles evidence of the ways in which power and control were eroticised in the Middle Ages, how sexuality was then as it is today imbued to varying degrees with a thrill of the chase and the capture, and how pain and humiliation could not only be pleasurable but central to formations of gendered identities and to spiritual advancement. It makes substantial gains in exploring the medieval terrain of eroticised power and pain and asks how looking at S/M historically might affect our conception of the Middle Ages, and – ­preposterously – of ourselves.

Notes 1 Madeleine Brainerd, ‘Stolen pain: romance and the redistribution of suffering’, in One hundred years of masochism: literary texts, social and cultural contexts, ed. Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 71–90 (p. 72). 2 The term BDSM stands for a number of erotic behaviours. Most typically it is taken to mean ‘Bondage, Domination, Sadism, Masochism’. 3 Brainerd, ‘Stolen pain’, p. 72. 4 Brainerd, ‘Stolen pain’, p. 72. 5 See Glenn Burger and Stephen F. Kruger, ‘History and a logic of the preposterous’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Medieval cultures, 27 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Burger and Kruger ask, ‘might we need (preposterously) to rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding modernity but as the effect of a certain self-construction of the modern, which gives itself i­dentity

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by d ­elimiting a “before” that is everything the modern is not?’ ­(pp. xi–xix). 6 Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, vol 2: The use of pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 215; Roland Barthes, The pleasure of the text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975); see also Suzanne Gearheart, ‘Foucault’s response to Freud: sado-masochism and the aestheticization of power’, Style, 29.3 (1995): 389–403 (389). 7 See Carl Westphal’s 1870 essay ‘Die konträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes’ (‘Contrary sexual sensations: the symptom of a neuropathic (psychopathic) condition’) in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. Michel Foucault makes the now infamous argument that ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’, in The history of sexuality, vol 1: An introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 43. 8 Todd McGowan, ‘The bankruptcy of historicism’, in Everything you always wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 89–106 (p. 91). 9 Valerie Traub, ‘The new unhistoricism in queer studies’, PMLA, 128 (2013): 21–39. 10 I recognise that ‘selfhood’ in the Middle Ages differs from that of today, but I do not engage in a lengthy examination of that topic here. 11 A global rise in a far-right terrorism and in a radicalised fascist-­leaning white supremacy in the United States and Europe makes it necessary to reaffirm that BDSM practice is frequently a queer practice; it exposes the sexualised nature of power, its performative nature, defining its accoutrements as a type of drag. BDSM brings attention also to the performative and fluid nature of gender roles, and the queer temporalities surrounding kink-sex. And most importantly, BDSM is a consensual and innovative fulfilment of sexual fantasies. In providing a space to examine historical iterations of sadomasochism and how it can provide agency in unexpected ways (particularly in how masochistic pleasure can queer scenes of humiliation and torture), this volume hopes to undermine in its own way the rise of a sadistic farright fascism emboldened in the West. 12 Bonnie Wheeler, ‘Mastering humiliation in medieval literature’, plenary talk at the International Medieval Conference at Kalamazoo, Session 333, Saturday, 11 May 2019.

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 25

13 Ummni Khan, Vicarious kinks: S/M in the socio-legal imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 17. 14 Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Turn the beat around: sadomasochism, temporality, history’, differences, 19.1 (2008): 32–70 (34); here Freeman sets out her aims: ‘I want to focus on sadomasochism, an extremely marginalized sexual practice that I understand in predominantly ­temporal terms, as a deployment of bodily sensations through which the subject’s normative timing is disaggregated and denaturalized’ (34). 15 Freeman, ‘Turn the beat around’, 38. 16 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, with especial reference to the antipathic sexual instinct: a medico-forensic study, 12th edn, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Stein and Day, 1978). 17 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, p. 53. 18 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, p. 86. 19 ‘The masochist desires to experience pain, but he generally desires that it should be inflicted in love; the sadist desires to inflict pain, but in some cases, if not in most, he desires that it should be felt as love’ (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the psychology of sex, vol. 1, part 1 (New York: Random House, 1942), p. 160). See also the important work of Iwan Bloch (1872–1922), such as Strange sexual practices in all races of the world, trans. Keene Wallis (New York: Falstaff Press, 1933). 20 Sigmund Freud, Three essays on the theory of sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000). For more on Freud’s views on masochism see ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’, The Freud reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York and London: Norton, 1989), pp. 562–7; ‘A child is being beaten’, The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey and Alix Strachey (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 185–8, and ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, The Freud reader, pp. 594–626. See also Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual anomalies and perversions. A summary of the works of the late professor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Book four: sexual aberrations arising from fixations on component impulses, ed. Norman Haire (New York: Encyclopaedic Press, 1966). 21 Freud, ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’. 22 Freud, ‘A child is being beaten’. See D. N. Rodowick, The difficulty of difference: psychoanalysis, sexual difference and film theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 66–94. 23 Kaja Silverman, ‘Masochism and subjectivity’, Framework: the journal of cinema and media, 12 (1980): 2–9 (3).

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24 Theodor Reik, Masochism in sex and society, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 191. 25 Reik, Masochism in sex and society, p. 191. 26 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1989): ‘even though the sadist may definitely enjoy being hurt, it does not follow that he enjoys it in the same way as the masochist; likewise, the masochist’s pleasure in inflicting pain is not necessarily the same as the sadist’s’ (p. 46). See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), and Carol Siegel, Male masochism: modern versions of the story of love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 27 Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, p. 134. 28 Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, p. 40. 29 Victor E. Taylor, ‘Contracting masochism’, in One hundred years of masochism, ed. Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 53–69 (p. 54). 30 Michel Foucault, ‘Sex, power, and the politics of identity’, in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 163–73 (p. 169). 31 Foucault, ‘Sex, power, and the politics of identity’, p. 165. 32 Michel Foucault, ‘Sexual choice, sexual act’, in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, pp. 141–56 (p. 152). 33 Nikki Sullivan, ‘Sadomasochism as resistance?’, in A critical introduction to queer theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 151–67 (p. 154). 34 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 96. 35 Leo Bersani and Adam Philips, Intimacies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 85. See also Volker Woltersdorff, ‘Masochistic self-shattering between destructiveness and productivity’, in Destruction in the performative, ed. Alice Lagaay and Michael Lorber, Critical Studies, 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 133–51. 36 In 1982, Judy Butler located a deep-seated oppression in the women who ‘consented’ to dominance; see Judy Butler, ‘Lesbian s&m: the politics of dis-illusion’, in Against sadomasochism: a radical feminist analysis, ed. Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E.  H. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star (San Francisco: Frog in the Well, 1982), pp. 168–75. And yet 1982 also saw the publication of Coming to power: writings and graphics on lesbian s/m, 3rd edn, ed. Samois (Boston: Alyson, 1982).

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 27

37 Pat Califia, ‘A secret side of lesbian sexuality’, in S and M: studies in sadomasochism, ed. Thomas Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1983), pp. 129–36 (p. 135). 38 Patrick Hopkins, ‘Rethinking sadomasochism: feminism, interpretation, and stimulation’, Hypatia, 9.1 (2008): 116–41 (123). 39 Gloria G. Brame, William D. Brame, and Jon Jacobs, Different loving: an exploration of the world of sexual dominance and submission (New York: Villard, 1993), p. 54. 40 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 55. 41 Catherine Scott, Thinking kink: the collision of BDSM, feminism and popular culture (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), p. 188. 42 Scott, Thinking kink, p. 155. 43 ‘The media’s tendency to reduce all interactions to simple binaries of oppressor/oppressed, especially in the case of race, is often too blunt a tool to address the fluidity of how power moves back and forth between parties in a BDSM exchange’ (Scott, Thinking kink, p. 196). Reading Kirin Wachter-Grene’s guest edited issue ‘At the limits of desire: Black radical pleasure’, The Black Scholar, 50.2 (Summer 2020), which examines intersections of Blackness and kink/BDSM, will be useful here, as well as work by Darieck Scott and Jennifer Nash. 44 Scott, Thinking kink, p. 203. 45 India’s second-century Kama Sutra covers behaviours such as biting, scratching, and consensual erotic slapping. Johann Heinrich Meibom’s treatise (1639) speaks to the medical/moral benefits of flogging. And in 1782, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote of a certain pleasure that came from childhood beatings by Mademoiselle Lambercier: ‘I had found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sensuality which had left me less afraid than desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand. No doubt some precocious sexual instinct was mingled with this feeling, for the same chastisement inflicted by her brother would not have seemed to me at all pleasant’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1904), p. 12). 46 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, p. 53; as cited in Thomas Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction to the study of sadomasochism’, in S and M: studies in sadomasochism, p. 17. 47 Weinberg and Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction’, p. 18; Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, pp. 621–2. 48 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the psychology of sex, vol. 3: Analysis of the sexual impulse, love and pain, and the sexual impulse in women (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), p. 90. First published Random House (1903).

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49 Paul H. Gebhard, ‘Fetishism and sadomasochism’, Science and psychoanalysis, 15 (1969): 71–80; cited in Weinberg and Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction’, pp. 20–1. 50 Paul Gebhard, ‘Fetishism and sadomasochism’, 79; cited from Weinberg and Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction’, p. 23. 51 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 28. 52 Pat Califia, Macho sluts (Boston: Alyson, 1988), p. 9. 53 Califia, ‘A secret side of lesbian sexuality’, p. 135. See also Pat Califia, ‘Feminism and sadomasochism’, in Feminism and sexuality: a reader, ed. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 230–7. 54 Tiona Nekkia McClodden, ‘Stonewall 50 Celebration with Tiona Nekkia McClodden’ (2019), www.tionam.com/iron-fist-in-a-velvetglove-stonewall-50 (accessed 20 December 2021): ‘Iron fist in a velvet glove is a leather pride event prioritizing the SM community through performance, intervention, and series of readings set to take over the Whitney Museum of American Art on June 13 for two hours. Thematically set as a cruising party to retain knowledge tied to the material culture of the SM community, attendees will be asked to declare themselves as either voyeur or player before entering the building. All attendees are encouraged to flag in respect to all LGBT flagging systems (Hankies, Nails, Keys), which will be recognized and respected. Consent is core to this event.’ 55 David M. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott, Sexual outsiders: understanding BDSM sexualities and communities (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p. 35. 56 Charles Moser and Peggy J. Kleinplatz, ‘Themes of SM expression’, in Safe, sane and consensual: contemporary perspectives on sadomasochism, ed. Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 35–53 (p. 41). 57 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 5. 58 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 106. 59 See Gerard and Caroline Greene, S-M: the last taboo (New York: Grove Press, 1974), also Larry Townsend, The leatherman’s handbook (New York: The Other Traveller, 1972). 60 Darren Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable: S/M and the eroticisation of pain’, in Langdridge and Barker, Safe, sane and consensual, pp. 91–103 (p. 95). 61 Elaine Scarry, The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4.

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 29

62 Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable’, p. 97. Langdridge is particularly interested in the ways in which consensual pain play ­ ‘offers up a very real and visceral way of fusing the bodily horizons of self and other: a fleshly intertwining across a divide of otherness’ (p. 99), and offers ‘through the transfer of flesh and fluid, power, and emotion … that rare thing, a tender moment of togetherness’ (p. 101). 63 Ortmann and Sprott, Sexual outsiders, p. 85. 64 Weinberg and Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction’, p. 20. 65 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 206. 66 Weinberg and Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction’, p. 20. 67 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 108. 68 Khan, Vicarious kinks, p. 17. 69 David Halperin, What do gay men want: an essay on sex, risk, and subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 75. 70 Khan, Vicarious kinks, pp. 17–18. Khan reminds us that ‘[a]bjection instills anxiety about the collapse of categories, order, and meaning, but it is also associated with jouissance – an enjoyment that derives from the shattering of a unified self’ (p. 17). For an interesting examination of race in conjunction with this jouissance, on consent of Black women, see Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational flesh: race, power and masochism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014). 71 Larissa Tracy, Torture and brutality in medieval literature: negotiations of national identity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 292. 72 An inextricable link exists between the emergence of the gothic and sadomasochism, developing into a modern taste for the horror genre today. In Nightmare on Mainstreet, Mark Edmundson draws a fairly straight (albeit conservative) line from Sade to Poe and to the centrality of such an eroticisation of violence: ‘For at the core of every Gothic plot is the S&M scenario: victim, victimizer, terrible place, torment. From the psycho-analytical point of view, all of Gothic literature and film could be seen as the effort to purvey – while disguising, for the benefit of censors, internal and external – the pleasures of the sadomasochistic encounter’ (Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Mainstreet: angels, sadomasochism, and the culture of the Gothic (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 133). 73 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 188. 74 Kathy Sisson, ‘The cultural formation of S/M: history and analysis’, in Langdridge and Barker, Safe, sane and consensual, pp. 16–40 (pp. 17–18). 75 Sisson, ‘The cultural formation of S/M’, p. 18.

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76 Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe: doing unto others (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 27. 77 Sarah Salih, ‘Unpleasures of the flesh: medieval marriage, masochism and the history of heterosexuality’, Studies in the age of Chaucer, 33 (2011): 125–47 (147). See also Kristina Hildebrand, ‘Her desire and his: letters between fifteenth-century lovers’, in The erotic in the literature of medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 132–41. 78 Salih, ‘Unpleasures of the flesh’, 134. 79 Reik, Masochism in sex and society, p. 54. 80 Sisson, ‘The cultural formation of S/M’, p. 19. 81 Niklaus Largier, In praise of the whip: a cultural history of arousal, trans. Graham Harman (New York: Zone, 2007). Largier explains his objective: ‘what interests us is the voluntary practice and praise of the whip, the ritual of flagellation, the staging of the body, and the corresponding affirmative or critical, literary or scientific discourses in which flagellation has been discussed’ (p. 18). 82 Largier, In praise of the whip, p. 55. Also: ‘As mimesis, as imitation, it aims at something other than mere representation and similarity of suffering. What flagellation signifies instead (and here is its exemplarity) is a making present that breaks through symbolic similarity and historical relations and seeks to produce for us a “real” immediate presence to the suffering God – an immediacy made possible through suffering, but also shattered by it’ (p. 57). Additionally, Roland Finger examines the sadistic pleasures of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. He posits that the Wife is able to effectively dominate her husbands through her sexualized power; see Roland Finger, ‘Cracking the whip: sadomasochistic heroics in the Wife of Bath’s prologue’, Exit 9: the Rutgers journal of comparative literature, 5 (2003): 65–74. 83 Robert Mills, Suspended animation: pain, pleasure, and punishment in medieval culture (London: Reaktion, 2005). See also Karmen MacKendrick, counterpleasures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 52. 84 Mills, Suspended animation, p. 8. 85 See also Robert Mills, ‘Homosexuality: specters of Sodom’, in A cultural history of sexuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans (New York: Berg, 2011), pp. 57–79. Mills argues that such a ‘queering of the pain-pleasure nexus’ may have unexpected results on gender: ‘exhibitionism and masochism have the capacity, in certain contexts, to become strengthening and ultra-virile pursuits’ (Robert Mills, ‘“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: masculinity, masochism, and

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Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 31

queer play in representations of male martyrdom’, Exemplaria, 13.1 (2001): 1–37 (13)). 86 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, pp. 258–60. 87 Marilynn Desmond argues for a potential usefulness to explorations of medieval instances of erotic violence. She too recognises the role of masochistic fantasy within the romance tradition; see Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s art and the Wife of Bath: the ethics of erotic violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 88 Slavoj Žižek, The metastases of enjoyment: six essays on woman and causality (New York: Verso, 1994), p. 89. See also Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy your symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York: Routledge, 1992). 89 Brainerd defines masochism as ‘suffering that repeats itself, potentially altering itself through shifting power relations’ (Brainerd, ‘Stolen pain’, p. 72). 90 Paul Megna, ‘Courtly love hate is undead: Sadomasochistic privilege in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, in Everything you wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 267–89 (p.  287). Megna contends that, ‘Just as Capellanus’s courtly lover can defer obsequiously to an aristocratic woman’s whim at one moment and rape a peasant the next, so too can Troilus reap masochistic enjoyment from loving Criseyde without reciprocation at one moment and channel his sadistic hatred of Diomede the next’ (p. 283). Defining this historicity, Megna quotes from p.  81 of Enjoy your symptom!: [the] ‘unhistorical traumatic kernel of the Real which returns as the Same through all historical epochs’. See Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, The post-historical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); see also Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s medievalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 91 Holly Crocker and Tison Pugh, ‘Masochism, masculinity, and the pleasures of Troilus’, in Men and masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 82–96 (p. 86). Sarah Beckwith examines the problems associated with the ‘sacramental theatre’ of finding comfort in the pain of Christ in Signifying God: social relations and symbolic act in the York Corpus Christi plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 92 Tison Pugh, Chaucer’s (anti-)eroticisms and the queer Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), p. 32. Pugh argues sufficiently that the gender of the Courtly Lady figure could find itself

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free from the female body and open to a hermaphroditic rendering on The Thing: ‘If a woman can assume both the roles of Courtly Lady and of wife, so too may her suitor assume both the roles of husband and of Courtly Lady in an ultimate queering of gender’ (p. 46). 93 Pugh, Chaucer’s (anti-)eroticisms and the queer Middle Ages, p. 47. 94 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval identity machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 79. 95 Cohen, Medieval identity machines, pp. 107, 113–14. Cohen makes reference to ‘Guinevere in furs’ when examining her role in Chretien’s texts. See also Robert Sturges, ‘La(ca)ncelot’, Arthurian interpretations, 4.2 (1990): 12–23. Also Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Masoch/ Lancelotism’, New literary history, 28.2 (1997): 231–60. Also relevant here is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘A poem is being written’, in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Routledge, 1993), pp. 177–214. 96 Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and chivalry: discourses of male same-sex desire in the fourteenth century (New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 79. Zeikowitz (p. 78) also evokes Elizabeth Cowie’s analysis of reading and film spectatorship: ‘just as we draw on the events of the day to produce our own fantasies, so too we can adopt and adapt the ready-made scenarios of fiction, as if their contingent material had been our own’ (Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the woman: cinema and psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 140). 97 Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and chivalry, pp. 79–80. Zeikowtiz outlines the argument thusly: ‘Phase 1: knight A is beating knight B [whom the reader hates]. Phase 2: the reader fantasizes being beaten by knight A. Phase 3: knights A and B are beating each other, which the reader is observing.’ 98 Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and chivalry, p. 80. 99 Sara Ahmed, ‘Queer feelings’, in The Routledge queer studies reader, ed. D. Hall, A. Jagose, A. Bebell, and S. Potter (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 422–41 (p. 437). 100 Ahmed, ‘Queer feelings’, p. 437. 101 A conspicuous gap in the volume is a chapter on the racial vectors in relation to sadomasochistic behaviours. There is a good deal one could say on race, and a great effort was made to intersect the subject with the arguments presented in this volume. However, an enquiry remains essential and deserves to be the focus of its own study. See Musser, Sensational flesh. Also Ariane Cruz, ‘Beyond black and blue: BDSM, internet pornography, and black female sexuality’, Feminist studies, 41.2 (2015): 409–36: ‘Reconciled by the erection of fragile



Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink 33

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yet formidable boundaries between the constructs of fantasy/reality, inside/ outside, mind/body, and Black/white, Black women BDSMers engage in an elaborate play of race in the pursuit of not only sexual pleasure but also sentience. BDSM is a productive space from which to consider more than the multiplicity of Black women’s sexual p ­ ractice and the multeity of Black female sexuality’ (435).

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Part I

Spiritual and penitential (con)texts

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1

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Negotiating power and pleasure in The Book of Margery Kempe Nicole Slipp

In The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery’s relationships to pain, sex, and Christ highlight the power dynamics that she navigates as a woman in fifteenth-century England, and her navigations resonate with the practices of the contemporary queer communities of BDSM. BDSM theory offers a way to understand pain that does not rely on an opposition between pain and pleasure, on pathologisation, or on a reductive understanding of the possibilities of agency in desire. Following an analysis of the connections between Margery’s devotional practices and kink, this chapter considers Margery’s performances as examples of queer performativity and futurity,1 and, finally, explains her queer affective piety as a form of empowering masochism. BDSM could stand for bondage and discipline (BD), domination and submission (D/S), and sadism and masochism (SM). It functions as an umbrella term for a wide variety of sexual practices and identities; acts or desires that can be classified as kinky all essentially involve the conscious and performative resistance to or manipulation of existing power dynamics between practitioners. The other essential elements of BDSM are fantasy and performance. BDSM has the ability to queer heteronormative relations, not only because of its foregrounding of non-genital stimulation and flexibility on issues of gender and identity, but also because it has the ability to highlight power imbalances and a lack of consent that can form the basis of patriarchal, heteronormative relationships. A kink-informed reading (kinky reading) entails paying close attention to the particulars of fantasy, consent, violent or painful erotic content, and sexual power exchange in a text with

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Spiritual and penitential (con)texts

the understanding that the appearance of any of these elements may be deceiving.2 My discussion of sadomasochism is intentionally separate from the psychiatric and medical roots of the term. It is inaccurate to equate consensual sadism or masochism with pathology; in fact, a shared and unwarranted history of pathologisation is the first potential point of identification between Margery Kempe and BDSM. In both cases, twentieth-century critics have sought to explain away significance through a dismissal of behaviour or desires as abnormal or insane.3 Neither is it accurate to make any claim that Margery Kempe represents a secret fifteenth-century BDSM practitioner. Following Carolyn Dinshaw’s model in Getting medieval: sexualities and communities pre- and postmodern, the connection between Margery’s affective devotion and BDSM is a queer (and therefore partial, and complicated) connection across time between an old community and a new. Efforts to build literary communities based on queer identities must focus on affinity across time and rely on relations of resonance; that is, parallels or similarities between situations or identities rather than exact identifications. For example, Alexander Eastwood draws on Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘relation of resonance’ theory to speculate about the project of building a canon of trans literature by looking not for experiences of changing sex in literature but for ‘certain problems, ideas, strategies, or aesthetics that structure contemporary experiences of Transsexuality … [in order to] reimagine how trans epistemologies might animate texts without specifically trans content’.4 The main areas of resonance between The Book of Margery Kempe and BDSM are in relation to fantasy, consent, and performance. The Book of Margery Kempe is the biography of a fifteenthcentury laywoman who undertakes a devotional journey from careless sinner to mystic.5 It includes accounts of her contemplations and visionary encounters with the Trinity, especially Christ, her conflicts with others over religion, and her experiences as a pilgrim. Margery Kempe, the protagonist, is a wife and mother of fourteen children from the East Anglian town of King’s (once Bishop’s) Lynn. Following a difficult childbirth, she is delivered from madness by a vision of Christ and begins her spiritual journey. In Jerusalem, God gives her a gift of spontaneous holy crying that brings her mostly

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Negotiating power and pleasure 39

negative attention, from laypeople and clergy members alike. She is accused of Lollardy several times because of her desire to converse on scriptural matters. As she travels, she clashes with ecclesiastical authorities and jealous townspeople over her piety. One of her main concerns as a woman who is married and has already borne children is proving her chastity and avoiding the sin of lechery. One of the largest points of contention about the Book has been over authorship: critics wonder if Margery Kempe really existed,6 whether she worked alone, and if her work is fact or fiction. My own position is that Margery Kempe was a real woman who dictated the story of her life. However, the question of authorship, which is so central to some criticism, is a peripheral issue for me. My concern is with the desires that the text represents as those of a genuine woman, the impact Margery has on her society in the text, and the ways her relationship to power connects to kink, and those elements of the text remain regardless of the author’s identity. Margery’s desires are queer, not just in the sense that they make a queer connection to BDSM but also in the sense that they interrogate dominant structures of medieval sexuality in a positive way. As a woman in fifteenth-century England, Margery faces restrictive, sometimes contradictory ideas about her sexuality. On the one hand, sex is generally sinful, and virgins are God’s favourites. On the other, as a married woman, Margery must fulfil her sexual debt to her husband and bear children. Though she has no choice but to have sex, if she enjoys that sex it is still a sin. A medieval woman is caught between several contradictory discourses, with the result that she cannot completely conform to one set of social expectations without violating some part of another; additionally, Margery cannot worship God as she feels called to do without confirming her sinfulness according to other clerical discourses.7 As will become clear, Margery’s queerness defies sexual norms for both married and religious women. Margery patterns her devotion on biblical women and medieval female saints, but her particular expressions of devotion are excessive. She seems to regard herself as being in competition with other religious women. It is not enough for Margery to have eucharistic visions, for example; she must have special visions, better than those experienced by St Birgitta of Sweden. After she

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Spiritual and penitential (con)texts

sees a e­ ucharistic vision, Christ tells her, ‘My dowtyr, Bryde, say me nevyr in this wyse’.8 Similarly, her reported physical connection with Christ is more frequent and physical than that of other female mystics. Margery is proud that she goes further than the women she imitates do in devotion, but her excessiveness makes her imitation unorthodox. The incidences of eroticism and erotic masochism in the Book are numerous. The most obvious connections between Margery’s spiritual development and sexuality are the many instances in which she conceives of her relationship to God as marriage,9 especially when she interacts with Jesus as a husband. The tradition of affective piety in which Margery engages involves contemplation of Christ’s life and Passion and focuses on emotional connections to Jesus and Mary. Many mystics use familial and marital relationships to explain their relationships to God.10 The metaphorical mystical marriage is an orthodox concept: nuns are married to Christ; Christ is the bridegroom of the Church. St Birgitta calls herself the ‘bride of Christ’ in her Revelations. While marital meditations are not in themselves unorthodox, what makes Margery unusual is the explicit detail of the imagined physical, sexual connections she has with Jesus’s body. For example, in one vision Christ tells Margery, ‘therefore most I nedys be homly wyth the and lyn in thi bed wyth the’ (1.36.2102). Wolfgang Riehle calls her analogies ‘much too forceful’ in her use of ‘sensual concrete terms’.11 However, consider the following passage from Birgitta’s Revelations, just part of a vision she has of the judgement of her own dead mother: The said dead mother seemed to come creeping out of a foul and dark clay ditch; her heart was drawn out of her body, her lips cut off, and her chin trembled; … her nostrils were all gnawn; her eyes were put out, hanging down on her cheeks between sinews; … In her head the head pan failed and had fallen away, and the brain boiled up as it if it had been lead, and flowed out like black pitch. … Her breast was open and full of worms long and short … The chines or vertebrae of her back were all dissolved … they never ceased moving.12

Though Margery does describe the wounded body of Christ in detail, her accounts do not begin to approach this level of repulsiveness.

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Negotiating power and pleasure 41

And yet, no critic accuses St Birgitta of being too forceful; Riehle, for example, says Birgitta writes with ‘passionate dynamic terms’.13 Other mystics imagine themselves married to Christ; Catherine of Siena even describes her wedding band from her mystical marriage to God as Christ’s foreskin,14 and Riehle calls her work ‘marvellous’.15 So what makes Margery so unacceptably sensual? In addition to her lack of institutional backing and her gender, a lack of balance in her focus may be what makes critics question Margery’s legitimacy. Margery’s fixation on the body of Christ in particular stands out from the visions or revelations in the texts of other mystics. Christ’s body is the only object of her detailed, physical contemplations. Other mystics may contemplate the body of Christ on the cross in some detail, but they also consider other visual objects and connect the visions they have to larger political issues, demonstrating care for the world at large. Margery’s sensuality is too much for critics of mysticism because she visualises only that which furthers her erotic connection with Christ. The text justifies the sensual, erotic connection between Margery and God by having the explanations of their wedded behaviour come from Jesus, not Margery herself. For example, in Chapter 86, Jesus tells Margery, that she may treat him like a husband and go to bed with him ‘wythowtyn any schame’ (1.86.5077). Earlier in the text, Jesus is more explicit about how Margery might welcome him in her bed. He says, ‘thu mayst boldly, whan thu art in thi bed, take me to the as for thi wedded husband, as thy derworthy derlyng … And therfor thu mayst boldly take me in the armys of thi sowle and kyssen my mowth, myn hed, and my fete as sweetly as thow wylt’ (1.36.2102–8). In passages like this one, the text suggests an erotic aspect to true devotion to Christ. Part of Margery’s special relationship with Christ is her obedient rendering of her marriage debt to him, making their relationship sexual as well as spiritual. Margery associates Christ’s body with both her bed and the cross, and therefore both situations are erotic to her. Focusing on his wounds or his body during crucifixion, a normal practice of affective piety, allows Margery to continue her contemplation of the manhood of Christ. She relishes her visions of a wounded Christ many times. For example, just after her first experience of holy crying in Jerusalem, she has a vision of the crucified Christ:

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‘it was grawntd this creatur to beholdyn so verily hys precyows tendyr body, alto rent and toryn wyth scorgys, mor ful of wowndys than evyr was duffehows of holys … the reverys of blood flowyng owt plenteuowsly of every membr, the gresly and grevows wownde in hys precyows syde schedyng owt blood’ (1.28.1616–21). It is a privilege Margery is ‘grawntd’ to see these wounds. She fetishises Christ’s wounds, lovingly cataloguing his injuries, pairing descriptions of the wounds with positive descriptors of his body itself; his wounds are serious, but his body remains blissful, precious, and tender. For Margery, the wounding of Christ is also erotic because it gives legitimate reason to caress his body, releasing sexual energy in the guise of caregiving. She envies the women who get to touch Christ after he is dead. When she sees a vision of Mary, her sisters, and Mary Magdalene given leave to ‘do what worschip and reverens thei wolde to that precyows body’ (1.80.4600–1), she wishes she could have ‘had the precyows body be hirself alone’ (1.80.4605). Margery’s proprietary urge to have the body in private betrays the more personal nature of her desires, because the Christian theory is that the bond with Christ is shared by all Christians.16 Margery also imagines Christ’s body as wounded outside of the context of the Passion to divert her energy away from erotic or lustful thoughts about him. In a vision in Book 1, Chapter 85, she imagines Christ’s body lying next to hers, ‘the semeliest man that evyr myth be seen er thowt’ (1.85.4942–3). However, the sexual potential of the situation is interrupted: ‘than cam on wyth a baselard knyfe to hir sight and kytt that precyows body al long in the brest’ (1.85.4943–4). The fantasised penetration is violent, making yet another association between imagined violence and the eroticised body of Christ. As a result of this fantasy violence, Margery weeps and appreciates the Passion more completely; her contemplation of a wounded Christ instead of a directly sexual Christ brings her greater spiritual understanding but also releases the erotic energy that could otherwise lead her astray. The erotic connection between wounds and intimacy in the Book creates connections between Margery’s devotional thoughts and bodily reactions. Margery’s contemplations of the second person of the Trinity as her husband and the wounds of the Passion connect

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with the element of fantasy that is essential to BDSM. First, and most obviously, the contemplations are like fantasy because they involve imagining physical encounters that are pleasurable, as when Christ tells Margery, ‘take me in the armys of thi sowle and kyssen my mowth, myn hed, and my fete as sweetly as thow wylt’ (1.36.2106–8). Fantasy is often a required component of BDSM because some kinks are physically impossible; for example, in pet play, one partner plays the role of an animal of some kind.17 Margery’s devotional fantasies place her in bodily proximity with Christ and allow her to touch him, bringing her pleasure that would otherwise be impossible because of restrictions of time and space. At numerous points in the Book, the scribe writes that Margery’s contemplations are, for example, ‘so swet, so holy, and so devowt’ (1.17.905) that she cannot bear them without some physical expression like her tears or writhing and crying: ‘Whan sche beheld this sygth in hir sowle, sche fel down in the feld among the pepil. Sche cryid, sche roryd, sche wept as thow sche schulde a brostyn therwith. Sche myth not mesuryn hirself ne rewlyn hirselfe, but cryid and roryd’ (1.73.4132–5). Like masturbatory fantasies, the contemplations Margery experiences are highly personal and physically affecting, and they result in an orgasm-like bubbling over of energy. At times, Margery’s visions could be recreated as sadomasochistic pornography; for example, one finds this in the contemplation of the whipping of Christ before his crucifixion: An other tyme sche saw in hyr contemplacyon owr Lord Jhesu Crist bowndyn to a peler, and hys handys wer bowndyn abovyn hys hevyd. And than sche sey sextene men wyth sextene scorgys, and eche scorge had eight babelys of leed on the ende, and every babel was ful of scharp prekelys as it had ben the rowelys of a spor. And tho men wyth the scorgys madyn comenawnt that ich of hem schulde gevyn owr Lord forty strokys. (1.80.4526–31)

Margery’s lingering over the details of the whipping and the excess of the sixteen men giving forty lashes each with sixteen whips with eight lash tips of uneven lead evoke the aesthetics of sexual whipping scenes from erotic writing. One of the best-known early sadomasochistic erotic novels, Story of O, contains similar descriptions;

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for example: ‘The leather whip – the one she’d seen tucked in the first man’s belt – was long, with six lashes knotted at the end. There was a third whip whose numerous cords were knotted several times and quite stiff, as if soaked in water’.18 The description of the whips gives a more precise idea of how much pain they would cause. The anticipation of and ability to visualise the experience become part of the pleasure. Readers might also identify with O, and imagine experiencing those same whips and beatings. Margery, imagining the pain of the sixteen whips and their lead balls, also experiences an intense arousal of emotions, and wails and cries in sympathy with Christ: ‘sche wept and cryid ryth lowed as yyf sche schulde a brostyn for sorwe and peyne’ (1.80.4531–2). Though her release is characterised as being from sorrow or pain, sorrow and pain become sources of pleasure for Margery. Margery’s visualisations of the details of Christ’s death, near pornographic though they may be, are also a traditional part of affective devotion. As Sarah Stanbury argues in The visual object of desire in late medieval England, iconography, whether in altar pieces, statuary, or paintings, played a huge role in the piety of the average layperson of Margery’s time. The artistic representation of the Crucifixion or Passion was widespread. Medieval iconography routinely depicts saints and martyrs in the moments of their deaths in gruesome detail. St Sebastian, for example, is traditionally depicted pierced through with many arrows, bleeding and in pain.19 Stanbury argues that Margery, though she avoids describing them in her text, would have seen many images of saints and Christ that would have inspired her contemplations as much as the textual tradition of affective piety.20 Furthermore, Margery’s gazing at Christ’s body had more implications of physical contact based on medieval ideas about vision as an active two-way process between viewer and object. Stanbury suggests that, because of medieval understandings of vision, the impulse to see something actually corresponds to a desire to touch: Yet even when visual desire takes as its goal a purely mystical sight beyond the material world, the mechanics of vision link it with sensory experience and even material objects … In looking we are connected physically to the object we see by the agency of species, or



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visual rays. Images, through their species, literally touch us, linking us physically with them in ways that underwrite the dramatic physicality of late medieval affective piety.21

The medieval understanding that seeing is a two-way process of touching makes seeing, even in visions, physical and intimate. Visualising something also has the effect of imagined touch, heightening the emotional connection to that object.22 In Sight and embodiment in the Middle Ages, Suzannah Biernoff conceives of vision as ‘a dynamic extension of the subject into the world and at the same time a penetration and alteration of the viewer’s body by the object’.23 If Margery is seeing Christ’s body, she is also touching it, even being penetrated by it; medieval theories of sight give an extra sensual dimension to her contemplations. Margery’s admiration of Christ’s wounds results in a desire for her own pain and suffering on his behalf. At first, Margery’s willing pain takes the form of familiar and officially sanctioned penance: she fasts, and wears a hair shirt at all times. Following three years of intense temptations, Christ visits Margery and tells her that she should take off her hair shirt, ‘and I schal give the an hayr in thin hert that schal lyke my mych bettyr than alle the hayres in the world’ (1.5.377–8). Christ’s use of ‘lyke my’ in this statement indicates that he is gratified by her suffering. After this time, though she continues to fast and endure the physical discomforts of poverty, Margery’s assumption of pain for God’s love is less direct than the self-inflicted pain of the hair shirt, and often comes mostly from her visions. This aspect of her masochism corresponds to kinky understandings of pain because it stresses that Margery chooses to experience the kinds of pain that she enjoys. The context of pain is important. A masochist may experience a flogging administered under negotiated circumstances as arousing, but they would probably not enjoy accidentally hitting their shin against a table. In BDSM, the experience of pain, whether physical or mental, can be part of an effort to transform the self. Robin Bauer writes that masochism can be ‘about pushing one’s limits and changing one’s relationship to the boundaries one engages with, ultimately leading to a transformation of the self, to processes of resubjectification’.24 Similarly,

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Darren Langdridge observes that, ‘pain play appears to involve a way of experiencing the limits of one’s material-semiotic subjectivity through the exploration of agency and subjection’.25 As Margery attempts to transform herself and push the limits of her devotion to God, she engages with select kinds of pain that suit her. The fact that most of her pain is naturally occurring or fantasy sets Margery apart from other mystics and imitators of Christ. Margery suffers for God’s love, but her penitential practices are downright tame in comparison to the sometimes stomach-­ churning devotional rights of other medieval visionaries. As Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski writes, ‘medieval penitents were capable of the most shocking brutality when it came to self-inflicted suffering’.26 Ermine of Reims, for example, tied a knotted horse-hair rope so tightly around her body that her skin began to grow around it; to remove the rope (at the insistence of her confessor), she had to essentially flay that part of her own body.27 One particularly inventive monk, Arnulf of Villers, would tie a vest made from hedgehog pelts tightly to his body with ropes.28 Though Church officials sometimes demonstrate discomfort with the extremity of self-harm in the penitential practices of holy people, the canonisation of some of these figures shows that such practices were acceptable so long as they were not the norm for a majority of Christians.29 Margery’s difference from these other penitents indicates that she takes pleasure in certain types of pain, but not in others. Whereas the most extreme forms of self-abnegation cast the body and flesh as negative things to be controlled, Margery’s practice imagines the body as a site of pleasure, the control of which leads to intense emotional bonding with her beloved God. Early in her spiritual journey, and at Christ’s direction, she replaces most self-inflicted physical expressions of penance with internal, or imagined, punishments. Margery chooses the physical pain that leads to pleasure (through Christ’s recognition), not pain that will blot out her awareness of her body. The lack of severity in her self-harming is another thing that separates her from her religious role models. Christ tells Margery, ‘it lyken me wel the peynes that I have sufferyd for the’ (1.14.686), so as part of her contemplative imitatio Christi, Margery imagines her own suffering and even death. Egged on by obsessive contemplation of the cuts, bruises, and wounds on

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Christ’s body, Margery fantasises about how she too could endure torture and die to prove her devotion to God. Early in her spiritual development, she imagines a relatively easy death for herself: ‘sche ymagyned in hirself what deth sche mygth deyn for Crystys sake. Hyr thowt sche wold a be slayn for Goddys lofe, but dred the point of deth, and therfor sche ymagyned hyrself the most soft deth … hir hed to be smet of wyth a scharp ex for Goddys lofe’ (1.14.677–81). Gruesome enough, but quick and almost painless, this version of a martyr’s death shows that Margery sets boundaries around the types of pain she willingly endures; she chooses some types of pain but not others, in a manner similar to the way modern submissives set limits in BDSM.30 As she advances in her devotional life, however, Margery’s boundaries expand, and she imagines dying for God in a more painful way. She asks to die if she can no longer weep for others’ sins and tells God, ‘I wolde for thi lofe and for magnifying of thi name ben hewyn as small as flesch to the potte’ (1.57.3358–9). In this scenario Margery would presumably be alive for some of her mutilation, suffering many cuts, and perhaps broken bones, just like Christ on the cross. One psychological approach to masochism understands the masochist’s desire for pain as a desire to affirm embodiment and existence. On the other hand, other theorists identify the masochist’s (and particularly the religious masochist’s) desire to be absorbed into the other, to cease existing.31 Margery imagining being cut up into such small pieces connects with this desire for annihilation of the independent self; she wants to become part of God. Her specific choice of metaphor – that she should become like meat for the pot – indicates her desire to be consumed. Throughout the text, Margery suffers real physical pains and illnesses for God’s love. At one point the text relates that she is ‘ryth glad and mery that day that sche suffryd any disese’ (1.50.2821–2). The pleasure Margery takes in physical pain allows her to make sense of the conditions of her life. When she is sick or injured, rather than being a helpless sufferer, Margery sees herself as a willing victim and can take pride in her endurance. Margery takes pleasure not only in physical suffering for God’s love but also in verbal humiliation. God explains to her several times that her suffering shame on earth is a part of his mercy, and

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that earthly shame will lead to more joy in heaven: ‘Dowtyr, this plesith me rith wel, for the mor schame and mor despite that thu hast for my lofe, the mor joy schalt thu have wuth me in hevyn’ (1.78.4394–5). Margery applies a language of pleasure to her experiences of humiliation; she is happy to be abused by her community or clergy members. When a monk in York preaches against her, she says, ‘I have cawse to be ryth mery and glad in my sowle that I may any thing suffyr for hys lofe’ (1.52.2905–6). ‘Mery’ is the word the text most often pairs with Margery’s experience of shame. Instead of being made unhappy by humiliation, Margery feels sad when she lacks disgrace: ‘I sorwyd for I had no schame’ (1.13.645). Unlike in many BDSM scenes where the Top would be the one to deliver humiliation to the bottom directly, God himself is never the one who verbally abuses Margery. He speaks to her patiently, fondly, and respectfully. However, her taking humiliation from others increases her esteem in his eyes. In this way, Margery’s seeking out of ‘schame’ from others also has something like a voyeuristic component – she enjoys the humiliation because she knows God is watching her receive it and that he approves. There is delayed gratification at work as well: the more pain she suffers with others, the greater her eventual pleasure with God will be. Both voyeurism and the bottom meeting certain conditions to gain the Top’s approval can be present in BDSM scenes. Margery’s devotional masochism qualifies as kink, not only because of the more obvious connection between pleasure and pain but also because her diversion of erotic energy through wounds, suffering, or shame aligns with kink’s non-genital approach to sexual gratification. Masochism queers heteronormative assumptions about sex because it does not rely on genital stimulation for arousal: masochists may experience arousal and even orgasm from activities like whipping or flogging on any body part. In Jerusalem, Margery has many prompts to think about the Passion, and as she comes to Mount Cavalry she experiences an intense contemplation of Christ’s suffering: ‘sche fel down that sche mygth not stondyn ne knelyn but walwyd and wrestyd wyth hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed wyth a lowde voys’ (1.28.1572–4). As her contemplations reach an end or point of particular intensity, Margery has uncontrollable physical outbursts; she loses control of her body

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and voice. The orgasm-like explosion of feeling Margery experiences after meditating on the cruelty of the torture of the Passion reflects this possibility of non-genitally focused arousal. Margery’s masochistic focus on Christ’s wounds and her own pain and suffering make her harmony with God queer because masochism allows her to find pleasure without the genital focus that plagues her when she experiences what her culture classifies as sinful lust. When Margery displeases God by rejecting visions of negative futures in Book 1, Chapter 59, she is tormented by twelve days of temptation. Her ecstatic dalliances with Christ are replaced by visions in which she sees holy men ‘shewyng her bar membrys unto hir’ (3429), which are ‘delectabyl to hir ageyn hir wille’ (3435). These visions show Margery’s sinful lust fixated on the male member, though there are interesting queer implications in the fact that she sees ‘mennys membrys and swech other abhominacyons’ (3426, my italics). When Margery is in harmony with God, she sees Jesus in every man, but when she is out of harmony with God she sees every man’s penis. Margery fears the temptation of thoughts of penises, and she also fears the reality of penises. First, she resents and attempts to avoid her husband John’s penis before she can convince him to vow chastity with her. Though sex with him ‘was very peynful and horrybyl unto hir’ (1.4.321) she endures his sexual attentions for years after she wishes to become chaste. Margery experiences marital rape, and she therefore begins to associate heterosexual intercourse with her husband with trauma. She bears more children as a result of these assaults, which entrenches her further in her role as a literal mother instead of the spiritual mother she will become after she is able to vow chastity (the chapter will go on to consider how the text’s representation of motherhood emphasises Margery’s queer futurity). Maternal theory by scholars like Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly differentiates between motherhood as a patriarchal institution, ‘which is male-defined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women’, and mothering, which is ‘female-defined and centred and potentially empowering’.32 While Rich identifies the Industrial Revolution as the historical period in which the institution of motherhood creates a schism between the public and the private, keeping women confined to the home space,33 Margery’s

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e­ xperience of motherhood demonstrates that medieval motherhood could also confine women to the domestic sphere. When she is bearing and rearing her children, Margery cannot perform pilgrimages and public displays of her piety as she can after she achieves chastity. John’s sexual needs and her obligation to meet them and to bear any resulting children prevent Margery from taking control over her body and advancing her devotional goals. Second, Margery’s fear of rape is a consistent element of the text. Her main concern when being jailed in Leicester is that she not be put among men (1.46.2632–6). Even as an old woman, she worries over being left alone with men, especially on pilgrimage: ‘yet durst sche not slepyn for dred of defiling’ (2.6.389). Medieval ecclesiastical theory on rape allows for sin on the part of the victim of rape, and Margery may have feared that her body would betray her to lust if a man raped her.34 In her mind and in her reality, penises pose a threat to Margery’s quest for spiritual maturity and a perfect relationship to God. Male genitals are sinister and threaten her spiritual goals, so Margery’s desire needs a non-genital object on which to focus. Her masochism provides that focus. The fact that Margery struggles with lust as she does corresponds to normative medieval ideas about the embodied nature of women. Ecclesiastical and medical writing of the time attributed excessive desire to women and caution men against falling victim to their lusts. The older woman’s sexual voracity especially was the object of satire. Margery fears penises because they have the power, whether through her own lust or through unwanted contact, to force her to fit into certain female roles. Her resistance of gendered expectations for her body and avoidance of sin undermine the idea that women are more flesh than spirit; the gratification Margery experiences in her holy fantasies is queer because it allows her to achieve pleasure without penises or sin. The appearance of a BDSM scene may be that a Top is abusing a bottom; however, the reality of the encounter is that both partners have input into the scene and the bottom has greater control over what may occur. This manipulation of power dynamics is for mutual erotic benefit. In the Book, God is the Dom and Margery is the sub.35 Though God retains more control than the modern Dom by virtue of Margery’s orthodoxy, there is a surprising amount

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of reciprocity, negotiation, and consent in Margery’s relationship to the Trinity. God enjoys Margery’s tears and suffering too: he tells her that the shame she suffers for him ‘plesith [him] rith wel’ (1.78.4394). Margery trades her tears and prayers for grace for other people, negotiating terms in purgatory and salvation with God, and God uses Margery to convert more souls. Both Margery and God get pleasure from their relationship. During contemplation, Christ asks Margery whom she would like to save by her suffering. She answers that she would like to save her confessor, and Jesus tells her the confessor shall be with her in heaven, but so shall her father, husband, and children (1.8.458–73). In other ­meditations, Margery asks God to forgive others for sinning, and he agrees that her crying and tears will save them.36 These recurring negotiations between Margery and God suggest an ongoing and negotiated consent that is absent in Margery’s other relationships. In kink communities, learning is part of the process of both becoming a community member and refining one’s kink identity. Though they reach quite different conclusions about the nature of BDSM, Robin Bauer, Staci Newmahr, and Margot Weiss all note the crucial role of education and skill acquisition to kink.37 Learning kinky skills allows someone to meet others with more experience in that skill (who might become friends or partners), and to demonstrate commitment to safe practices (some kinky activities, like whipping or wax play, can cause serious damage if performed incorrectly). Margery’s propensity for conversation (not preaching!) on holy matters, her consultations with her confessors, her pilgrimages, and her mentoring of others show her own interest in both education and community building. Though she rejects the need for universal acceptance, it does seem important to her to have some small community of supporters to validate her identity as a pious woman.38 Kinksters benefit from belonging to communities in which their desires are not viewed as pathological; similarly, Margery benefits from the recognition of her spiritual authority by her own small community. In the Dom/sub relationship in particular, the concept of training is often very important. The dominant partner will train the submissive partner to adhere to their standards. If the sub fails to

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follow orders or breaks a rule, they will probably be punished for the infraction. If the submissive partner is a masochist, the type of pain involved in the punishment will be one that they do not enjoy. Sometimes, punishment will be applied simply to test that the sub will submit to the Dom. The explicitness of authority and punishments in a scene can be a relief in contrast to more subtle, but compulsory, structures of reward and punishment in everyday life, and the submissive partner can experience that relief as pleasure. Andrea Beckmann points out that employment relationships rely on compulsory hierarchy but are considered normal parts of society, whereas the pleasurable hierarchies of BDSM are considered perverted.39 The idea that sex occurs between equals, which Bauer describes as the false ideal of ‘harmonic sex’, ignores the various social hierarchies that influence sexual relationships and leads to the labelling of sex that acknowledges those hierarchies, or even revels in them, as perverted.40 In BDSM, punishment is part of play, whereas outside of BDSM, punishment may be represented as beneficial to the development of the one being punished, but it is decidedly not playful. Like a Dominant training a submissive, God leads Margery through her spiritual development. His care and attention to her progress would be likely to secure him the reputation of a ‘good’ Dom in modern kinky contexts. He tells her, ‘I schal make the buxom to my wil’ (1.77.4309), and teaches her his expectations and talks with her about her progress in her meditations; he tells her how she should pray, how she should do penance, and how she should eat in a lengthy vision soon after she begins her true devotional practices (1.5.361–401). God specifies what clothes Margery should wear, and these clothes indicate her special relationship to him like a collar or other kink symbol of ownership: ‘I schal ordeyn for the … yyf thow wilt be clad in white clothys’ (1.30.1758–60).41 God wants Margery to be obedient to him, and he is willing to guide her through a process of learning how she can best please him. When Margery fails to meet God’s standards, he punishes her. For example, when she fails to believe that God would damn anyone, he chastises her for doubting his word and punishes her for her lack of faith with twelve days of visions of men’s members. After the visions end, Margery tells God, ‘now wyl I lyn stille and be

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buxom to thi wille’ (1.59.3463). Unlike the humiliation she suffers, Margery does not enjoy this kind of torment, and after she endures it she always believes God when he speaks to her, demonstrating the effectiveness of the punishment. At some times, God punishes Margery simply to test the limits of her devotion, as when he sends her eight years of sickness, including mysterious abdominal pains ‘so hard and so scharp that sche must voydyn that was in hir stomak’ (1.56.3247–8). Her endurance of such trials allows her to prove her love for God. God tells Margery that any punishment he sends her is part of his mercy, since it leads her closer to devotional perfection and means she will not suffer in purgatory after her death (1.22.1168–71). In other words, the punishments are for her own good. Margery agrees that God’s punishments help her, and often expresses her gratitude for the pains that bring her closer to God. In her final prayer in the Book she says, ‘Heily I thank the that thu woldist letyn me suffryn’ (2.10.752). The system of punishment and training the Book depicts resonates with the systems in use in contemporary BDSM communities, particularly in that this alternative to more socially acceptable systems of dominance and punishment provides pleasure to the submissive. Knowledge of the ways BDSM manipulates power dynamics in the Dom/sub relationship encourages a closer look at the ways Margery experiences power in her relationship with God. In both cases, a community with rules and standards supports the individual relationship with a dominant partner. The community relationship validates the bottom or Margery’s individual experience as non-pathological or non-sinful. Without such a community, the individual is more vulnerable to dominant cultural ideals and is less likely to experience fulfilment. As in a kinky relationship between a Dom and a sub, all the pain, humiliation, and poverty that Margery suffers for God is consensual. Some theorists question the possibility of true consent within restrictive systems like patriarchy because of the system’s constant influence.42 A system could lead a person to believe they are choosing something for their own good that actually benefits that system; in other words, power is capable of creating desire to perpetuate itself.43 In fifteenth-century England, Margery would certainly have faced consistent pressure to adhere to Christian

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standards of living from the powerful Church; however, the actions she takes, because of their level of intensity, do not adhere to those standards. God adds a layer of complication to the idea of consent: if God is omnipotent, is it possible for Margery to withhold her consent? In spite of the extreme power imbalance between God and Margery, her consent to her devotional path and relationship with God is still valid, first because of the direct textual evidence of her consent, and second because of the medieval understanding of free will. Ignoring Margery’s own words and the text’s construction of consent dismisses Margery’s agency, which the text reasserts throughout. At several points in the Book, Margery states her desire to serve God or reaffirms her commitment to suffering on his behalf. In Chapter 50, for example, Christ asks Margery if she would like him to take away the suffering she endures for his love. She replies, ‘Nay, good Lord, late me be at thi wille and make my mythy and strong for to suffyr al that evyr thu wilt that I suffyr’ (2817–18). Autobiographical narrative presents the author’s perception of an experience and makes it the truth of a text. This exchange emphasises that although she suffers for Christ, Margery believes she can choose to turn away from her path of masochistic devotion and yet she does not. Furthermore, medieval Christians believed that God gives free will.44 God provides opportunities to turn away from sin, and he does not force people to follow him. Margery chooses to follow God’s commands, others do not. The explicit, consensual power dynamics of kinky relationships encourage closer reading of the power dynamics at work in Margery’s life, and it is most obvious that her relationship with God is consensual when it is compared to the many other non-­ consensual relationships of power she experiences, notably those with her husband and the Church. While medieval marital rules about sex supposedly give husbands and wives equal claim to each other’s bodies, and medieval stereotypes depicted women as more lustful than men, Margery’s experience is of a husband whose desires for sex impinge upon her spiritual goals: she must obtain John’s consent in order to live chastely. Though sex with her husband becomes ‘peynful and horrybyl unto hir’ once she turns to Christ (1.4.321), she must continue to submit to her husband’s

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sexual desires for years. It is only through Christ’s authority, which she can draw on because of her submission to God, that she is able to persuade John to live chastely at all. The deal that Margery makes with John to get his vow of chastity involves paying his debts and eating with him on Fridays, instead of fasting as she has for years. When she asks Christ for guidance, he tells her, ‘And he schal han that he desyreth. For, my derworthy dowtyr, this was the cawse that I bad the fastyn for thu schuldyst the sonar opteyn and getyn thi desyr’ (1.11.561–3). This negotiation of their marriage resonates with negotiations in BDSM because it is both consensual and mutually satisfying. Christ’s intervention into Margery’s marriage frees her from the condition of most wives under patriarchy – s­ ubmission to a husband’s needs. On her own, Margery cannot overcome the systems of patriarchal dominance she lives in, but through her willing obedience to God she escapes the kinds of obedience to which she does not wish to consent. Margery’s masochism and willing submission to God contrast with the non-consensual and one-directional flow of power and violence between clergy and laity and the potentially corrupt nature of the clergy who misinterpret Margery’s holiness. The clergy she meets are often hypocrites. Margery finds it difficult to acquire the ecclesiastical approval she needs to move about the country, fast as she wants to, or wear her white clothes. Since her visions and several weather-related miracles prove that her practices are holy, the Church is in error when it hampers her progress, and therefore out of touch with the true will of God.45 Her frequent imprisonment or examination by clergy and civil authorities suspicious of heresy show how oppressive patriarchal authority can be for a woman in fifteenth-century England, particularly in comparison with the more loving dominance of God.46 Margery is subject to oppressive power structures (marriage, ecclesiastical authority) that do not respect her volition. Her masochistic relationship with God, which is entirely voluntary, presents itself as a positive alternative, even though it looks pathological to her contemporaries and early twentiethcentury critics of the Book. By beginning Margery’s story with non-consensual pain, the text also shows that there is a difference between the physical and mental pain to which Margery consents and the pain to which she

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does not. In the very first chapter, Margery experiences a madness following childbirth. When Margery experiences unwanted torment and visions, she attempts to reclaim control over her pain through reactionary self-harm that gives physical expression to her psychological trauma: ‘sche wold a fordon hirself many a tym at her steryngs and a ben damnyd wyth hem in helle. And into wytnesse therof sche bot hir owen hand so violently that it was seen al hir lyfe aftyr. And also sche roof hir skyn on hir body agen hir hert wyth hir nayles spetowsly’ (1.1.150–63). Margery’s experience here is radically different from her grateful acceptance of pain and shame from God, and her delivery from this torment is what motivates her to begin a holy life. In the Book, there is a difference between the pain God gives to Margery with her consent, or that Christ submits to on the cross, which symbolise devotion and bring love and salvation, and non-consensual pain that comes from bad men or the Devil, which symbolises sin, despair, or hypocrisy. It is Margery’s performance of the roles of weeping, holy woman and special beloved of God that allow her to navigate away from non-consensual pain in favour of the consensual. The Book recounts Margery’s spiritual journey as performative. The most provocative of Margery’s performances of her devotion are her unrestrainable explosions of holy crying, which she experiences for many years following her visit to Jerusalem. The text recounts her first experience as follows: sche fel down that sche mygth not stondyn ne knelyn but walwyd and wrestyd wyth hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed wyth a lowed voys as thow hir hert schulde a brostyn asundyr … And sche had so gret compassion and so gret peyn to se owyr Lordys peyn that sche myt not kepe hirself fro krying and roryng thow sche schuld a be ded therfor. (1.28.1572–9)

Mass, moving sermons, male children, and wounds are among the many triggers capable of prompting Margery into a fit of roaring, boisterous crying. Though she is capable of having her crying fits in private, the majority of Margery’s crying happens before spectators, making the crying a public performance of her emotional devotion to God and especially Christ’s Passion. With these actions, she performs devotion to God with her body but without bearing children.

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Julia Bolton Holloway makes an explicit connection between the medieval mystic’s visionary contact with God and the saints and dramatic performance. She writes, ‘such practices consisted of revisioning the sacred drama with oneself as witness and participant, transcending both time and space. Rather than as hallucinations, it could be wise to perceive these visions, these texts and these paintings, as spiritual exercises, sacred conversations, and participatory reenactments of the past’s sacred drama’.47 Margery’s conversations with holy figures and her imagining of Christ’s passion participate in a dramatic tradition. Her holy crying involves the physical acting out of her intense emotions; when she cries in mass she disruptively performs her devotion to Christ. The recording of her conversations and outbursts in the text archives them and creates new audiences in readers. Margery’s performance of devotion impacts her observers, and no matter how they react, she benefits spiritually. Her relation of her contemplations in conversation with holy men grants her some authority as it proves she is in God’s favour and brings her personal comfort and gratification. Her performative crying either moves people who see her into adopting a more holy lifestyle, or to heap scorn on her, which helps her achieve more glory with God. Like Margery’s devotion, BDSM is performative. The theory of performance as it applies to BDSM can also shed light on Margery’s devotional performances. As Terry Hoople argues, ‘queer performances are misarticulations … of hetero-patriarchal norms which pervert the normalizing aims of hetero-patriarchal relations of power, thus operating, even if only in a limited, site-specific way, to undermine these relations by exposing their contingency’.48 Hoople employs Judith Butler’s theory of queer performativity in order to argue that BDSM is capable of undermining the oppressive dynamics it cites in performance. The queer performativity of kink provides a new perspective on Margery’s performance of masochism and submission as part of her affective piety in the Book. When Margery performs her devotion, the citation of the pain and torment of Christ and her unwilling submission to men underscore the repressive nature of marriage and Church hierarchy to a woman in her position. As Marla Carlson argues, the female mystic’s performance of pain grants her access to speech in systems that would otherwise repress her; Carlson writes,

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‘for the mystic, pain has been a source of empowerment and guarantee of authenticity’.49 If Margery’s wailing in church guarantees anything, it is that she gets the attention, however begrudgingly, of her community. Margery’s performance of her devotion, and the occasional consultation with a sympathetic clerical authority, allow her text to walk along the very edge of orthodoxy; though she is expressing herself and using her body in unusual ways for a married woman of her time, she is always able to find validation for her practices from earthly or divine authorities. She pushes her conduct beyond what most people are comfortable with, but always remains theologically justifiable. The Book’s representation of this brinksmanship resonates with the practices and representation of BDSM. On the level of practice, kinksters may derive pleasure from pushing boundaries in three different ways: from pushing social boundaries through their scenes; from testing their personal physical limits and pain tolerance; and from participating in what practitioners call edge-play, which are types of activities that are controversial within BDSM communities, like breath play.50 As Weiss and also Ummni Khan have shown, mainstream representations of BDSM test the limits of social acceptability by introducing elements of BDSM but then dismissing them as forbidden or perverse;51 community-­produced representations of BDSM, on the other hand, often present BDSM practices as ways to challenge socially acceptable limits.52 Margery’s representation of her experiences in the Book connects more with the practitioner’s view of BDSM; that is, the text presents her ­practices as empowering and challenging to secular and clerical authorities. She demonstrates the potential productivity of living on the edge of acceptability. Margery’s queer performance of her devotion also embraces a concept modern queer theorist José Muñoz calls ‘queer futurity’. Whereas general futurity depends on heterosexual reproduction and the continuation of normative ideals, queer futurity is ‘attentive to the past for the purposes of critiquing the present and hopes to build an alternative, utopian future’.53 Muñoz identifies elements of the queer experience, such as social and familial rejection, that can lead to a commitment to disrupting the status quo. While Muñoz’s analysis of queer utopias and futurity is concerned with

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­ id-to-late twentieth-century film and performance in New York m City, Margery’s devotional practices resonant surprisingly well with his ideas of how hopeful queerness reacts to a stultifying present in order to imagine a better future. First, the Book emphasises the importance of Margery’s spiritual development over the importance of futurity through reproduction. Margery is spiritually unsatisfied by her fourteen biological children. In fact, since she often wishes she were a virgin, these children only remind her of her maternal, and therefore unvirginal, status. Instead, Margery values her spiritual children, a network of chosen family who support her devotional goals. When a clerk in York asks her to explain the meaning of God’s command ‘crescite et multiplicamini’, Margery replies, ‘thes words ben not undirstondyn only of begetyng of children bodily, but also be purchasing of vertu, whech is frute gostly’ (1.51.2842–4). She insists that bearing children is not the only way to follow God’s command. To that end, she includes stories of men she mothers in a spiritual sense; she raises them in devotion, and these men call her mother because of her piety and influence, including the shipmaster on her trip to Norway in Book 2, Chapter 3, and Thomas Marshall, who is made a ‘newe man’ and experiences holy crying himself through Margery’s guidance (1.45–6.2534–44). Though Margery has fourteen biological children, she does not write about her children beyond reporting that fact, except in the case of her eldest son, whom she includes only as an example of her spiritual mothering. This son, John, is a worldly man, but through her prayers and tears he changes his ways and becomes devout (2.1–2.1–202). The Book clearly values Margery’s spiritual mothering, which might contribute to a queer futurity, more than her biological motherhood, which only contributes to reproductive futurity. Margery’s weeping, crying, conversations, and the Book are also examples of utopian performativity because they seek to create community and belonging for her in otherwise hostile spaces. As Muñoz writes, ‘performance is the kernel of a potentiality that is transmitted to audiences and witnesses … the real force of performance is its ability to generate a modality of knowing and recognition among audiences and groups that facilitates modes of belonging, especially minoritarian belonging’.54

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Margery’s weeping, for example, proposes an alternative way of showing devotion, and her text encourages imitation of her tears, both through its description of the benefits of those tears – Christ tells her that holy crying saves souls from purgatory (1.22.1166–7) – and by the inclusion of stories of people who join her spiritual family through imitation and find fulfilment like Thomas Marshall (1.45.2534–47). The readers of her Book who believe and follow her could also join this spiritual family, extending her vision of piety into the future. In The powers of the holy, as a part of his examination of the humanity of Christ and Lollardy, David Aers responds to the idea that affective piety empowers medieval women through the feminisation of Christ. He argues that the medieval Church sidelines the Jesus of joy, who also encourages action against repressive or unjust governments, and focuses on the wounds of the Passion in order to elicit affective responses that encourage submission to suffering and authority. Affective piety is a non-intellectual movement that gives individuals without access to theological texts access to God through emotion. In response to the idea that affective piety empowers women because they can take control of their bodies through their imitatio Christi, Aers writes: pleasures and desires, including pleasures that are viewed as transgressive … may be produced by current relations of power as a move in the perpetuation of those relations of power. As Foucault remarked in an interview with the editors of Quel Corps in 1975, ‘power is strong … because, as we are beginning to realize, it produces effects at the level of desire’.55

He argues that any illusion of power that comes to women through affective piety actually involves their reabsorption into the Church’s existing power structure. Aers’s insightful critique of the reification of the humanity of Christ is valuable, but his assumption that affective piety can only replicate the kind of submission valued by the Church finds parallels with the anti-sex assumption that BDSM only replicates patriarchal violence. Like critics of BDSM, he denies the value of the agency and subjective experience of the mystic and assumes that any pleasure they find in submission must be because they enjoy submitting to the

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Church. While the Church expects obedience and submission, and affective piety promotes those qualities, the submission and meekness Margery practises allow her to challenge these structures; her masochism encourages worship of God and earthly suffering, but not blind obedience to those clergy who would restrict her expression of her love for God. If the patriarchal power relations of her time were actually producing Margery’s desires for their own reinforcement, one might expect them to produce something a little more ­manageable and less excessive. As I discuss above, Margery’s kinky desires are rarely the right kind, or the right amount, to win her the acceptance of male authority figures. Furthermore, Aers deems the  power that mystics may receive from their acts of devotion to be illusory; however, freedom from sex with her husband and from resultant childbirth and the freedom to travel on pilgrimage are very real for Margery. She undermines the Church’s power through her consensual manipulation of power with God, and her performance of public suffering affords her a level of control over her body. In every society, people experience corrupt or coercive power, whether it is through the hypocrisy of the fifteenth-century Church or the exploitative structures of modern-day capitalism. For some people, the solution or response to these structures is to perform pleasurable and deviant manipulation of existing power dynamics to find some measure of control over their own experience. There are definite resonances between Margery Kempe’s affectively pious relationship with God and modern BDSM, enough to form a queer connection across time. In BDSM and in Margery’s Book, masochism can constitute a way of relating to power and of negotiating within existing hierarchies for an increased sense of control and pleasure. Though she lives in a world of oppressive patriarchal authority and threats of real violence, Margery Kempe enters into a loving, consensual, submissive relationship with God that helps her make peace with her desires, resist corrupt clerical control, and find her own power.

Notes  1 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Queer futurity is

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an optimistic mindset that questions the present while imagining positive futures and possibilities for minoritarian subjects through queer aesthetics.   2 This overview is necessarily brief. For more academic kink theory, see Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker (eds), Safe, sane and consensual: contemporary perspectives on sadomasochism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Peggy Kleinplatz and Charles Moser (eds), Sadomasochism: powerful pleasures (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006); or Ummni Khan, Vicarious kinks: S/M in the socio-legal imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). For community-produced theory, see Jay Wiseman, SM 101: a realistic introduction (Emeryville: Greenery Press, 1996); Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, The new bottoming book (Emeryville: Greenery Press, 2001); or John Warren and Libby Warren, The loving dominant (Emeryville: Greenery Press, 2008).   3 For an excellent overview of the psychiatric history of sadomasochism, see the first chapter of Khan, Vicarious kinks.   4 Alexander Eastwood, ‘How, then, might the transsexual read?: notes toward a trans literary history’, Transgender studies quarterly, 1.4 (November 2014): 590–604 (595).   5 For a brief overview on the history of this work, see Lynn Staley’s introduction to Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed.  Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), hereafter the Book. For more details on the transmission history, see Julie Chappell, Perilous passages: the Book of Margery Kempe, 1534–1934 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). For more on the history of the critical reception of the Book, see Marea Mitchell, The Book of Margery Kempe: scholarship, community, and criticism (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).   6 In fact, there are some sources that seem to document Kempe’s existence. In 1438, for example, a Margery Kempe was admitted into the Guild of the Trinity of Lynn (Staley, ‘Introduction’, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 1 n. 2).   7 The literature on medieval attitudes towards women’s sexuality is vast.  For an introduction to the topic, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe: doing unto others (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).   8 Kempe, The book of Margery Kempe, 1.20.1085–6. Book, chapter, and line numbers will follow subsequent quotations in parentheses.   9 Margery has a vision of her marriage ceremony to the Godhead when she is in Rome (1.35.2000–35).

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10 As Christopher Roman points out in Domestic mysticism in Margery Kempe and Dame Julian of Norwich (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), female mystics in particular use familial metaphors in relating their spiritual experiences because the domestic metaphors make the spiritual seem more appropriate for women. 11 Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (Abingdon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 38. 12 Julia Bolton Holloway, Saint Bride and her book: Birgitta of Sweden’s revelations translated from Middle English with introduction, notes, and interpretive essay (Newburyport: Focus Information Group, 1992), pp. 105–6. 13 Riehle, The Middle English mystics, p. 139. 14 Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy feast and holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 174–5. 15 Riehle, The Middle English mystics, p. 45. 16 Some biblical passages that support the idea that Christ’s redemption of mankind is universal: ‘Jesus … by the grace of God should taste death for every man’ (Heb. 2:9); ‘he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world’ (1 John 2:2); ‘whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). 17 Many people may assume pain would be essential to BDSM; however, not all BDSM practices involve pain: many role-playing scenarios and most bondage, for example, would not be about physical pain. The two essential elements of BDSM are fantasy and power exchange. Any activity that qualifies as kinky will include one, or both, of these qualities. Pat Califia writes: ‘The key word to understanding S/M is fantasy  … The S/M subculture is a theatre in which sexual dramas can be acted out and appreciated’ (Pat Califia, Public sex: the culture of radical sex (Jersey City: Cleis Press, 1994), p. 168). Those sexual dramas frequently revolve around the reversal or exaggeration of realworld power dynamics. 18 Pauline Réage, Story of O, trans. John Paul Hand (Philadelphia: Blue Moon, 1993), p. 11. 19 Marla Carlson, Performing bodies in pain: medieval and post-modern martyrs, mystics, and artists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Carlson considers the iconography of and dramas about both saints in conversation with modern performance artists in her book. 20 Sarah Stanbury, The visual object of desire in late medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 191–218.

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21 Stanbury, The visual object of desire, p. 6. 22 Lisa Manter, ‘The savior of her desire: Margery Kempe’s passionate gaze’, Exemplaria, 13.1 (January 2001): 39–66. Manter provides another perspective on the importance of sight in the Book when she reads Margery’s visions via psychoanalysis and feminist film theory. She argues that even as Margery masochistically identifies with Christ’s body, she is also watching the scene, which results in additional voyeuristic pleasure. 23 Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), p. 102. 24 Robin Bauer, Queer BDSM intimacies: critical consent and pushing boundaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 163. 25 Darren Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable: S/M and the eroticisation of pain’, in Langdridge and Barker, Safe, sane and consensual, pp. 91–103 (p. 102). 26 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The strange case of Ermine de Reims: a medieval woman between demons and saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 82. 27 Blumenfeld-Kosinkski, The strange case of Ermine de Reims, pp. 160–1. 28 Blumenfeld-Kosinkski, The strange case of Ermine de Reims, p. 80. 29 Though famous saints and mystics engaged in extreme ascetic practices, generally with the permission of a confessor or superior, the Church preached moderation in penance for the majority. In The strange case of Ermine de Reims, Blumenfeld-Kosinski gives several examples of biographers expressing uneasy acceptance of their subject’s extreme ascetic practices (pp. 80–1), including Ermine of Reims’s confessor, Jean le Graveur, who writes that Ermine ‘had the habit of saying, “I can never suffer enough” … I answered, “Penance is a very good thing, but you have to do it with discretion”’ (p. 161). 30 Negotiating limits is a crucial aspect of BDSM. There are commonly accepted community standards for setting limits, e.g. safe, sane, and consensual (SSC) or risk-aware consensual kink (RACK). A submissive might set limits based on intensity of sensation, impact placement, acceptable language, or any other parameter that influences their enjoyment. 31 Ariel Glucklich, Sacred pain: hurting the body for the sake of the soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 100–5. 32 Andrea O’Reilly, Rocking the cradle: thoughts on motherhood, feminism and the possibility of empowered mothering (Bradford: Demeter Press, 2006), p. 11; Adrienne Rich, Of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution, tenth anniversary edn (New York: Norton, 1986).

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33 Rich, Of woman born, pp. 41–55. 34 William of Conches, for example, writing in the twelfth century, differentiates between a woman’s rational will and her natural will: even if a woman does not consent to rape, her body may eventually consent by enjoying it against her rational will. He asserts, ‘Although raped women dislike the act in the beginning, in the end, however, from the weakness of the flesh, they like it’ (quoted in Irven M. Resnick, ‘Marriage in medieval culture: consent theory and the case of Joseph and Mary’, Church history: studies in Christianity and culture, 69.2 (June 2000): 350–71 (362–3)). 35 See also Christopher M. Roman’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 5), in which he finds a Dom/sub relationship between God and Richard of St Victor. He further argues that the medieval mystic uses existing social forces in the creation of ‘novel ways to express desire and need’. 36 Margery’s saving souls through her tears is a traditional feature of the saint’s intercession; part of the reason it would be included in the text is to set Margery up as the equal to some of her saintly models, like Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, who also cried to save the souls of sinners. 37 Bauer, Queer BDSM intimacies; Staci Newmahr, ‘Rethinking kink: sadomasochism as serious leisure’, Qualitative sociology, 33 (2010): 313–31; Margot Weiss, Techniques of pleasure: BDSM and the circuits of sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 38 For example, she relates stories about two men who regard her as a spiritual mother (2.2.64–86; 1.45.2534–47), and she includes an incident in which she convinces a small group of Londoners of her legitimacy (2.10.617–36). 39 Andrea Beckmann, The social construction of sexuality and perversion: deconstructing sadomasochism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 40 Bauer, Queer BDSM intimacies, pp. 3–4. 41 Costume is often an important part of kink practice, and for Margery dress is also an important part of her mystic role. Her many struggles to be awarded and then to stay in all-white clothing reflect the ways certain clothing corresponds to certain positions or roles in scenes. Some BDSM play or fetishes require particular items of clothing or accessories: a leather fetishist will need leather to wear; a military roleplaying scene requires a uniform of some kind; a nappy fetishist wears nappies. Collars are a very important accessory in BDSM culture, and might be worn for specific scenes, as in pet play; to signal submissive status; or to indicate a committed relationship. Dress reflects fantasy in

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BDSM as it reflects aspiration (to be like a virgin and special to God) in the Book. 42 For more on how consent might be tested within dominant systems, see Masha Raskolnikov’s consideration of the limits of consent and hyperheterosexuality in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s tale, Chapter 8 in this volume. 43 David Aers, ‘The humanity of Christ: reflections on orthodox late medieval representations’, in The powers of the holy: religion, politics, and gender in late medieval English culture, ed. David Aers and Lynn Staley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 15–42 (p. 36). 44 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Christian classics edition (1911; Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1981); Augustine, The teacher; the free choice of the will; Grace and free will, trans. Robert P. Russell (1968) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); Bernard of Clairvaux, Concerning grace and free will, trans. Watkin W. Williams (London: Macmillan Company, 1920). St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, and Bernard of Clairvaux all write about the importance of free will to Christian theology. 45 The inability of some members of the Church to recognise a mystic’s holiness is a common trope of hagiography. 46 For example, she is called a ‘fals strumpet’, imprisoned, and examined in Leicester (1.46.2606–752), arrested in Hessle (1.53.3045–55), and preached against by a monk in York (1.52.2896–902). 47 Holloway, Saint bride and her book, p. 128. 48 Terry Hoople, ‘Conflicting visions: SM, feminism, and the law. A  problem of representation’, Canadian journal of law and society, 11.1 (Spring 1996): 177–220 (209). 49 Carlson, Performing bodies in pain, p. 101. 50 Breath play involves restricting the breath of the submissive partner, for example through choking. See, for example, Lisa Downing, ‘Beyond safety: erotic asphyxiation and the limits of SM discourse’, in Langdridge and Barker, Safe, sane and consensual, pp. 125–40 (p. 129). 51 Margot Weiss, ‘Mainstreaming kink: the politics of BDSM representation in U.S. popular media’, in Sadomasochism: powerful pleasures, ed. Peggy Kleinplatz and Charles Moser (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006), pp. 103–132; also Khan, Vicarious kinks. 52 Juicy Lucy, a member of the Samois collective of lesbian feminists, sees BDSM as an active response to the power inequalities present in sexual relationships (Juicy Lucy, ‘If I ask you to tie me up, will you still want to love me?’, in Coming to power: writings and graphics



Negotiating power and pleasure 67

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on lesbian S/M, 3rd edn, ed. Samois (New York: Alyson Publications, 1987), pp.  29–40). In Public sex, Califia writes, ‘S/M is a deliberate, pre-meditated, erotic blasphemy. It is a form of sexual extremism and sexual dissent’ (p. 158). 53 Muñoz, Cruising utopia, p. 18. 54 Muñoz, Cruising utopia, p. 99. 55 Aers, ‘The humanity of Christ’, p. 36.

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Land of saints and sadists: the S/M scene(s) in medieval Ireland Phillip A. Bernhardt-House

Medieval Irish literature contains an intriguing level of frankness about anatomical and sexual matters, which is perhaps unexpected if one is familiar with the postcolonial prudishness of modern Ireland. This is especially noteworthy given that a great deal of this literature was not translated or made more accessible until the Victorian and slightly later periods. Translating potentially graphic passages often had scholars like Whitley Stokes resorting to Latin and even Greek, sometimes in the middle of their English renderings of narratives,1 in order to disguise the nature of what was being described, except to informed and educated, and thus ‘properly prepared’, readers. The translation into English of the Old Irish penitential by both E. J. Gwynn and Daniel Binchy switched into Latin for their full catalogues of sexual sins.2 Thus, it is not surprising to find that a subject akin to what modern practitioners and theorists would refer to as BDSM has not been examined in relation to medieval Irish literature.3 Granted, these terms as they are used now had not existed when the study of medieval Irish literature began, and one looks in vain through medieval Irish lexical materials for terms which approximate these concepts. However, the rather outdated colloquial phrase used particularly of what was formerly called simply ‘S&M’, namely ‘whips and chains’, does have a certain degree of resonance with several occurrences in medieval Irish literature. One repeated detail in several of these is the echflesc, an Old Irish compound from ‘ech’ (‘horse’) and ‘flesc’ (‘rod’), which could be translated as ‘horserod’, ‘horsewhip’, or as John Carey preferred to render it, ‘riding crop’, the latter of which has particular resonance for BDSM and



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fetish-related activities.4 Marilynn Desmond treats of this subject in a discussion of the eroticised violence of images of the ‘mounted Aristotle’, in which the philosopher is portrayed being ridden like a horse by a woman brandishing a whip: the ‘mounted Aristotle’ – whether text or image, goes beyond metaphor to represent the erotic possibilities of humiliation and even flagellation. In many images, the female rider brandishes a whip held aloft in midair as though she were in the act of striking Aristotle with it. … As a visual detail – or an attribute – the whip directs the viewer’s attention to the physical sensations Aristotle will experience as a consequence of the rider’s erotic mastery. The excessively detailed riding crop acts as a visible fetish that demands that the viewer recognize the erotic possibilities of female sexual and phallic mastery.5

What Desmond discusses has direct parallels to what will be discussed in what follows in terms of understanding the imagery of eroticised violence, which underlies any parsing of BDSM practices. Given that in Victorian England, a nickname for riding crops was ‘dick’, and this usage is what then attached that nickname to the penis in modern colloquial English, this is especially relevant in particular cases. Two such scenes are at least connected to sexual situations in their medieval Irish contexts, and a third one might lend itself to that interpretation as well. The first can be dealt with somewhat quickly and simply, because while it arises from a sexual situation, it is not in itself part of an explicitly sexual scene and does not feature direct sexual acts, though it is an example of eroticised violence. It should be kept in mind that none of what is discussed in this specific instance falls into the category of responsible, ‘safe, sane, and consensual’ BDSM practice as known in modern fetish communities. Yet, for readers within those communities, as well as the everyday modern reader, sadism and masochism appear to be an intrinsic part of what occurs. It is a short scene in the tale Fingal Rónáin, ‘The KinSlaying of Rónán’, a tenth-century CE Middle Irish tale found in the early twelfth-century manuscript known as the Book of Leinster, which bears similarities to the Greek tale of Hippolytus (best known from the drama by Euripides), and may have some basis in historical events from the seventh century CE. In the Irish tale, the

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nameless ‘daughter of Eochaid of Dun Sobairce’ has fallen in love with Mael Fhothartaig, son of King Rónán, son of Aed. While Mael Fhothartaig actually woos her on behalf of his father, Rónán, the father and daughter perceive that he is wooing the daughter for himself. Eochaid and his daughter agree to the match, and she is married to King Rónán. However, the daughter attempts to carry out her desires with Mael Fhothartaigh, using one of her servingwomen as an intermediary to communicate her wishes, but her plan fails when the serving-woman becomes Mael Fhothartaig’s lover. The daughter of Eochaid then threatens her serving-woman’s life if she does not proposition Mael Fhothartaigh on her behalf; when the serving-woman reveals this situation to Mael Fhothartaigh, he asks the advice of his friend Congal, who offers to take care of the situation by setting up a false tryst to literally knock some sense into Eochaid’s daughter. Congal meets with Eochaid’s daughter at a remote location called the Bú Aífe (‘the Cows of Aífe’), which was said to be popular for trysting, and then scolds her for her behaviour and whips her with an echflesc.6 The entire tale is riddled with sexual tension, and in this particular scene the daughter of Eochaid is physically punished for her importunate behaviour.7 Afterwards, she presents the situation to her husband, King Rónán, as if her stepson had in fact attempted to rape her, which ends badly for nearly everyone in the tale. The meeting between Congal and Eochaid’s daughter is not an explicitly sexual scene, and Eochaid’s daughter does not appear to enjoy being treated in this fashion; thus, there is no directly stated pleasure in the act for either the victim of the attack nor for Congal carrying it out on behalf of Mael Fhothartaigh, who has been put in an embarrassing and potentially dangerous situation by the entire affair. Yet, the beating from Congal with a riding crop is the closest that Eochaid’s daughter gets to any direct physical interaction with Mael Fhothartaigh. With the implicit phallic imagery of the riding crop involved, Congal striking with it on behalf of his friend is like Mael Fhothartaigh himself ‘striking’ Eochaid’s daughter in sexual intercourse. The daughter of Eochaid’s deceitful characterisation of the incident as a rape by Mael Fhothartaigh afterwards serves to transform it from a moment of punishment and a realisation of her own misguided desires into a negative sexual experience, but

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one still seething with charged eroticism. Eochaid and his daughter set the precedent for this pattern of mischaracterisation at their initial appearance in the tale with their selective misreading of the overtures of Mael Fhothartaigh. Later in the story, this tendency finds further expression in the propensity to read any event in a way most potentially pleasurable sexually for the daughter, even when it is entirely incorrect to do so. In this vein, Eochaid’s daughter prefers her account of being raped by her desired love object over admitting that she received corporal punishment for her inappropriate overtures. Her servant’s enjoyment of sex with Mael Fhothartaigh displaces her own idealised desire to share Mael Fhothartaig’s bed, and the psychological pain this deprivation of her true desires causes her can then be enacted physically with her punishment by Congal, Mael Fhothartaig’s substitute. Further, Congal’s carrying out of the beating is likewise his own substitution for Mael Fhothartaigh and acting specifically on his behalf. Punishing the young and beautiful daughter not only for causing trouble but also for being desirable herself and more appropriate a match with Mael Fhothartaigh or his friend must have been part of the savour for Congal as he believes he is enacting just retribution on her. Congal’s riding crop substitutes for his own penis as he wields the weapon against the daughter and substitutes for Mael Fhothartaig’s penis through the voyeuristic pleasure of acting phallically on his friend’s behalf. While these interpretations do not exhaust the possibilities for what emotional states may have been involved in this situation, the pains and pleasures of eroticised violence certainly lend themselves to such an understanding in the tale’s pairings, substitutions, social roles, and the desires of at least one of the characters involved. These formulations and their potential psychological underpinnings may give expression to the fulfilment of the unstated desires of Congal and of Mael Fhothartaigh through the transformation of the pleasure-giving and receiving phallus to the punishment-dealing (and potentially pleasure-transmitting) riding crop. Medieval Irish texts do not tend to give any insight as to the internal or emotional states of characters, so we cannot as modern readers know how Eochaid’s daughter or Congal felt about the situation with any certainty. But, as modern readers, perhaps we

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can invoke what Robert Mills calls ‘wishful thinking’ in relation to queer readings of stories of male martyrdom in the present instance: I am pressing for a slightly more ‘hopeful’ approach to interpretation than paranoid reading practices generally allow for, one which identifies the transgressive possibilities in as unlikely a location as medieval Christian orthodoxy – even if that does ultimately run the risk of wishful thinking on the part of the modern commentator (but should the heteronormative paradigm so often projected onto readings of medieval texts and images not be similarly ‘wishful’ in certain instances, and why should we not at least attempt to identify the potential for reparative, wishful thinking in medieval modes of looking, reading and imagining?).8

Mills’s further discussion will have particular relevance for a later part of the present study, but his general hermeneutic as outlined here and elsewhere is in operation during the present interpretation: though medieval Irish audiences and authors may or may not have associated being punished with a horsewhip for inappropriate sexual advances a kind of displaced (and thus inappropriate in itself!) or sublimated form of sexual fulfilment, the thought cannot escape the connotation for many modern readers. There is another use of an echflesc in a different tale which is far more ambiguous, however, and though it has a punitive dimension, it may also be more along the lines of what we would consider ‘S/M proper’ in the modern sense. It is from the tale Serglige Con Culainn (‘The Wasting-Sickness’, ‘Love-Sickness’, or ‘Sick-Bed of Cú Chulainn’), a composite late Old Irish and late Middle Irish tale which combines an eleventh-century Recension A section with a ninth-century Recension B section, and which exists in the eleventhcentury manuscript Lebor na hUidre.9 As if the manuscript attestation of the tale is not complicated enough, the tale of Serglige Con Culainn has a very complex plot, even in comparison to Fingal Rónáin. In brief, on the eve of Samain (31 October leading into 1 November), the population of Ulster comes together for a regional assembly at Emain Macha lest supernatural harm come to them on that particularly important occasion.10 The foremost Ulster hero, Cú Chulainn, delays the assembly’s official convening in favour of

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awaiting the arrival of his foster-brother Conall Cernach and his foster-father Fergus mac Róich. As this occurs, a number of beautiful waterbirds come to Emain Macha, and the women of the Ulaid decide they would like a bird for each of their shoulders, which Cú Chulainn reluctantly offers to obtain for them. He does this, but fails to obtain a pair of birds for his wife (who in the two different recensions of the tale has a different name – Emer in the Middle Irish version, which is his more widely attested wife, and Eithne Ingubai in the Old Irish version, which is sometimes the name of his aunt or another female relation).11 When the most beautiful pair of these birds exhibits signs of otherworldly origin (by being yoked together by a red-gold chain), Cú Chulainn’s wife tries to dissuade him from attempting to capture them, but the hero will hear none of her objections. Rather than succumbing to his sling-throws, the birds seem immune, and Cú Chulainn begins to speak of impending doom. His attempt to kill the birds via spear-casts also fails. In despair, Cú Chulainn retires to the side of a standing stone by the water, and falls into a stupor. In his visionary sleep, Cú Chulainn sees two beautiful women who approach him: Co n-accai in dá mnai cucai. Indala n-aí brat úaine impe. Alaili brat corcra cóicdíabail im shude. Dolluid in ben cosin brot úane chucai, 7 tibid gen fris, 7 dobert béim dind echfhleisc dó. Dotháet alaili cucai dano, 7 tibid fris, 7 nod slaid fón alt chétna. Ocus bátar fri cíana móir oca sin .i. cechtar dé imma sech cucai béus dia búalad combo marb act bec. Lotir úad iarom.12 [While sleeping he saw two women approach: one wore a green cloak and the other a crimson cloak folded five times, and the one in green smiled at him and began to beat him with a horsewhip. The other woman then came and smiled also and struck him in the same fashion, and they beat him for such a long time that there was scarcely any life left in him. Then they left.]13

While Cú Chulainn is in this near-death state, Fergus mac Róich warns that it would be dangerous to move him. He is eventually taken to his fort at Dun Sobairce,14 and he remains in this stupor for over a year.15 As later events in the tale unfold, it is revealed that these two supernatural women are the humanoid forms of the two chained

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birds which Cú Chulainn had failed to stun and obtain for his wife. They are named Lí Bán and Fand (the latter of whom is the wife of the otherworld divine figure Manannán Mac Lir) and they have come to enlist Cú Chulainn’s assistance, and (in Lí Bán’s words) to ‘seek his love’. Lí Bán’s husband, Labraid Lúathlám ar Claideb, needs Cú Chulainn’s martial prowess to defeat a certain otherworldly enemy. In addition, he also gets the love of Fand, which leads to a variety of difficulties for the hero and his wife. Otherworldly animals, and particularly birds – whether or not they are explicitly humanoid denizens of the otherworld transformed or not – are often distinguished by their chaining together, so – despite the ‘wishful thinking’ hermeneutic of Mills mentioned above – we should not necessarily read anything particularly bondage-related into this detail of the story.16 However, the use of the echflesc for Cú Chulainn’s flogging, and the further specific message that the arrival of the otherworldly women was to seek Cú Chulainn’s favour and his love, and the subsequent affair he has with one of them, is highly suggestive of a sadomasochistic understanding of their relationship, in which Cú Chulainn suffers greatly in both psychological and physical ordeals and ultimately ‘bottoms’ for the divine Fand’s punishing phallic echflesc.17 The cliche of a girl hitting a boy in the playground because ‘she likes him’ is well understood. In the situation here, the supernatural woman striking Cú Chulainn with her sister’s assistance and both employing horsewhips in order to enlist his assistance and elicit his love sounds like something only fantasised about in the most salacious S/M dungeons. It may simply be that the hero was being punished for his inappropriate attacks on the women when they were in bird form, as the general interpretation of this tale has stated. Yet, with what happens as a result of this punishment, such a spare interpretation appears feeble when the eroticism of what eventually occurs, and the specific female phallic supremacy of Fand enacted on the hero, is considered in its widest valences. Frankly, the Irish heroic ethic does seem to be one which is inherently masochistic, in which the extreme extent of wounds inflicted between warriors with their varied weapons upon their opponents becomes a point of pride and the details of which are expanded upon with lurid fascination by medieval authors. This fits with



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some of what Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan discusses in terms of masochism being the realisation of a spiritual impulse, a preparation for death, and a potential manifestation of a heroic archetype.18 Cú Chulainn’s wounding in a number of different contexts is graphic and extensive, often with phrases such as this one from Táin Bó Cúailnge suggesting that the holes in his flesh were of such size that birds could fly through them: Ra gab cách díb bar tollad 7 bar tregdad, bar ruth 7 bar regtad araile á dorblas na matnae muchi go taáth funid nóna. Dambad bés éoin ar lúamain do thect tri chorpaib dóene, doragtaís trina corpaib in lá sin, go mbértais na tóchta fola 7 feóla trina cnedaib 7 trina créchtaib i nnélaib 7 i n-áeraib sechtair.19 [Each of them [Cu Chulainn and Fer Diad] began to pierce and wound, to overthrow and cast each other down from the twilight of early morning until sunset. If it were usual for birds in flight to pass through men’s bodies, they would have gone through their bodies that day and carried lumps of flesh and blood through their wounds and cuts into the clouds and the air outside.]20

This makes his heroism all the more undeniable in the estimation of the medieval Irish audiences who heard and read these tales.21 Ann Dooley discusses how in Táin Bó Cúailnge, Cú Chulainn experiences multiple episodes where he is wounded severely in physical battles, but then undergoes a restorative sleep, on one occasion with the literal divine intervention of his deific father Lug’s presence and magic.22 What differs in the case of Serglige Con Culainn is that Cú Chulainn’s attack and near-mortal wounding is entirely supernatural and, it is implied, visionary in origin, but its impacts have direct consequences for his physical and mental health in the material world of tribe, friends, and family in his home territory of Ulster. Elaine Scarry discusses how rare it is that pain as an experience is mentioned in literature, perhaps due to its inherent and inexpressible subjectivity.23 While sometimes Cú Chulainn’s experiences of enduring physical wounds are mentioned by him in descriptive manners, the emotional or psychological dimensions of such experiences are rarely if ever outlined directly in his own words,24 nor in those of the medieval narrative authors writing about him. In some sense, perhaps the psychological toll of his failures is manifested

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in the length of his debilitated existence after this experience, even independent of the potentially retributive counter-attack from the transformed women that it also represents. But one could go further: though Cú Chulainn fights with and has sex with warrior women on a few other occasions in medieval Irish literature, and tends to defeat them in battle before doing so, here he is not only ‘bested’ by the evasive manoeuvrability and otherworldly abilities of Fand and Lí Bán in bird form, he is also utterly defeated and nearly slain by a supernatural woman who is never stated to be a warrior at all, and who wields a non-lethal (and potentially erotic) weapon that is an implement for controlling domestic animals. No greater defeat could be imagined for an Irish warrior, and thus in addition to what enchantments he may have fallen under as a result of this psychosexual fantasy vision, the devastation of and humiliation to his heroic pride must have been superlative. Humiliation and even ‘sissification’ is a practice in modern BDSM that is enjoyed by some people, particularly by powerful men at the hands of women for its power to humble and give catharsis over their superior social and other positions in a subversive manner. This medieval Irish example fits that pattern perfectly. During his stupor over the following year, Cú Chulainn also gives a mantic pronouncement on the expectations of how best to exercise sovereignty for his foster-son Lugaid Riab nDerg, who has become the king of Tara, in a section of the text known as the Briatharthecosc Con Culainn (‘The Wisdom-Sayings of Cú Chulainn’).25 In certain respects, despite the stated intentions of the otherworldly women, it appears that things did not go to plan at their first meeting with Cú Chulainn, and it is likewise clear that he had no explicit pleasure in being flogged thus to the point of death. Yet, this disciplinary humbling of the hero could be considered a necessity for what follows in the tale as well, and in a particular interpretation this kind of activity and its specific intention to humble via punishment is well known, as mentioned before, within what falls under the BD (bondage/discipline) and DS (dominance/ submission) parts of the BDSM initialism, even if the Dom and sub in this case are not explicit sadists and masochists. The ways in which these sorts of activities lead to what practitioners call ‘subspace’, an altered state of consciousness stimulated

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by adrenaline and endorphins and which can lead to depersonalisation, trances, and other psychological effects,26 might parallel Cú Chulainn’s experience in being brought low by the otherworldly women, who have put him into this state so that an ecstatic revelation might follow. Cú Chulainn’s ecstatic pronouncements of gnomic wisdom benefit the entire population of Ireland through the good kingship they foster. In Robert Eisler’s classic (though somewhat dated) study Man into wolf: an anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism, and lycanthropy, the wide traditions of European mythic and literary lycanthropy are discussed in relation to the ideas of sadism and masochism; some of his examples include both Apollonian and Dionysian instances of this, and even a brief discussion of Irish werewolf tales, but this tale and its contents are not mentioned.27 Cú Chulainn fits the medieval Irish paradigm of a ‘werewolf’ in almost all respects, apart from actual physical transformation into a wolf (or other canid): Irish werewolves are often metaphorically ‘human-wolves’ when they function as warriors in specific contexts, rather than literally transforming from human form into canid or hybrid human–animal forms.28 Cú Chulainn’s name literally means ‘the Hound of Culann’, so the canid metaphor exists explicitly in every mention of him. Thus, it would not be unexpected, perhaps in Eisler’s interpretation, to see a masochistic strain connected to symbolic lycanthropy at some point in his sexual ‘hero’s journey’. Another linkage involving flogging and sadomasochistic pleasure in medieval Irish literature is the incident, also featuring a supernatural flogger, in the most renowned late seventh/early eighth-century Hiberno-Latin hagiography of St Colum Cille (alias Columba) written by Adomnán of Iona. Intriguingly, both Colum Cille and Cú Chulainn are figures associated with the Irish province of Ulster, and both are abbreviated ‘CC’ in manuscripts concerning them. The incident occurs in Book III, Chapter 5 of the Vita Columbae, the section of the work concerned with apparitions of angels and other manifestations of heavenly divine light. In that chapter, the saint is living on the isle of Hinba, a common place for him to take more solitary eremitic retreats away from the cenobitic life of his monastic community. An angel visits him in his visionary state and shows him a book made of glass that has written in it which kings are to be

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ordained according to the divine plan. When Colum Cille sees that Áedán mac Gabráin is to be king of Scottish Dál Ríata, he refuses to carry out God’s plan in officially ordaining Áedán as king, and the angel punishes the saint by flagellating him: Quid cum secundum quod ei in libro erat commendatum Aidanum in regem ordinare recusaret, quia magis Iogenanum fratrem ejus diligeret, subito angelus, extendens manum, Sanctum percussit flagella, cujus livorosum in ejus latere vestigium omnibus suae diebus permansit vitae. Hocque intulit verbum: ‘Pro certo scias,’ inquiens, ‘quia ad te a Deo missus sum cum vitreo libro, ut juxta verba quae in eo legisti, Aidanum in regnum ordines. Quod so obsecundare huic nolueris jussioni, percutiam te iterato.’ [But when he refused to ordain Aidan as king, according to what was commanded him in the book, because he loved Iogenan, Aidan’s brother, more, the angel suddenly stretched out his hand and struck the holy man with a scourge, the livid scar of which remained on his side all the days of his life. And the angel added these words, saying: ‘Know surely that I am sent to you by God, with the book of glass, in order that, according to what you have read in it, you shall ordain Aidan to the kingship. But if you refuse to obey this command, I shall strike you again.’]29

Despite this entire experience taking place ‘in extasi mentis’, ‘in a trance of the mind’,30 the supernatural punishment leaves a physical scar, not unlike the situation discussed above with Cú Chulainn and his flogging by Lí Bán and Fand. After the angel’s warning that he will strike him again if he continues to refuse this divine command, the angel visits the saint again over the next two nights until the saint finally submits to his commands and returns to Iona to ordain Áedán.31 While the text does not specifically state that the saint continued to refuse and was thus subsequently punished by another flagellation each night, it seems implied that the repeat visits and the delayed final submission of the saint’s will took further reiterations of this psychophysical disciplining in order to be accepted by Colum Cille. This chronologically earlier (in terms of attested literary sources) ecclesiastical incident seems more ambiguous, even, than the previously discussed one involving Cú Chulainn, and more full of what

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we might call ‘queer’ potentials, because it concerns human and angelic sexual interactions (which are explicitly forbidden in several places in the Bible).32 There is also potential homoeroticism in Colum Cille’s case if we assume the angel has a gender consonant with its grammatical gender, all by an ostensibly celibate but consummately pious saintly figure, in direct contravention to divine commands given to him through the punishing angel. Physical ordeals are not unusual for those in monastic life’s ascetic milieu, and the Irish context is no different; however, flagellation is not one that is commonly attested.33 Robert Mills has analysed how stories of male martyrdom set up new understandings of masculinity by having their saintly protagonists endure what would otherwise be understood as submissive, feminine, and even emasculating torture as a sign of their spiritual potency and heroism,34 and perhaps we can understand Colum Cille’s incident with the angel in this way. Colum Cille was one of the first Irish ‘peregrini’, the perpetual ‘pilgrims’ who left Ireland as religious exiles and ‘outlaws for God’ (deórad Dé). This lifestyle was understood by Irish ecclesiastical culture as the ‘blue/grey/green (glas) martyrdom’, in contrast to the ‘red martyrdom’ of actual torture and death endured by the original Christian martyr saints (which did not happen in the Irish circumstances of conversion) or the ‘white martyrdom’ of the monastic life.35 Further, ­flagellation – whether in punishment for disobedience, penance, or in selfinflicted ascetic practices – is understood as an important imitation of the sufferings of Jesus before his crucifixion in the interpretations of later medieval Christian theologians, and as echoed by the sufferings endured by the early Desert Fathers, according to Niklaus Largier’s important study In praise of the whip.36 What sets apart this angelic flogging scene with Colum Cille is that it occurs directly from divine agents rather than human ecclesiastical personnel or oppressive persecutors. Though it is intended as a punishment, the degree to which Colum Cille could have been expected to know how best to deal with divine directives transmitted to him by angels is not something attested in any medieval Irish monastic rule known at present: such emphasis on ‘discernment of spirits’ would not have come about on a systematic level for the most part until much later Ignatian spiritual traditions. Further, Colum Cille’s ‘subbing’ for

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the angel is unique in that rather than this supernatural torment coming from demons as it does in the case of St Anthony and other ascetic and eremitic practitioners’ temptations and persecutions, the agency is directly from one of God’s (faithful, in contrast to the fallen nature of demons) angels, and the Irish saint has the scars to prove it for the rest of his life.37 This is very much in line with the penitential and eschatological trends of early Irish monastic spirituality in particular, as outlined by Katja Ritari.38 Whereas Cú Chulainn does not seem to enjoy his treatment by Fand and Lí Bán, and it leaves him nearly dead for a year, Colum Cille appears to be very deliberate in his persistent refusal to submit to divine authority despite knowing what is in store for him should he not do so. For an individual as prone to receiving angelic visitations as he was, this seems an unusual occurrence given the inevitability of the situation. That the saint had to pre-emptively guilt-trip Áedán and his relatives and descendants to always submit to his and his monastic successors’ own authority might explain why there was reluctance on the saint’s part to submit to the divine commands for the ordination of that specific king. One might read this situation as being more than simply a monastic tendency towards extreme asceticism. As an appendage to this section of the Vita, a passage is inserted in Dorbbéne’s manuscript of it which is stated to have come from the earlier hagiography of St Colum Cille by Cumméne, the seventh abbot of Iona (Adomnán was the ninth abbot),39 upon whose work Adomnán also certainly drew.40 Likewise, elsewhere in the Vita, Colum Cille favours Áedán (Book  I, Chapter 8)41 and the prophesies concerning his rightful heirs (Book I, Chapter 9).42 It is highly likely that this incident had some particularly poignant historical merit for possibly up to half a century before the Vita was written. The theme of a gradual humbling from pride and being forced into conformity with divine will of even the holiest of figures in human religious contexts occurs across the world in many religions, but here the understanding of it can take on a different meaning with what has been established in the preceding discussion. Rather than merely being a context for religious asceticism and penitential masochism, we can understand Colum Cille’s repeated refusals and subsequent punishments before his eventual submission to

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be a realisation of his own internal struggles over the matter of his role in ensuring divinely ordained kingship, with all the eroticism that such kingship implies in the Irish context. Colum Cille was not an everyday man of Ireland, but was of royal lineage, and himself a candidate for inheriting the kingship; as Brendan Lehane wrote, Colum Cille’s giving up of secular life was not merely the avoidance of duties in the world and of family and social occupation: ‘Columba had given up a sceptre’.43 His clerical celibacy was not avoiding the sexual relationships of matrimony with ordinary women, it involved ceding the inherited right to have sex with the Goddess of Sovereignty as king. In this incident, as he ruminated over the divine decision of rightful kingship and his role in ordaining it, the lack of sexuality with a goddess of one religion was willingly traded for the repeated substitute divine phallicism of the punishing angel to reiterate the loss of what his inherited position could have brought him in terms of superlative secular power and divine sexual satiation. No mere holy asceticism or penitential punishment, this episode is instead psychospiritual masochism. There are other similarities between Colum Cille and Cú Chulainn,44 and Adomnán’s text is demonstrably earlier than all of the texts concerning Cú Chulainn. Thus, it seems fair to ask if there is a direct comparison between these two figures being made via these incidents, and a drawing of a deliberate parallel by the later Irish writers of the Ulster Cycle tale to Adomnán’s ecclesiastical text. Both involve supernatural punishers – in one case, aviantransformed otherworldly women, and in the other, the winged bird-like angelic messenger and punisher – and though one situation is explicitly sexual in terms of the punisher eventually becoming the lover of the punished character, the other does not seem to have this element, at least explicitly or deliberately in the medieval Irish context. Modern readers, however, are free to understand their own desires through such scenes, particularly since human-angelic eroticism is a biblical theme and one often connected with homoeroticism in various ways. The other factor which makes these incidents comparable seems somewhat marginal, and yet may have its own importance to consider: namely, both of these visionary experiences involve royal inauguration; while the direct connection between the otherworld

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women’s punishment of Cú Chulainn and the mantic pronouncement he later makes for the new king of Tara is absent, nonetheless these associations are present in both.45 The ways in which the Goddess of Sovereignty is described in a number of Irish texts does suggest a certain Dominant/submissive dynamic as being a part of the basic understanding,46 and the connection between the Goddess of Sovereignty and the king is always explicitly sexual,47 thus perhaps the question of the wider world of BDSM is not irrelevant to these matters, either. A ritual context suggests that the interpretation of these matters might benefit from comparison to other situations involving flogging from the wider European sphere. Ritual flogging occurs in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which is also connected to royalty.48 There are rites of passage that involve flogging at the foot of a statue of Artemis Orthia in Sparta,49 a festival of Dionysus called the Skiereia which is held in Alea, Arcadia, involves the flogging of women (on the Delphic Oracle’s recommendation),50 and the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii has a painting which shows a flogging scene in a Dionysian context, specifically of a winged divine female carrying out the disciplinary action on a presumed human woman.51 This last example is noteworthy, because the characteristics present in the divine being – wings and femininity – are also found in the Irish examples of Colum Cille and Cú Chulainn, respectively, and thus may represent a potential distant precedent. Further examples exist, and what emerges in many of them is that divine beings seem to compel action via these means, at least on a metaphorical level, and it is also possible that such imagery could have a physical, ritual instantiation as well in order to bring about catharsis, or even to stimulate ecstatic states. Both submission to the will of divine beings, and an attempt to bring humans to greater perfection in divine will through purgation or purification, do seem to be relevant possibilities in the case of the two main incidents examined herein. In order to be prepared for greater and more intense otherworldly and divine contacts, mortification of the flesh might need to occur in these Irish contexts, and eroticised violence can be one means of such mortification. It is interesting that these visionary experiences also have physical ramifications in the tales examined in the form of the saint’s scar and the hero’s prolonged

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state of stupor. While the pleasure-pain dynamics of continental medieval courtly love traditions may draw on an immense store of psychological sadomasochistic imagery, it is intriguing that for these Irish tales it is not merely in the realm of the psychic (in the widest possible sense of the term, i.e. internal/mental as well as supernatural) that such experiences have their impacts, but in the physical and mental/emotional realms too. For decades, modern BDSM practitioners have employed altered states of consciousness, role-playing, religiously charged imagery and symbolism, and much else besides. Some fetishistic experiences have the potential to become spiritual paths of their own.52 Stories like the medieval Irish ones discussed here could add further historical precedents, as well as fertile grounds for potential symbolic usages and creations of role-playing personae, roles, scripts, and scenes in a spiritually aware and engaged pursuit of BDSM activities. In the present medieval Irish cases, these can take place in at least two different religious or spiritual contexts (paganism/polytheism and Christianity). The potentials to be drawn from these few texts examined above are nearly limitless, and when these texts are engaged with in an informed and conscious manner as exemplary sources in a practical, sexual, and spiritual context, a great deal of pleasure could be had from such explorations. These few occurrences do not exhaust the wide possibilities present in medieval Irish literature for discerning the ‘Fifty shades of Glas’ that could exist within this body of texts.53 As further examples, I briefly allude to the penchant of St Findchú to be suspended from hooks, making him what Karen Eileen Overbey refers to as a potential ‘patron saint of body piercing’,54 and an incident involving St Moling driving an awl through his engorged penis to avert his lustful thoughts, which would make him a potential patron saint of genital piercing in particular.55 The masochistic pleasures of body piercing as eroticised violence are well understood by those who partake of them; making the leap across the centuries to these Irish ecclesiastical examples provides further materials from which to build such conscious sites of pleasure. If the widening of this subject to include sexual fetishism of various sorts occurred, as has been the trend within modern BDSM communities and considerations, even more possibilities would present themselves. Without

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wishing to flog a dead horse, however, I also think that as valid as these modern readings and interpretive encounters with medieval Irish literature are, we must also remember that lurking behind these intriguing uses of imagery and their potential psychological and even religious relevance, our own post-psychoanalytic ideas of sadism, masochism, and other such concepts are difficult if not impossible to directly correlate to anything that would have existed in medieval Irish culture on an explicit lexical or cognitive level. However, the eroticism of kingship and its associated rituals and divine beings, and the replacement of explicit sexual pleasure for eroticised violence is plain to see when the fullest associations of these images and contexts are appreciated and understood. Mills’s methodology mentioned earlier as a basis for some of the present discussion certainly is possible and indeed valid, and yet we must also be aware of the ‘hard limits’ of such applications, and must negotiate them anew with each Irish text in the same way that one must renegotiate such hard limits with new partners in any and all roles in modern BDSM practices. The would-be commentator on these topics is well suited to adopt the methodology of the ‘switch’ in BDSM: sometimes, one tops the text, while at other times, the text tops oneself, and still other times – no matter how much one might wish to top the text – the text itself may not cooperate in these regards, and the text ‘tops from the bottom’. A hermeneutics of BDSM as applied to medieval, or indeed any, literature could involve any one of these things, though the approach of the switch might be the positional choice that yields the most varied interpretations and fascinating conclusion. We are too aware of the more passive approach that more traditional scholarship has played in this regard, expecting the text to speak for itself; as a result, that conservative and text-based methodology could be described as ‘bottoming for the text’. Likewise, there is an approach favoured within queer theory, gender studies, feminist scholarship, and other modes that prioritises theory first and looks for the text to support it, and often builds grand edifices on relatively small bits of evidence from a highly selective corpus, which could be characterised as ‘topping the text’ and having one’s own theoretical desires shape how one interacts with the text. The switch approach would combine these together, paying due respect

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to the ‘Top’ of the text and the traditions and cultural complexes from which it originates, and thus doing due diligence in terms of understanding these on their own terms before engagement, but then having the text ‘bottom’ for the reader as modern praxis-based approaches and theories are applied to it to bring out otherwise occulted aspects of texts’ eroticism. I hope that the discussion which has preceded in this chapter does a decent job of applying that switch methodology in its hermeneutic of uncovering the eroticism of violence and punishment in the medieval Irish texts it has examined. One suspects that Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin would probably say that study of medieval Irish literature itself, unlike the ideals of modern BDSM practice, and perhaps even especially in relation to topics like the present one, is not necessarily consensual since our ideas are so vastly different from theirs – and the subjectivity of texts themselves has not been a consideration for any scholarly treatment of which I am aware, in this or any other area of enquiry – and, in any case, the study of medieval Irish literature is likewise never safe nor sane.

Notes

I would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Dr Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, whom we lost in April of 2015. Dr Ní Bhrolcháin was a hard-smoking, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, and hard-laughing Irish woman, a world-class scholar, a feminist, and an activist. No better testament to her scholarly achievements in the field of medieval Irish Studies could be conceived than her book, An introduction to early Irish literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), which I would highly recommend to everyone who would like to learn more about the subjects discussed in the present contribution. It was her article focusing upon the sexual aspects and potential metaphor of the entire tale as a loss of sexual potency, ‘Serglige Con Culainn: a possible reinterpretation’, referenced in note 16 above, originally given at the Second International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales in 2005, and a short conversation we had following her paper, which directly inspired the present contribution. Her original paper at the conference on this subject was far more raucous and explicit than the published

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Spiritual and penitential (con)texts version. My comparisons of Cú Chulainn and Colum Cille’s respective sadomasochistic incidents goes all the way back to a study I did as an undergraduate in Prof. David Bernstein’s Medieval and Renaissance England course at Sarah Lawrence College during the Fall Semester of 1995, for which I am grateful to his memory as well, and during which time I was cutting my teeth simultaneously on medieval and Celtic studies as well as the world of BDSM. I also thank Christopher Vaccaro for his excellent assistance in improving the present contribution. All remaining inadequacies are attributable only to myself.

 1 Whitley Stokes, ‘Mythological notes’, Revue celtique, 2 (1874): 199–200 (‘VIII. Créd’s Pregnancy’). This incident involves the folkloric motif of ‘conception by swallowing’ often found in Irish and other Insular Celtic texts, and yet in this case, rather than a small transformed being in the form of a worm, grain of wheat, or other shapes being swallowed and leading to conception, the swallowing involved is a woman ingesting semen that an excited warrior has ejaculated on a patch of watercress in the woods near a well, from which she conceives a child. The specific details involved in this instance of the folkloric motif are also found elsewhere in the Indo-European cultural sphere.   2 E. J. Gwynn, ‘An Irish penitential’, Ériu, 7 (1914): 143–7 §11–35; Daniel A. Binchy, ‘Appendix: the Old-Irish penitential’, in The Irish penitentials, ed. Ludwig Bieler (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963), pp. 263–5 §11–35.   3 An acronym standing for, and also abbreviating, ‘bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism’ (thus rendering BDDSSM down to BDSM) in its fullest form.   4 As an intriguing aside, the echflesc, in the text titled by its editor ‘A Tuath Dé Miscellany’, is said to have been invented by the Irish god Lug, who is the father of Cú Chulainn, a character who is discussed at length in this chapter; John Carey, ‘A Tuath Dé Miscellany’, Bulletin of the board of Celtic studies, 39 (1992): 28 §10, 30 §10.   5 Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s art and the Wife of Bath: the ethics of erotic violence (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 2006), pp. 13–27 (pp. 19–22).   6 It might be noteworthy to remark that the woman’s father, Eochaid, has a name which appears to be derived in some fashion from one of the Irish words for horse, ech, and that horses are often associated with sexual potency in Irish literature and mythology.   7 David Greene, Fingal Rónáin and other stories (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1955), 6 line 99; Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘The

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kin-slaying of Rónán’, in The Celtic heroic age: literary sources for ancient Celtic Europe & early Ireland & Wales, ed. John Thomas Koch and John Carey (Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2003), pp. 274–82 (p. 277).   8 Robert Mills, ‘“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: masculinity, masochism, and queer play in representations of male martyrdom’, Exemplaria, 13.1 (2001): 1–37 (3–4).   9 There is also a seventeenth-century copy of the tale in another manuscript in Trinity College Dublin, MS.H.4.22; Myles Dillon, ‘The Trinity College text of Serglige Con Culainn’, Scottish Gaelic studies, 6 (1949): 139–75, with corrigenda in Scottish Gaelic studies, 7 (1953), 88; translated in Myles Dillon, ‘The wasting sickness of Cú Chulainn’, Scottish Gaelic studies, 7 (1951): 47–88. 10 In other texts, the night of Samain is the occasion for the Feis Temro, often translated as the ‘Feast of Tara’, but which is more accurately translated as the ‘Sleeping of Tara’, with ‘sleeping’ here understood sexually, and which involved the confirmation of the king in his marriage to the Goddess of Sovereignty, which is often depicted in explicitly sexual terms. While supernatural threat, thus, does accompany this occasion in Irish tradition, it is also an occasion for sexual consummation and communion between the mortal world and the supernatural world. 11 His wife’s name is Eithne Ingubai generally at the beginning of the tale, and Emer toward the end. 12 Myles Dillon, Serglige Con Culainn (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1953), 3 §8 lines 71–8. 13 Jeffrey Gantz (trans.), Early Irish myths and sagas (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 157. 14 This location is now known as Dunseverick, County Louth. Interestingly, this is also the location from which Eochaid, the father of Rónán’s second wife, and thus also Eochaid’s daughter, originates; Greene, Fingal Rónáin, 3 line 11; Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘The kin-slaying of Rónán’, p. 275. It is the traditional location of Cú Chulainn’s home fort. 15 Discussion in Muireann Ní Bhrolcháinn, ‘Serglige Con Culainn: a possible re-interpretation’, in Ulidia 2: proceedings of the second international conference on the Ulster Cycle of tales, ed. Ruairí Ó hUiginn and Brian Ó Catháin (Maynooth: An Sagart, 2009), pp. 344–55 (p. 349). 16 Anne Ross, ‘Chain symbolism in pagan Celtic religion’, Speculum, 34.1 (January 1959): 41–53. 17 For the purposes of this discussion, I am defining ‘bottoming’ as the role in a BDSM context in which someone who ‘Tops’ and plays the role of

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the Top (and is often also the Dominant and/or sadistic person in the dynamic) exerts dominance on the person in the role of the ‘bottom’, often with the infliction of pain, as well as possible humiliation, physical restraints or binding, and other such sensations or experiences on their submissive partner, generally with the understanding that such experiences and sensations also constitute receiving pleasure or fulfilment for that submissive partner. Even though Cú Chulainn does have some power in the relationship he ends up having with Fand, she is ultimately the Top in the relationship in a variety of ways, and whether or not Cú Chulainn had any choice in the matter in their initial meeting, he continues to engage with her after that point, which indicates his willingness to endure such submission as his role in the relationship, and thus his assent to bottom for Fand’s Topping. 18 Lyn Cowan, Masochism: a Jungian view (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1982). 19 Cecile O’Rahilly (ed./trans.), Táin Bó Cúalnge from the book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1967), p. 87, ll. 3145–9. 20 O’Rahilly, Táin Bó Cúalnge, p. 233. To be clear, the birds involved here are not the chained birds of Serglige Con Culainn and other tales, which are generally supernatural and transformed women (though not exclusively) and are envisioned as larger waterbirds like swans, geese, cranes, or herons, but instead are smaller birds like songbirds, wrens, sparrows, robins, crows, and the like, which, though still sizable in their wingspans when flying in terms of envisioning the extent of wounds through the flesh, would be excessive even for the exaggerating tendencies of Irish heroic narrative. 21 While sadomasochism is not mentioned, Sarah Sheehan discusses the homoerotic elements in the relationship – and particularly the graphic and sexualised details in the deadly combat – between Cú Chulainn and his foster-brother Fer Diad: ‘Fer Diad de-flowered: homoerotics and masculinity in Comrac Fir Diad’, in Ó hUiginn and Brian Ó Catháin, Ulidia 2, pp. 54–65. 22 Ann Dooley, Playing the hero: reading the Irish saga Táin Bó Cúailnge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 127–38. 23 Elaine Scarry, The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 11. 24 The author of Serglige Con Culainn, however, does mention that Cú Chulainn was angry after missing his attempts to capture the birds immediately before this incident of Fand and Lí Bán’s visionary ­incursion happens.

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25 Dillon, Serglige Con Culainn, pp. 9–10. A translation of this wisdom text, often separated from the rest of the text and omitted in translations like that of Gantz, noted in 13 above, can be found in Maxim Fomin, ‘Briatharthecosc Con Culainn in the context of Early Irish wisdom-literature’, in Ó hUiginn and Ó Catháin Ulidia 2, pp. 140–72. 26 Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, The new bottoming book (Emeryville: Greenery Press, 2001), p. 19. 27 Robert Eisler, Man into wolf: an anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism, and lycanthropy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), pp. 109, 130 (Dionysian werewolf connections), p. 133 (Apollonian werewolf connections), p. 138 (Irish werewolves). 28 Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Werewolves, magical hounds, and dogheaded men in Celtic literature (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), pp. 173–5. 29 Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, Adomnan’s life of Columba (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1961), pp. 472–5. 30 Anderson and Anderson, Adomnan’s life of Columba, pp. 472–3. 31 This entire incident can also be found more accessibly in Richard Sharpe (ed./trans.), Adomnán of Iona, life of St. Columba (New York and London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 208–9. 32 Gen. 6:1–4, 19:1–11; 2 Pet. 2:4–18; Jude 6–13. These passages (particularly the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Gen. 19) have occasionally been read as relating to homoeroticism and have a role to play in the wider implications of these questions. It appears that they might be especially transgressive to consider under the present discussion. See, for example, Michael Vasey, Strangers and friends: a new exploration of homosexuality and the Bible (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1995), pp. 137–8; Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and homosexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 100 n. 3. 33 The rule of St. Benedict suggests regular beatings for boys, but adults and abbots no less are far outside of the allowances of this particular monastic rule; Timothy Fry, The rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981), p. 54 §30. In any case, the Benedictine practices were not yet in common usage during St Colum Cille’s lifetime, nor when Adomnán wrote. Some especially severe penitential practices, however, are attested in Ireland, which could include lashes with a scourge in the ‘Old Irish table of commutations’ – Binchy, ‘Appendix: the Old-Irish penitential’, 277–83. 34 Mills, ‘“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”’. 35 Thomas M. O. Charles-Edwards, ‘The social background of Irish Peregrinatio’, Celtica, 11 (1976): 43–59; Clare Stancliffe, ‘Red, white,

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and blue martyrdom’, in Ireland in early Mediaeval Europe: studies in memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 21–46. Glas is a word meaning ‘blue,’ ‘green’, and ‘grey’ (and perhaps best understood as ‘sea-coloured’) in Old Irish, and which is connected to otherworldliness. 36 ‘Fixation on the Passions of Christ, which forms the basic model of all Christian life … enters a realm where it is less a question of belief than of repeatedly staging a history of suffering through a dramatic unfolding of the passions and images in the soul’ (Niklaus Largier, In praise of the whip: a cultural history of arousal, trans. Graham Harman (New York: Zone, 2007), p. 25). Largier explores the voyeuristic pleasures of the spectacle of whipping and the power of flagellation to provide religious, emotional, and erotic excitement: ‘Wherever the flogger and his victim appear, they inhabit a space that becomes the site of a drama by way of this ritual inflicted on the body: a drama in which punishment and penance, carnality and shame, torment and desire, as well as ascesis, ecstasy, and pain all coalesce in specific fashion and are exposed to our gaze in an exemplary way’ (p. 13). 37 Similar to (but not entirely synonymous with) ‘bottoming’, for someone to ‘sub’ and to be a ‘sub’ is to be the person in a submissive role in a BDSM dynamic, willingly entering into situations of infliction of pain by the Dom, exertion of the Dominant’s will in directing their behaviour, and in other ways allowing the Dom control over some aspect of their life that may not always be specifically erotic in nature or context. Whereas Cú Chulainn’s dynamic with Fand seems more on the bottom/ Top spectrum because of Fand’s continuous contact with the hero and active direction of his behaviour, in the situation with Colum Cille and the angel, I would characterise it more as a sub/Dom relationship, since the angel clearly expects the will of God under which the angel is acting to be followed by the saint even when the angel is not there and actively directing things. On one level, the Top/bottom dynamic has a markedly physical dimension to it, at least as I am deploying the terms here, whereas the Dom/sub dynamic has a mental and psychological component that is also heavily emphasised, even though both the ­physical and the psychological come into both varieties of dynamic. In both cases examined here at length, the divine partner in the relationship has the role of the Dom or the Top. 38 Katja Ritari, Pilgrimage to heaven: eschatology and monastic spirituality in early medieval Ireland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), especially pp. 13–45 on Columban monastic spirituality.

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39 Anderson and Anderson, Adomnan’s life of Columba, pp. 474–7; Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona, p. 209. 40 Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona, pp. 357–9 n. 360. 41 Anderson and Anderson, Adomnan’s life of Columba, pp. 226–7; Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona, p. 119. 42 Anderson and Anderson, Adomnan’s life of Columba, pp. 228–9; Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona, p. 119–20. 43 Brendan Lehane, Early Celtic Christianity (London: Constable, 1995), 103. 44 One unusual motif shared by both the hero and the saint concerns their death narratives, in which their horses lament them before death by coming to their esteemed owners and weeping in their laps, with Cú Chulainn’s crying tears of blood; see John Carey, ‘The death of Cú Chulainn’, in Koch and Carey, The Celtic heroic age, pp. 134–43 (p.  136); Anderson and Anderson, Adomnan’s life of Columba, pp.  522–5; Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona, p. 227. Given the frequency of horse-related names, imagery, and implements in the tales selected above, these matters seem significant. Perhaps a further dimension of fetishism and BDSM that could be explored in future discussions of these tales is the phenomenon known today as ‘pony-play’. 45 Further, the entire situation discussed earlier in Fingal Rónáin might be an example of a ‘Sovereignty myth gone wrong’: Kim McCone, Pagan past and Christian present in early Irish literature (Maynooth: An Sagart, 2000), pp. 134–5; Elva Johnston, ‘Kingship made real?: power and the public world in Longes Mac nUislenn’, in Tome: studies in medieval Celtic history and law in honour of Thomas CharlesEdwards, ed. Fiona Edmonds and Paul Russell (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), pp. 193–206 (pp. 199–200). Richard Sharpe’s notes on Adomnán’s text suggest that a shift from a pre-Christian practice of royal inauguration to an explicitly Christian practice might be asserted by the incident with Colum Cille, and this is an important consideration in the transformation of Irish society through Christianisation and the shift in understanding of the divine derivation of sovereignty from polytheistic to Christian divine beings; Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona, pp. 355–7 nn. 358–9. 46 The Dominant/submissive dynamic in certain forms of consensual relationship can extend to a variety of sexual as well as everyday/nonsexual situations in which the Dominant partner has control over the submissive. The Dominant partner’s titles and all referents are capitalised in an extension of the respect and deference which the submissive is bound to extend to them at all times in which their relationship exists.

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47 Proinsias Mac Cana, Celtic mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1970), pp. 94–7. 48 Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, Vol. 2: a sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 119–24. 49 Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: myth and cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 104. 50 W. H. S. Jones, Pausanias, description of Greece, books VIII.22–X (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 8–9 (8.23.1). 51 Walter Burkert, Ancient mystery cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 104. See as well the references to Dionysian matters in Eisler’s work in note 28 supra. 52 Among an increasing body of literature dealing with these matters, see Lee Harrington, Sacred kink: the eightfold paths of BDSM and beyond (Lynnwood: Mystic Productions Press, 2010); Lee Harrington (ed.), Spirit of desire: personal explorations of sacred kink (Lynnwood: Mystic Productions Press, 2010). 53 Given the wide semantic range, ambiguity, and potential liminal and spiritual connections of the term glas (mentioned earlier in relation to the ‘blue/grey/green martyrdom’ of perpetual exile, usually over the sea, in an Irish context), it may be very appropriate to use here, no matter how poor the reference to popular (and supposed) BDSM literature may be. 54 Karen Eileen Overbey, ‘Mapping the sacred: time, space, and politics in the stories of the saints’, Foilsiú, 1.1 (Spring 2001): 130–44 (134). 55 Vernam E. Hull, ‘Two anecdotes concerning St. Moling’, Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 18 (1930): 90–9.

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3 Failed sadism and masochistic martyrdom in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames Tina-Marie Ranalli

Christine de Pizan was the first professional female author of French literature and the first French author to stake out ‘a position as a woman in the male-dominated world of letters’, in the words of David F. Hult.1 Christine composed the Livre de la cité des dames (Book of the city of ladies, 1405) to refute the misogynistic assertions that pervaded much of the prominent literature of the time. The narrator-protagonist of the Cité, also Christine, works to construct a fortified, eternal city that represents the book itself.2 The intradiegetic walled city emblematises the defensive function of the book in terms of its role as an apologia for women. The Cité des dames serves an important function, as scholars have previously noted, as corrective to the Roman de la rose, a very well-known and polemical misogynistic text – namely the portion written by Jeun de Meun, from c. 1278.3 The supremely fortified City of Ladies that Christine-protagonist constructs over the course of the text counteracts and rectifies both the depiction of the female body as inherently vulnerable and the sexual assault and violent rape in the Rose, which will be discussed below.4 Kevin Brownlee has cogently demonstrated how Christine rewrote the rape from the Rose (in her Dit de la rose, 1402) and I will argue below how, in Part III of the Cité, Christine similarly rewrites what I term the sexual assault that occurs in the coilles passage of the Rose.5 The Cité des dames is divided into three sections, all of which detail the accomplishments of exemplary women, including what we would now call women of colour and proto-non-binary figures. The

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model women are from western Asia, northern Africa (­including Egypt and Ethiopia), and Europe. Part III of the Cité des dames includes a couple of saints who went from living as women to living and presenting themselves as men: Marine/Marin and Euffrosine/ Sinaroth. Whereas scholars have generally referred to these characters as cross-dressing women, I propose that these figures align more closely with what we in the twenty-first century call ­nonbinarism. Indeed, when they are living as men, Christine genders these saints as both male and female. The following excerpts from a single passage in the vita of Marine/Marin demonstrate how these saints are presented as male and female at the same time: Et la sainte vierge ot plus chier prendre la coulpe sur elle [que] magnifester que elle fust femme pour soy excuser... Et la fille du tavernier enffanta un filz que la mere d’elle apporta a Marin... Et la vierge le receut... Et un temps aprés ce, les freres, meuz de pitié, prierent l'abbé que il receust frere Marin... Et la sainte vierge le faisoit humblement et voulentiers. [Nevertheless, this [female] holy virgin preferred to accept the blame rather than reveal that she was a woman in order to excuse herself... The innkeeper’s daughter bore a son, whom her mother brought to [male] Marin... The [female] virgin took the child... Later moved by pity, the brothers begged the abbot to take Brother Marin back... The [female] holy virgin did all this humbly and gladly. (3.12)]

At first glance it might appear that these figures could potentially also be considered proto-trans in today’s terms. If were to consider them to be proto-trans figures, we would likely think of them as proto-trans men – however, since Christine's stated scope for this work is women, we should recognise that Christine counted them among saintly women, which invalidates their being thought of as trans figures. In addition they are still referred to as female even while living as men, so there is no neat, clear transition from female to male. Each section of the Cité is presided over by an allegorical lady  – Rayson (reason), Droitture (rectitude), and Justice, ­respectively  –  who visits Christine-protagonist and guides her in her construction of the fortress/book. The third part recounts the construction of the highest parts of the city, both physically and

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spiritually, as the high towers epitomise the spiritual loftiness of the holiest of the future inhabitants of the city: the female saints whose vitae comprise the third section and who accompany Mary when she comes to reside in the completed city. Christine’s text presents each exemplum described – all women – as corresponding to a brick in the developing city/Cité. Upon closer inspection though, as Maureen Quilligan points out, the construction of the city achieves completion halfway through Part II (with the story of a daughter who breastfeeds her mother), meaning that the saints in Part III are positioned as qualitatively different from the other exempla in the Cité. As Quilligan explains, Although the subjects of the last tales narrated in part II are also citizens and not architectural components of the city as are the majority of the tales told so far, the saints of part III … are curiously resistant to mutation, not only within the metaphor of the city, but, of course, also within the various vitae that Christine recasts.6

Christine rewrote multiple source texts in terms of her project of constructing a defence of women and refuting existing misogynistic notions in society and literature. A striking feature of her martyrology is that she only depicts male tyrants and female saints (with  some secondary male saints who are presented in terms of their relationship to female saints).7 According to Maureen Quilligan: Martyrdom’s very lack of dependence on sexual difference is, finally, what makes Christine’s rewriting of her specific source for the martyrology so suggestive. It is most important that she not only rewrites Boccaccio simply by including a martyrology, but also revises many significant details in the martyrology of her authoritative precursor for her saints’ lives, Vincent of Beauvais.8

Christine’s strict demarcation of tyrants as male and saints as female, as part of her revision of her sources, constitutes an important aspect of her defence of women in the Cité. Renate BlumenfeldKosinski discusses how Christine recast her immediate source for Part III of the Cité as follows: Christine’s innovation with respect to her source for book 3, Vincent of Beauvais’s Miroir historial (in its French translation by Jean de

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Vignay) is a thorough repositioning of the lives of the early martyrs and other saints: Vincent’s historical framework is replaced by a polemic pattern that introduces each group of saints as a direct response to the standard misogynist reproaches Christine articulates explicitly in books 1 and 2 of the Cité.9

The fact that Christine included religious material in the Cité is striking, since she is typically a secular writer, and her secularity sets her apart from other medieval female writers. As Quilligan, again, explains: The sequence of narratives that make up the martyrology in the last section of the Cite des dames is thus one of the few places where her otherwise secular corpus deploys the discourses of religion. The oddity of the martyrs’ legends in Christine’s work is worth stressing – female writing in this period was typically couched in religious terms, but Christine’s writing was usually of a secular nature.10

While the fact that Christine rewrote her source text for Part III is important to the present study, the specifics of these changes as well as a comparison of Christine’s hagiography to that of other writers fall outside the scope of this chapter. Instead, this chapter takes as its point of departure (1) Christine’s establishment of a specific paradigm of martyrdom that would normally comprise just a subset of hagiography, and (2) the way in which she then uses this paradigm not just to rewrite her source texts but, more significantly, to rectify all misogynistic texts, with the Roman de la rose as a privileged target. As Blumenfeld-Kosinski notes, ‘In Christine’s writings the Roman de la Rose is ever present as a kind of foil or counterpoint; she frequently sets off her own opinions against those of Jean de Meun’.11 The paradigm of martyrdom that Christine establishes in her saints’ lives foregrounds seduction: all perpetrators are men who seek to seduce the saint and all targets are women who reject the attempted seduction. The saints are publicly stripped naked and subjected to a multitude of tortures and attempted sexual assault, including rape. These interactions would normally comprise highly erotically charged scenarios, especially in that Christine depicts the martyrdom as inextricably bound together with ­male-on-female seduction. Nonetheless, Christine succeeds in desexualising the martyrdom in the Cité.

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The present chapter examines the dynamics of power and violence in Christine’s distinctive paradigm of martyrdom in Part III of the Cité des dames through the lens of sadism and masochism.12 It does not concern itself with the subcategories of masochism originally outlined by Freud and imbued with a thoroughly kyriarchal worldview.13 Although saints’ lives, including Christine’s iterations of these lives, depict violence inflicted without the consent of the submissive party, sadism and masochism are consensual. Nonetheless, there are instructive parallels between hagiography and S/M that exist outside of the consideration of consent. It is commonly accepted among Christine scholars that, while the tyrants wield the officially recognised, institutional authority – traditionally viewed as earthly – it is the saints who dominate the interaction between the two in that they are aligned with the Christian God and their subjugation in this world both enables and equals a victory in the next world. The S/M dimension of this work comprises another facet of the power relations between tyrant and saint, in addition to the religious aspect. The present S/M reading further builds on two established lines of thought about hagiography in general, not just in Christine’s corpus: that the vitae were often imbued with sexuality and that Christian women defending their morality could be considered warriors.14 Part III of the Cité introduces from the outset the theme of women as medieval warriors with Mary as their lord, establishing it as a framework for the text that follows. I take a different stance from much earlier scholarship on gender and female saints in medieval texts, which often refers to such figures as taking on a ‘masculine role’ or even as being ‘in drag’.15 Such an interpretation presupposes a notion of what is and is not ‘appropriate’ for medieval women and reflects the exceptionalist view of medieval women, which codes certain behaviour as 'masculine' and then posits that medieval women only engaged in such behaviour as an exception. Indeed, it is often the case that the medieval text does not present the women’s behaviour as odd or problematic; the judgement of inappropriateness comes from the scholarly analysis. Mary holds a position of power and control, which prefigures the similar role the saints will play in the subsequent martyrology vis-à-vis the tyrants. These two notions together – women as ­warriors and

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Mary as seigneur – set up the power reversal that will occur as the ­martyr-masochist saints later direct the torture scenes. Justice sets this tone in telling Christine-protagonist that the third and highest section of the city is to house Mary, who is repeatedly described in seigneurial terms as ‘la Royne tres exellente’, ‘the most excellent Queen’; ‘ceste tres haulte, excellent souveraine princepce’, ‘this most lofty and excellent sovereign princess’; ‘Royne des cieux’, ‘Queen of heaven’ (3.1); and more.16 Justice explains that the city is to be ‘dominee et seigneurie par elle’, (‘ruled and governed by her’ (3.1)). Justice speaks at length about Mary and her dominion, including the world outside of the city, continuing to describe her in notably active terms: Or viengnent doncques princepces, dames, et toutes femmes au devant recepvoir a grant honneur et reverence celle qui est [non pas] seullement leur Royne mais qui [a] administracion [et seigneurie] sur toutes puissances crées aprés un seul filz que elle porta et conçut de Saint Esperit et qui est filz de Dieu le pere. Mais c'est rayson que ceste tres haulte, excellent sourveraine princepce soit suppliee par l'asemblee de toutes femmes que de son humilité luy plaise habiter ça em bas entre elles en leur cité et congregacion sans l'avoir en desdaing ne despris pour le regard de sa haultesce envers leur petitesce.17 [Let princesses, ladies, and all women now come forward to receive her with the greatest honor and reverence, for she is not only their queen but also has ministry and dominion over all created powers after the only son whom she conceived of the Holy Spirit and carried and who is the son of God the father. And it is right that the assembly of all women beg this most lofty and excellent sovereign princess to reside here below in her humility with them in their city and congregation without disdain or spite because of their insignificance ­compared to her highness. (3.1)]

Mary is presented not just as a powerful lord but even as the active agent in the conception of her son, which runs counter to the misogynistic manner in which sex and conception were presented at the time (and sometimes even now, especially in light of how pervasive the myth of the allegedly passive egg remains).18 The arrival of Mary also occurs prior to the start of the martyrology, which positions her to fulfill her role of watching over

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the saints. Christine goes beyond the expected representations of Mary, presenting a figure espousing traits more traditionally associated with men. She depicts Mary both as lord, as discussed above, and head of an army of knights, which is a way in which medieval works have presented Jesus. Justice describes Mary’s role vis-à-vis the women of the city as a warrior to defend them against all assaults, much like a rex de facto (one who has earned the right to be king by dint of their deeds, valour, etc., as opposed to a rex de jure, who has been named king but is not worthy of the title): ‘supplie humblement a toy tout le devot sexe des femmes qu’en horreur ne te soit/habiter entre elles par grace et par pitié comme leur deffenderresse, protectarresse, et garde contre tous assaulx d’annemis et du monde’, ‘may all the devout sex of women humbly beseech you that it please you well to reside among them with grace and mercy, as  their defender, protector, and guard against all assaults of enemies and of the world’ (3.1). To the best of my knowledge, it appears that Christine was unique in attributing this martial role to Mary – one that medieval writers typically reserved for Jesus and, more generally, men.19 Mary leads the saints, already named as her noble compagnie, like a king leading their knights in and out of battle.20 This evocation at the incipit of Part III of the Cité establishes the saints as warriors, a motif Christine continues in the vitae. Christine quite manifestly demonstrates that the saints she depicts are warriors, much like the Amazons she presents in Part II: ‘l’empereur, de ce moult indignez, la fist tourmenter de divers tourmens; et, entre les autres, luy fist clouer le chief de mil cloux, si comme le heame du chevalier’, ‘The emperor was angered by this and ordered her to be tortured with various torments, such as having a thousand nails hammered into her head as though it were a knight’s helmet’ (3.7). This powerful image of a female knight functions as a highly significant element of Christine’s larger programme of decrying the misogyny inherent in much courtly literature by recreating and regendering the traditional roles of active, desiring male subject and poet versus the passive, female object of desire.21 Another poignant portrayal of the Cité saints as fulfilling a martial role, not to mention an advisory role, occurs in Luce’s vita. Her tyrant came to treat her like his advisor, asking

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and taking her advice in all matters. After living thus for twenty years, God revealed that she should return to Rome and die there: ‘Et celluy tantost laissa tout et s’en ala avec la sainte vierge, non pas comme seigneur mais comme sergeant’, (‘Thereupon he forsook everything and departed with the holy virgin, not as lord but as sergeant [a non-knightly soldier of lower rank]’ (3.5)).22 Christine thus builds upon the precedents for depicting devout women who resist sexual advances as martial, uing this paradigm not only to illustrate the strength of the saints and their dominion over the tyrants who seek to overpower them but also to suggest that Mary possessed some of the same characteristics with which only Jesus is normally associated. Christine’s use of the warrior motif, moreover, draws attention to the extent of the saints’ power, since that power might otherwise be underappreciated by readers/the audience. So too in masochism can readers/viewers misinterpret the power driving the scene as belonging to the masochist’s play partner instead of the masochist. That the saints ultimately control the scenes with the tyrants aligns with the spatiality of the intradiegetic world of the Cité. Christine only relates the tales of the saints’ martyrdom once the walls of the city are complete. Whereas the saints are fixed within the space controlled by the tyrants within their vitae, these lives are narrated within the larger area of the city, safe and protected within its fortified limits. The title of Part III of the Cité is particularly suggestive in terms of fortification and the medieval canon: ‘Cy commence la tierce partie du Livre de la Cité des dames, laquelle parle comment et par qui les haulx combles des tours furent parfaiz et quelles nobles dames furent eslutes pour demourer es grans palais et haulx donjons’, (‘Here begins the third part of the Book of the City of ladies, which tells how and by whom the high roofs of the towers were completed and which noble ladies were chosen to reside in the great palaces and lofty mansions’ (3.0)). The mention of lofty towers recalls the topos of the lady who is unable to escape the tower in which she has been imprisoned by a male figure who holds institutional and/or familial power over her. Christine refigures the towers as spaces dominated by women as a corrective to the traditional paradigm. Her evocation of this motif anticipates the fact that what the tyrants will try to make into a male-dominated locus of power over women will ultimately

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be c­onquered by the same women the tyrants are attempting to control. Christine thereby inverts the traditional power dynamic that ­ pervaded so much of the writing of her time. This early mention of the tower in Part III of the Cité thus prefigures the saints’ dominant role in the vitae. I aim to demonstrate that the saints’ wresting control from the tyrants over the space and interactions in Part III can be understood as failed sadism on the part of the tyrants and masochistic martyrdom commanded by the saints.23 Sexuality in the Cité is complex and something that Christine must deftly negotiate in her writing. The S/M reading elucidates how Christine adeptly managed the problematic theme of sexuality. She first evokes a highly erotically charged paradigm of martyrdom (more so than in typical hagiography) and then needs to desexualise it, given her goal in the Cité of correcting misogynistic commonplaces and literary precedence. It is a difficult task she sets up for herself. The S/M reading explains how she negotiates this as well as the inverted power dynamic. First, Christine has to remove herself from the economy of desire in order to construct for herself an authorial persona, as Kevin Brownlee explains: At the heart of this project of historically contingent auto-mimesis is Christine’s radical separation of gender from sexuality. That is, she officially establishes her authority as woman author by distancing herself from any possible sexual identity as historically specific woman. Central to this strategy is Christine’s ‘autobiographical’ self-representation as widow, in which she presents herself as a ‘corrected’ Dido who is both a mother and an author. It is this provocative combination of three gendered subject positions – v­ irtuous widow, caring mother and female author – that Christine uses to establish her authority within the public discursive space of the early ­fifteenth century Parisian literary establishment. In this enterprise of public self-definition, the key negative element is that of the female sexual object of desire, and/or the sexually desiring female subject. For during the decade and a half following her husband’s death, the period during which her literary career was definitively established (1390–1405), Christine de Pizan carefully and programatically detached her female-gendered authorial persona from the economy of sexual desire, normally associated with courtly discourse.24

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After desexualising her persona as author in this novel way, Christine is then (self-)authorised to desexualise the female figures in the Cité. The most complicated figures of the Cité in this respect are the saints in Part III, for two reasons: hagiography already entails an erotically charged paradigm and Christine’s unique focus on male tyrants and female martyrs doubles down on the erotic possibilities. The Cité indeed capitalises on this sexual possibility in depicting martyrdom as strictly gendered and intrinsically combining attempted seduction/sexual assault with religious conversion, sex with violence:25 Justine, sainte vierge nee d’Anthioche, jeunette et de souveraine biauté, surmonta le diable qui se estoit vanté a l’invocacion d’un nigromencien qu’il feroit tant que elle feroit le voulenté d’un homme qui fort estoit espris de s’amour et ne la laissoit en paix. Mais pource que par prieres ne par promesses riens n’y faisoit. [Justine, a holy virgin born in Antioch, very young and extraordinarily beautiful, overcame the Devil, who boasted during the invocation of a necromancer that he would succeed in making her do the will of a man who was completely taken with her love and who would not leave her in peace, for he thought the Devil could help where entreaties and promises were useless. (3.8)]

As this passage exemplifies, the tyrants’ amorous advances toward the saints and their efforts to convince them to reject Christianity operate as two facets of the same sequence of attempted domination. The Cité’s many references to the sponsa Christi motif reflect this blurring between the spiritual and the sexual. The Cité also explicitly links violence and love in establishing that the brutality and suffering of the cross sparked love for Jesus in the female worshippers. The attempted violence and sexual assault in this back-and-forth exchange continually increase in severity as the saint consistently spurns the advances. At each rejection, the tyrant replies with another threat of an act that is sexual, violent, or both and whose severity augments each time. Just as the tyrants’ advances function on two levels ­simultaneously – the sexual and the religious – so too does their ultimate reaction to their failed sadistic manoeuvres operate in the same dual manner. The failure of his attempted sadism reaches the only kind of climax

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he is able to achieve, an ersatz jouissance that stands in place of the sexual and religious climax that he desired and failed to achieve: orgasm, as the desired culmination of the would-be sexual advances, and conversion, his religious goal. In some cases, the tyrant seeks marriage, which relates to both of these spheres. The power differential between the tyrant and the saint is already misleading in spiritual terms, as Part III of the Cité is traditionally – and rightly – read. While the tyrant wields the officially ­recognised power, it is actually the saint who holds the ultimate or true power. The aggressor sees the torture and death of the saint as his own victory, whereas she sees her martyrdom as a spiritual victory because it allows her passage into heaven. The same paradigm is at work within the S/M dynamic. The tyrant’s violence: is enacted through an intermediary, largely occurs as retaliation for the saint’s rejection of his sexual and spiritual advances (which necessarily precedes his act), and ultimately fails. Ironically, the more he tries to dominate her, the more impotent he proves himself to be. He displays their encounter within the public sphere, for all to witness. However, in each instance, his attempt to create a spectacle of her submission turns into a display of his incompetence and her ultimate dominion over him – the inverse of what he was attempting to enact. Whereas the subjects of many classical and medieval saints’ lives are male figures, Christine focuses solely on female saints, which reflects the overarching goals of the Cité: to defend women and depict their manifold virtues and create an all-female space that is the city. As Quilligan notes, ‘Christine rewrites [her sources] to insert active female subjectivity within each story’.26 Christine does not seek to invert the gender hierarchy. Rather, her aim is to disprove the prevailing misogynistic denigration of women. What is especially noteworthy about Christine’s gendered paradigm of martyrdom is that she presents her saints in a way that maintains a binary opposition where only men inflict violence and concomitantly initiate sexual advances, and women are almost exclusively the targets of these acts. This sharply demarcated, gendered economy of violence highlights the heterosexual foundation of the torture. The result of this gendered martyrdom, especially as considered in the context of sadism and masochism, falls in line with a larger trend in

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the Cité and Christine’s oeuvre overall: in ­demonstrating that it is actually the female saints who take control of the torture scenes and that they thwart each sadistic (sexual) endeavour, Christine depicts the female body as inviolate, like the city. The notion of unscathed bodies relates to an important concept in the Middle Ages: the Christian emphasis on virginity as an ideal, particularly for women. In the Cité, Christine radically revises the common understanding of chastity by maintaining that women who have engaged in sex, such as the widows she so adamantly defends, can be virtuous like virgins. Christine Reno explains Christine’s refiguration of chastity as follows: the ideal of virginity she sets forth is metaphorical as well as literal. Virginity implies, in addition to sexual purity, the freedom from any sort of involvement with men that might hamper woman’s pursuit of her particular goals. Moreover, Christine’s focus in the Cité is not the spiritual reward of a more perfect state of eternal bliss that the Church held out to the celibate, but rather a triumph that could be measured primarily in terms of the standards of this world.27

Christine not only makes this rhetorical move in order to redeem women who have previously engaged, or continue to engage, in sex but she also intentionally severs the traditional association of women with sexuality. This desexualisation of women is an important theme in much of Christine’s oeuvre and was a bold position to take in her time. As Brownlee explains, early in her career Christine ‘engaged in a series of self-conscious revisions of the dominant literary discourses and genres of late medieval France, motivated in large part by her perception of the necessity of e­ stablishing an explicitly female authorial voice in contexts which had, before Christine, excluded that possibility’.28 Lady Justice’s words to Christine-protagonist in Part III both demonstrate and authorise the author’s elimination of the hierarchy dividing women based on marriageability and desirability, showing that all types of women can be equally virtuous: ‘sans nombre pourroye conter de dames de divers estas, tant vierges que vesves ou mariees, en qui Dieux a demonstré ses vertus par merveilleuse force et constance’, ‘I could tell of countless ladies of different social backgrounds, maidens, married women, and widows, in whom God manifested his virtues

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with amazing force and constancy’ (3.18). Christine simultaneously redeems the body that is doubly disparaged in the m ­ isogynistic tradition – that of women who have engaged in sex – and displaces virginity as the unparalleled ideal for Christian women. Hence Part III of the Cité includes both virginal and non-­virginal saints and does not present the latter as any less virtuous or pious. Moreover, Christine shows that proto-non-binary women who presented as men – such as Marine/Marin and Euffrosine/ Sinaroth  – sometimes did so, at least in part, in order to live without the limitations placed on women, including being compelled to wed. As Benjamin Semple aptly notes about the Cité, ‘the virgins therefore are not the woman in her entirety but the part that retains the right to refuse her body’.29 Christine rejects reducing women to their relationship to sexuality or to men. Ultimately, Christine’s inclusion of all of these categories of women in her catalogue of female saints serves to remove them from the economies of sexual desire and marriage and to desexualise them and the martyrdom she depicts. In terms of S/M, her tyrants fail in their attempted sadism and her female saints best them through a desexualised masochism. As Ummni Khan has shown, the inclusion of S/M in a work often allows the author and viewer a twofold jouissance: they get off both on vicariously experiencing the kink and in condemning it as other and wrong.30 In the case of the Cité, however, this usual trope is not present. Instead, Christine takes a genre, hagiography, that typically does present S/M themes in a way that offers the dual jouissance and rewrites it in a desexualised manner that strips it of titillation. Three of the primary means of desexualising the narrative in the Cité are the fact that the intended sexual, sadistic acts are largely prevented from occurring and that there is no description of sex or rape, and Christine thwarts the anticipation of erotic acts. A key moment at the beginning of Part III of the Cité directly repudiates a central moment in the Rose and serves to elucidate how Christine desexualises female figures – in this instance, outside of the context of martyrdom. One of the most controversial moments in the Rose occurs in a discussion between Dame Rayson (Lady Reason) and the naive, male lover figure, the protagonist li amans. The author of this part of the Rose, Jean de Meun, has

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Dame Rayson use the obscene term coilles (there is no equivalent expression in English for this extremely vulgar term for the testicles) when narrating to li amans the story of Jupiter’s castration of Saturn. Li amans reacts by exclaiming: Si ne vos tiegn pas a cortaise quant ci m’avez coilles nomees, qui ne sunt pas bien renomees en bouche a cortaise pucele. (6898–901)31 (Moreover I find you uncourtly for having said coilles, which are not suitable in the mouth of a young courtly lady.)

With these words li amans sexualises his interlocutor by depicting Dame Rayson, an allegorical figure representing the faculty of reason, as engaging in oral sex. In so doing, Jean is portraying the forcing of coilles in a female’s mouth – a sexual assault that prefigures the violent rape at the end of the Rose.32 Given the extensive, clever word play in the Rose, especially in that coilles functions both as sign and referent, what David F. Hult calls the wordthing, these lines operate in two ways of interest here (in terms of how they relate to Christine’s rewriting): (1) Jean is putting his words into Dame Rayson’s mouth, which functions to illustrate literally the male ventriloquism of the female voice in misogynistic medieval texts like his and (2) these lines replace the sign (coilles) with the referent, which effects sexual violence/assault.33 Hult rightly points out that Jean’s evocation of coilles typically points to their absence: ‘Again as Porion has noted, all three occurrences of the word’, when Dame Rayson, Ami, and Nature evoke coilles, ‘are used to signify the absence of the thing, its separation from the body, its nonexistence’.34 While this is indeed true, there is a noteworthy exception when li amans mentions coilles in response to Dame Rayson, as a sub-section of the first instance noted here. This anomaly is when Jean transforms the sign into the referent in placing coilles in Dame Rayson’s mouth. Christine’s Cité, I propose, features a line that pointedly rewrites and undoes this sexualisation and sexual assault of Dame Rayson. Christineprotagonist addresses Mary as follows: ‘O! Dame, qui est celluy tant oultrageux qui jamais ose pensser ne gitter hors de sa bouche

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que le sexe femenin soit vil, consideree ta dignité?’, (‘Oh! My lady, what man is so brazen to ever dare think or project from his mouth that the female sex is vile, considering your dignity’ (3.1)). The image of words being ejected from a mouth in this citation recalls and inverts the Rose’s image of coilles being forced into a mouth. Whereas Dame Rayson did not employ coilles in a sexual context, Jean sexualises both the word coilles and Dame Rayson via li amans’s utterance – not to mention that Jean is already choosing to have Dame Rayson employ the contentious term coilles. Christine does the opposite. She takes what is otherwise a multivalent term, le sexe femenin, that can designate the female genitals and wields it in a strictly non-genital and non-sexual sense, using it to refer to the female sex qua all women. Christine’s paradigm of martyrdom relates to both sadism and masochism. I use the term ‘sadism’ to mean when pleasure is derived from acts like binding, inflicting pain, and/or domineering another. The term ‘masochism’ is employed here as the gratification from things like experiencing pain, being bound, marked, and/ or dominated. This enjoyment is not always but often sexual, even if no acts traditionally considered to be sexual are taking place. Theodor Reik explains that since the turn of the twentieth century, the meaning of the term masochistic (masochistisch) expanded to include the non-sexual: Der Ausdruck [masochistisch] hat eine Bedeutungserweiterung erfahren. Seine ursprüngliche, engere Bedeutung einer Triebperversion, die aus einer passiven Einstellung zum Partner sexuelle Lust zieht, ist erhalten geblieben. Jenseits dieses Bezirkes bezeichnet Masochi­ smusjetzt eine besondere Art der Lebenseinstellung oder des sozialen Verhaltens, welche das eigene Leiden oder die eigene Ohnmacht geniesst. Das Wort ist seiner engeren sexuellen Bedeutung entwachsen. Es ist desexualisiert worden. [The word (masochistic) has extended its significance. The original restrictive meaning of sexual aberration which derives satisfaction from a passive relation to the partner has been retained. Masochism, however, has come to mean also a particular attitude toward life or a definite type of social behavior: of enjoying one’s own suffering or one’s own helplessness. The word has outgrown its narrower, sexual meaning and has become desexualized.]35

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What matters here is how masochism functions non-sexually in martyrdom. In the Cité, the attempted sadism is indeed sexual, while the masochism categorically is not. In fact, desexualising the scene is part of the saints’ masochistic victory over the tyrants. It is important to note that in both of these scenarios, it is the eponymous figure who commands the encounter, determining what acts will be enacted, in what manner, and to what extent. ‘Conscious power games … must be played on the conditions of the other partner. So, the slave must first instruct the master’.36 As Maria Marcus further notes, ‘At a certain point, my partner seemed to be superfluous, maybe even irritating – because he was disturbing me in something that was actually a kind of masturbation’.37 Popular culture tends to consider the sadist and masochist to operate in tandem with one another, thereby painting the masochist as a passive recipient of the other’s will. However, it is precisely the opposite: it is the masochist’s will that dictates the course and nature of the masochistic encounter just as it is the sadist who commands the sadistic experience. As Gilles Deleuze notes, masochism is often incorrectly understood as the inverse of sadism: Jamais un[.e] vrai sadique ne supportera une victime masochiste (une des victimes des moines précise dans Justine: ‘Ils veulent être certains que leurs crimes coûtent des pleurs, ils renverraient une [personne] qui se rendrait à eux volontairement’). Mais pas davantage un[.e] masochiste ne supportera un bourreau vraiment sadique. Sans doute a-t-il[/elle] besoin d’une certaine nature pour [le bourreau]; mais il[/ elle] doit former cette ‘nature’, l’éduquer[,] la persuader suivant son projet le plus secret, qui échouerait pleinement avec [un.e] sadique. [A genuine sadist would never tolerate a masochistic victim (one of the monk’s victims in Justine explains: ‘They want to be certain that their crimes cost tears; they would send away [anyone] who were to come to them voluntarily’.) Nor would a masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. [They] do of course require a special ‘nature’ in the [torturer] but [they] need to mold this nature, educate, persuade it in accordance with [their] immensely secret project, which could never be fulfilled with a sadist.]38

The desire of the sadist does not align with that of the masochist. Both would not be gratified simultaneously since only one can

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be directing the scene. Instead of a sadist, a masochist plays with what Deleuze terms a bourreau (torturer) and a sadist plays with a victime (victim). The fact that many of the common expressions around S/M relate to playing a role, performing a scene, taking on a persona points to its deliberately and highly self-consciously staged quality. Deleuze’s work, in accordance with Sacher-Masoch’s and Sade’s original texts on which he focuses his study, is largely written in heteronormative and gendered terms, where the person in the position of power in each paradigm (the masochist in masochistic scenarios and likewise for sadistic scenes) is a white male of privilege. Women participate but are controlled by the volition of the kyriarchal male. The citation and corresponding translation above have been edited to invite a broader context for these important notions by, as much as reasonably possible, removing markers of gender. Given a cursory consideration of the martyrology in the Cité, one would likely presume that the violence and interactions depicted are sadistic. After all, the tyrant wields the official, recognised, institutional power in each instance. However, the power dynamic is more complex than it may first appear. In each vita, the saint successfully resists the tyrant’s attempts to seduce her, in terms of both sex and spirituality. His reaction to each thwarted assault is compensatory retaliation – he responds with violence to punish her for rejecting him and to mitigate his own impotence in succeeding in overpowering her and coercing her to accede to his will.39 This violent rebuttal, an attempt to countervail and invalidate the tyrant’s vain seduction attempt, itself fails. The fact that the saints are bound, incarcerated, or immobilised in some way makes the tyrants’ inability to enact their violent, would-be sadistic urges all the more striking. The tyrants’ impotence is underscored by their needing an intermediary figure to perform the violent acts for them  – the significance of this necessity of an intercessor is paramount to the tyrants’ failed sadism. Whereas the aggressors expect the scene to transpire according to their wishes, in each instance the saint foils the intended sadism. The saint thus renders the tyrant doubly ­impotent: making him unable to control her, the intended victim of his sadism, as well as commanding the torturers, who are expected to unequivocally enact his wishes.40

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The narration in the Cité des dames provides an extensive spectrum of seduction, ranging from simple discourse, through various  types of physical coercion, to attempted rape. Most of the sadistic play occurs in the view of onlookers. The interaction between tyrant and saint intentionally plays out before an audience. The public nature of the setting of these scenes and the presence of an audience attests to their performative nature, which is also an important aspect of S/M. The more the saints refuse the men’s attempts to force the women to participate in their sexual fantasies, the more violent the tyrants become and the more heightened and extreme the attempted sadism. In many cases, as with Marguerite, for example, the text explicitly declares that the tyrant’s violence is a direct response to her rejection of him: ‘Et, a brief dire, pource que elle ne se voulst consentir a sa voulenté et qu’elle regehy qu’elle estoit christienne, il la fist durement batre et enchartrer’, (‘And, in short, since she would not consent to his desires and declared herself Christian, he had her severely beaten and imprisoned’ (3.4)). The victimisation of the women occurs on multiple levels: they are undressed against their will, raped, and tortured – all as public performance. When these efforts remain ineffectual, the sadistic play progresses to superficial corporal violence, which involves beating, whipping, and the like. Here, the body is only attacked on its surface; nothing penetrates it. The saints are deprived of food, which ostensibly functions to weaken the body and mind but more importantly represent attempts to mar the women’s physical beauty. Since the tyrant’s sexual advances are rejected, he thus seeks to destroy what she denies him. His attempts to compensate for his impotence are, thus, unsuccessful, resulting in further emasculation. This continued defiance amplifies the aggressor’s anger and, as a result, the violence becomes more brutal. The saint displaces the would-be sadist’s power, dominates the scene, and renders him a passive onlooker. The ­martyr-masochist always commands the scene. The would-be sadistic acts never achieve their intended aim. In every instance, the saints reject the attempts at seduction and the violence fails to inflict damage for various reasons. In terms of narration, the martyrs are sometimes shown to thwart the tyrants’ attempted sadism on their own and sometimes by means of a heavenly intercessor, which Christine

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employs as a representation of the saint’s conviction of will and power over the tyrant. The martyrological scenes in the Cité thus evoke Hegel’s master–slave dialectic (Dialektik von Herrschaft und Knechtschaft) in that the tyrants’ institutional power crumbles when the saints refuse to recognise it. Initially, the aggressors seek to demonstrate their power over the saints publicly by sadistically dominating them. When the saint refuses to acknowledge the aggressor as dominant (in a Hegelian and sadomasochistic sense), he is unable to force her to accede to his will. Impotent, he instead retaliates by ordering her to be exposed naked, humiliated, and violently tortured as a public spectacle. His actions are both a means of punishing her for refusing to acknowledge his would-be dominance and an attempt to (re)assert his authority over her and the spectators. The tyrant first attempts to sadistically seduce the saint. The aggressor intends the seduction to be sadistic in that it is always with an expectation that he holds all of the power and can control the situation as he wishes. The tyrant assumes that the saint will acquiesce, which itself is based on the presumption that  she will recognise his institutional authority. Instead, she rejects his seduction and concomitantly refuses to acknowledge his authority. Already rendered impotent and humiliated at this point, he retaliates by turning to increasingly hardcore sadistic acts and again the saint thwarts and nullifies the attempt. Again, he attempts more hardcore sadism and again is foiled and rejected by the saint, on and on. The result of this culminating chain of events that comprise the sadomasochistic scene between the tyrant, saint, and spectators is the inverse of what the tyrant expects. Saint Foste provides an illustrative example. Her tyrant, the emperor Maximien, has his torturers take a saw to Foste. When they see that hours of sawing have had no effect on her, the torturers ask the saint how she is able to withstand such torture unscathed. ‘Et Fauste les comenca a prescher de Jhesu Crist et de sa loy et les converti. L’empereur, de ce moult indignez, la fist tourmenter de diverse tourmens’, (‘And Foste began to preach about Jesus Christ and His law and so converted them. The emperor was angered by this and ordered her to be tortured with various torments’ (3.7)). Her resistance and victory in the episode of the saw enrages him further and leads to worse torture:

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Et celle prioit pour ceulx qui la persecutoyent. Et le prevost fu converti parce qu’il vid les cieux ouvers et Dieu seant avec ses anges. Et quant Fauste fu mise en la chaudiere d’iaue boulant, le prevost s’escria: ‘Sainte serve de Dieu, ne t’en va pas sans moy:’et sailli dedens la chaudiere. Quant les deux autres que elle avoit convertis virent ce, ilz saillirent aussi dedens la chaudiere, dont l’iaue bouloit a tres grant onde, et Fauste les touchoit et ilz ne sentoyent nul mal. [Yet she prayed for her persecutors. The prefect was converted when he saw the heavens open up and God sitting among His angels when Foste was placed in a cauldron of boiling water, the prefect cried out, ‘Holy servant of God, do not depart without me!’ and dived into the cauldron. Two others whom she had converted saw this and also dived into the cauldron where the water was at a rolling boil, and Foste touched them, and they felt no pain. (3.7)]

Instead of the tyrant subjecting the saint to public humiliation, she turns his sadistic advances back on him, putting him, instead, on public display as humiliated and dominated. He fails at enacting his sadistic desires. In thwarting his sadistic attempts, the saint both demonstrates her masochistic control of each event within the scene and also turns the effects of the attempted sadism back on the tyrant. She thus renders him the victim of his own would-be sadism and masochistically turns the scene to her benefit while also enabling her martyrdom as a saint to be recognised by God, earning her entrance to heaven. In order to give a fuller idea of how the torture scene progresses, it will be enlightening to follow the course of Katherine’s martyrdom at the hands of Emperor Maxence. When the saint refuses Maxence’s attempts at seduction, he resorts to violence, both as a means of retaliation and an effort to make her acquiesce. He starts with menaces, then torture and severe beating, imprisoning her for twelve days in an attempt to make her relent as a result of being starved. After none of this progression of intensifying torments has worked, he is at a loss, not knowing what he could do that would be worse: ‘l’empereur ne savoit quelz tourmens pour la tourmenter plus durs faire; sy fist par le conseil de son prevost faire rouees plaines de rasouoirs qui tournoyent l’une contre l’autre et quanque estoit ou mislieu estoit detrenchié’, (‘the emperor did not know what harsher tortures he could use to compel her, and so, ­following

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his prefect’s advice, he had wheels built and fitted with razors that turned against one another so that whatever was between them would be sliced in two’ (3.3)). He thus has his torturers construct the infamous wheels with razors and then place Katherine in them, naked. While this is an attempt to evoke fear from the saint and spectators, its failure to do any harm elicits the inverse of what the tyrant had hoped and further establishes his failed sadism. Maxence has his wife’s breasts torn off and eventually has her beheaded (decoller) with many of the converted in attendance for the latter. Once his wife is dead, he immediately resumes his efforts to seduce Katherine, this time trying to compel her to marry him. When she again refuses, he finally realises that, no matter how intense the violent attempts to overpower her will, she always persists and dominates. He therefore decides to have her beheaded – a mode of death that targets the visually symbolic source of her words of rejection and the expression of her will: ‘et quant il vid que elle [Katherine] estoit reffusant a toutes ses peticions, a la parfin donna sa sentence que elle fust decollee’, ‘but, after he realised that she was rejecting all of his requests, he finally issued the sentence that she be beheaded’ (3.3). Katherine still does not react as Maxence wants her to – ideally to finally cede to his will or at least to express fear. Instead of resisting or pleading, she readies herself for death with her thoughts on the present and future believers whom she will aid. The Cité utilises various means to demonstrate that it is the saint rather than the tyrant who controls their interaction. As was typical in medieval texts, the Cité represents power, victory, and the like via visual symbols. Judicial duels and trial by ordeal are examples of this prioritising of visual instantiations of what was presumed to be God’s will. In the Cité, one prevalent example is the saints’ exorcism of demons and other representations of pagan deities from icons, which compels these forces to assume a visible form while angels intercede on behalf of the martyrs. Similarly, the saints’ power within the torture scene is often expressed via visual or aural cues. Marguerite’s vita provides some intriguing examples. Christine starts recounting Marguerite’s vita in the manner of a typical pastourelle (pastoral poem) with a shepherdess happily tending her goats. In this genre, this figure is traditionally accosted by a nobleman who seduces and/or rapes her. Christine’s vita of

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Marguerite conspicuously opens in the same way but rewrites that genre – just as she rewrites romanz (romance) in the Cité – in that this shepherdess succeeds in resisting her assailant. While imprisoned, she asks God to show her the root cause of this evil, which prompts a series of visual representations to appear. First, a ‘horrible dragon’ appears who tries to devour her and whom she slays, despite her being ‘terribly frightened’. Next, a dark figure appears and ‘et adonc Marguerite l’ala hardiement requerre et le couscha soubz elle; le pié luy mist sur la gorge et il crioit a haulte  voix mercis’, ‘Margaret bravely went after him and pinned him down; she placed her foot on his throat and he cried aloud for mercy’ (3.4). Her encounters read like the battles within the series of aventures (adventures) so typical of chevaliers errants (knights errant or wandering) in romance. Upon vanquishing this latest foe in her knightly manner, Marguerite’s cell fills with light and angels: yet more visual symbols of the saint’s ordeal. As with the other saints, a series of ever-escalating torments ensues until the moment when the tyrant turns to murder as the only remaining option he sees for himself. Significantly, the beheading does not take place until the saint agrees to it and allows it to occur. Only once Marguerite knows that she has succeeded in her overall endeavour, that her ordeal will be considered a true martyrdom by God, does she willingly extend her neck to acquiesce to her beheading: Et l’ange de Dieu vint, qui luy dist que sa peticion estoit exauciee et qu’elle alast ou nom de Dieu recepvoir sa palme de vittoire. Et adont estandi le col; decollee fu, et les anges emporterent son ame. [And God’s angel appeared and told her that her prayer had been granted and that she would receive her victory palm in God’s name. Thereupon she stretched out her neck and was beheaded, and the angels carried away her soul. (3.4)]

The saint is the dominant here; the beheading only occurs once she willingly assents to it. The terminology accentuates her power over the tyrant in that her martyrdom earns her a palme de vittoire (victory palm).41 This is another visual symbol, a representation of dominance and power that associates this martyrological encounter with a martial victory, whether genuinely war-related or simulated, like a tournament.

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The tyrant arranges an audience for his interaction with the saint, attempting to reduce her to a spectacle, fix her body in space, strip it nude, and bind it. Since he cannot sway her mind, he attempts to dominate her body, as an overt gesture of control meant to demonstrate to onlookers his (apparent) power over her. In some cases, the aggressor’s initial attempts at coercion occur in seclusion. His failure within the one-on-one dynamic prompts him to attempt to shift the power dynamic by introducing an audience. In all instances, there is an expectation that the victim’s experience of shame, anger, and any other reaction to the torture will be heightened within this new paradigm of the spectacle, thereby amplifying the intensity of her pain and degree of victimhood and rendering her even more powerless than before. However, the saints do not allow themselves to be made into victims in the public arena, as the tyrants attempt to do. Instead, the saints turn the public display into a show of their own dominance over the tyrant and of subversion. Instead of being humiliated by the audience, they instead subjugate the onlookers as well as the tyrant and torturers, thereby amplifying the ignominy of the emasculation experienced by their captors. In terms of nudity, God intervenes to shield the saint’s naked body from view. This godly intervention recalls a famous scene from the ancient Indian, Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, one of the greatest works of world literature. Duh.śāsana, on the orders of Duryodhana – both of whom are male figures – attempts to remove Draupadī’s sari in an effort to shame her by displaying her naked body in public. The Hindu god Kr.s.n.a intervenes, making Draupadī’s sari infinitely long, so that no matter how much cloth he removes, her body is always covered. The public recognises that the martyr-masochist controls the pain play. The saint thus publicly humiliates the tyrant – a worse disgrace than he intended for her since he holds the officially recognised power. The tyrant fails to control how the audience will read the spectacle he creates. Part of what the tyrant hopes to achieve with the public display is to transform the saint’s body into a text of his creation by inscribing the violence he inflicts on her flesh. The tyrant intends to take the female body that has been bound and mutilated by the violence he had ordered his intermediaries to inflict and display it as a spectacle where the blood, wounds, scars, and

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other visible marks of his aggression are meant to narrate his victory over the saint. The tyrant further intends the saint’s body-as-text to accentuate the aesthetic and sexual appeal of her naked body for the tyrant and offer an exhibitionist tableau for the onlookers and torturers, who are presumed to enjoy the would-be sadistic display. Ultimately, both the tyrant’s intermediaries and the crowd he has assembled demonstrate that, contrary to the tyrant’s expectations, they side with the saint. In hagiography, the saint’s body serves as a text to be read by the devout. In an imitatio Christi, Christine’s saints undergo their martyrdom in a public space full of witnesses. When we encounter the saints in Part III, their bodies are texts in the process of being written. As in traditional hagiography, the intradiegetic audience of the Cité fully participates in the violent process of that writing, while the extradiegetic audience participates to a more limited extent in the writing-as-torture. However, Christine depicts the tyrants’ attempts to write their sadism on the saints’ bodies as failures and she repeatedly and insistently restores the integrity of the saints’ bodies. The vita of Saint Christine provides an illustrative example: Et pource que elle sans cesser nommoit le non de Jhesu Crist, il luy fist coupper la langue; mais mieulx que devant et plus cler parloit adés des choses divines et benoyssoit Dieu … Et le faulx Julien … blasma les bourriaulx et leur dist que ilz n’avoyent pas assez pres couppee la langue de Christine; si luy couppassent si pres que tant ne peust parler a son Crist. Si luy errachierent hors la lanague et luy coupperent jusques au gavion. Et celle cracha le couppon de sa langue au visaige du tirant et luy en creva l’ueil. Et luy dist aussi sainement que oncques mais: ‘Tirant, que te vault avoir couppee ma langue adfin que elle ne beneysse Dieu … Et pource que tu ne congnois ma parolle, c’est bien raison que ma langue t’ait aveuglé’. [And because she unceasingly pronounced the name of Jesus Christ, he had her tongue cut out – but then she spoke even better and more clearly than before of divine things and of the one blessed God … The treacherous Julian … castigated the executioners and they had not cut Christine’s tongue short enough and order them to cut it so short that she could not speak to her Christ, whereupon they ripped out her tongue and cut it off at the root. She spat this cut-off piece of



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her tongue into the tyrant’s face, putting out one of his eyes. She then said to him, speaking as clearly as ever, ‘tyrant, what does it profit you to have my tongue cut out so that it cannot bless God … And because you did not heed my words, my tongue has blinded you, with good reason’. (3.10)]42

Christine-author’s maintenance of the inviolability of the martyrs’ bodies functions both metaphorically, in showing them to still function as before (like Saint Christine speaking despite her tongue having been removed) or literally, in undoing any effects of the intended but failed sexual, violent acts. Christine’s restoration of the inviolate body undoes any attempted rewriting of the saint’s body-as-text enacted by the tyrant. This definitive text narrates the saint’s victory and the tyrant’s failure. The saint’s body/text is depicted either as unaffected by the torture or (when the body is shown to have been altered through the violence) as a sign of the saint’s masochistic martyrdom. The restitution of the integral body also re-establishes the saint’s desexualised body, reflecting the women’s final dominance over their captors and audience. The repeated inability of the tyrants to violate the saints’ bodies, which always remain intact, further reflects a core leitmotif of the Cité: the invulnerability of the intradiegetic city. The martyrdom, like S/M, allows the saints to transcend the usual bounds of the physical body and access a new state of being. Their ascent to a higher plane of existence, literally figured as heaven, reflects their moving beyond the fixed gendered norms of their society. So, too, in S/M does the play subvert gendered and other norms and enable participants to push the boundaries and limits of the body. Despite its extremely violent instantiation and the tyrant’s intent to inflict pain as a means to alter and dominate the will of the resisting saint, the attempts at sadism in the Cité all remain nothing more than failed attempts. The will of the would-be dominator is clearly expounded in the text and is evident, but the actual acts are either interrupted or – in the rare cases where violence is ­successfully inflicted – elided by the narration or undone by God. The sadistic impulses in the Cité are then fuelled by rejection and become a chain of acts both prompted by and an instantiation

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of the tyrant’s impotence that culminates in utter failure – it is the perfect inverse of the tyrant’s intention, which is a culmination of sexual congress ending in orgasm and, to him, the saint’s acquiesced conversion to what he wants her to be (pagan and his). The rising desire as it goes on, the increasing intensity of the acts – the longed-for explosive ejaculation that is denied to the tyrant – he then projects onto and enacts upon the saint. Unable to achieve the sexual climax he seeks, he orders her to be decapitated. As with the rest of the torture, he does not enact it himself. He instead orders intermediaries to enact the violence for him, another instantiation of his impotence. It is thus her head, rather than his phallic one, that becomes the site of the culmination of his failed sadism. The saints turn the torture inflicted on them into something productive and meaningful, rather than contingent. The torments they endure are the means by which the saints achieve sanctity. It is, then, not only the tyrants who experience desire. The saints are also active, desiring subjects – though not in the traditional sense where women are often depicted within the economy of sexual desire in medieval texts – in that what they want is canonisation through martyrdom. The martyr-masochists typically do not attempt to avert or prevent the intermediaries’ actions, even the infliction of pain or threat of death. Even in cases where a messenger of God intervenes in the pain play between tyrant, intermediaries, and saint, Christine narrates it as though the intervention were after the fact, rather than interrupting or preventing it from occurring. Blandine’s reaction to the tyrant’s sadistic advances, for instance, runs counter to what one would expect: ‘et aprés, elle, aussi lieement que la femme va a espoux, se ala mettre ou tourment’, ‘and afterward, as happily as a woman going to meet her husband, she submitted herself to torture’ (3.11). In lieu of the terror one would expect, her reaction is likened to the joy of a bride, another conflation of the spiritual and the sexual. Certainly, the sponsa Christi motif holds a key position in Part III of the Cité. Similarly, Katherine’s unintimidated, even welcoming attitude towards the torture is apparent in her advice to another victim of the same tyrant who was torturing her: ‘ne doubte point les tourmens … car aujoud’uy seras receue en la joye sans fin’, ‘do not be afraid of the tortures … for today you will be received into endless joy’ (3.3). Katherine thus instructs the

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new martyr as to how to act during the scene, to deny the tyrant the suffering he expects and wants. Katherine encourages this person (who was the wife of the tyrant and just converted upon witnessing Katherine’s scene) to focus on the positive outcome of the torture instead. With Martine, ‘Dieux la gardoit que elle si tost ne mourust, adfin que les tourmenteurs et le puepple eussent cause de  eulx convertir’, ‘God prevented her from dying too quickly so that the torturers and spectators would be moved to convert’ (3.6). The Cité emphasises that the saints as well as God make the torture into something productive, martyrdom and its effects on the onlookers, which figures the saints’ actual power in their seeming subservience, as with masochism. A singular example of Christine’s subversion of misogynistic commonplaces about women is enacted through challenging expectations surrounding blood and milk. Milk, instead of blood, flows from the martyrs’ wounds and sweet aromas emanate from their mouths even while their bodies are enduring brutal torture, often for days on end. Saint Christine’s martyrdom provides an example that not only illustrates milk flowing instead of blood but also includes additional torments: Le tiers juge vint aprés, nommé Julien, et fist prendre Christine et se vanta que il la feroit aourerbles ydolles. Mais pour toute la force que il y peust mettre, il ne la pot faire remouvoir du lieu ou elle estoit; sy fist faire un grant feu autour d’elle. En ce fierent cheoireu demoura par trois jours, et la dedens estoyent ouyes doulces melodies. Et furent les tourmenteurs/ espoventez par merveilleux signes que ilz virent. Lesquelles choses rapportees a Julien, cuida forcener. Et quant le feu fu consommé, elle s’en sailli toute saine. Le juge fist admener les serpens et fist gitter sur elle deux aspis – qui sont serpens qui mordent et enveniment merveilleusement* – et deux grosses couleuvres. Mais ses serpens se laissierent cheoir a ses pies, les testes enclinés, sans luy mal faire. Et deux autres horribles serpens nommez gievres furent laissiees aler; et il se pendirent a ses mamelles et la lechoyent … Et adonc celluy, forcenant, luy fist errachier les mamelles, et tantost en yssi laiet en lieu de sanc. [The third judge, named Julian, appeared, and he ordered Christine seized, boasting that he would make her worship the idols. In spite of all the force he could apply, he was unable physically to move her

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from the spot where she was standing, so he ordered a large fire built around her. She remained in the fire for three days and from inside the flames were heard sweet melodies. She tormentors were terrified by the amazing signs they saw. When the fire had burned out she emerged fully healthy period. The judge commanded that snakes be brought to him and had two asps (with their deadly, poisonous bite) and two adders released upon her. But these snakes dropped down at her feet, their heads bowed and did not harm her at all. Two horrible vipers were let loose and they hung from her breasts and licked her … Then in his rage her ordered her breasts ripped off, whereupon milk rather than blood flowed out. (3.10)]

These pleasant secretions that replace the expected blood, gore, and stench, symbolise the saints’ purity and power. Instead of suffering under the torture, the saints subvert the tyrants’ expectations, as exemplified by the milk and agreeable smells. The martyrdom of Martine, meanwhile, demonstrates milk flowing in lieu of blood in addition to several other aspects of the masochistic martyrdom. What is narrated in this citation is only a part of what Martine’s vita from the Cité includes (she also endured wild beasts, fire, having her head shaved, and more): Derechief l’empereur fist despoullier Martine tout nue, et la char d’elle estoit blanche comme lis qui faisoit esbahir les veans pour sa grant biauté. Et quant l’empereur, qui la couvoitoit, l’ot longue piece admonnestée et vid qu’oveir n’y vouloit, il la fist toute detrenchier. Et de ses playes yssoit laict pour sanc et oudeur grande rendoit. Encore plus forcené sur elle, la fist estandre et atachier a pieux et luy derompre tout le corps, tant que ceulx qui la martiroyent estoyent tous lassez. [Thereupon the emperor had Martine stripped nude, and her lilywhite body dazzled the spectators because of its singular beauty. After the emperor who lusted after her had argued with her for a long time and realized she would not comply, he ordered her body slashed all over, and instead of blood, milk poured from her wounds, and she gave off a sweet scent. Raving all the more at her, the emperor ordered her body to be drawn and staked down and broken, but those who were martyring her became exhausted. (3.6)]

Instead of the expected resistance, blood, pain, and eventual submission of the saint to the will of the tyrant, all of this is subverted.

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The outpouring of milk and pleasant scents from the saints’ wounds in place of blood is the outward, visible sign of this inversion of expectations and of the fact that it is the saint who holds the power and who is controlling the masochistic interaction. Christine takes the thwarting of readerly expectations regarding blood a step further in depicting a saint causing her tyrant’s intermediary to bleed. As Theodorie was imprisoned by her tyrant, a son of the Devil came to her ‘pour violer sa chasteté. Mais, incontinent, prist tres fort a seigner du nes; si s’escria que un jouvencel qui estoit avec elle luy avoit donné du poing sur le nes’, ‘To violate her chastity, whereupon this incontinent man began to bleed profusely from his nose and therefore cried out that a young boy who was with her had struck his nose with his fist’ (3.15). He thus blamed a man for the saint’s having overpowered him and left a visible mark of her dominance over him. Instead of his making her bleed through rape, she instead caused him to bleed. While Christine’s are not the only saints to exude suave odours and fluids in martyrology, the Cité takes this one step further in a way that further support Christine’s desexualisation of the female body, vindication of non-virginal women, and apologia for women. Through the milk, Christine radically aligns the virginal with the maternal, blurring the lines of distinction between these disparate roles for medieval women and refuting the supposed taint of bearing children, as part of Christine’s larger programme of redeeming widows from the misogynistic notion that they were dishonourable. Christine aligns each of these aspects, the virginal and maternal, with Mary as the ultimate ­ instantiation of both qualities and the superlative exemplum for women. The Cité further unites virginal and parental women by using the term mamelles, a word denoting breasts that are capable of or engaged in lactating, each time female breasts are evoked, even for virgins (e.g. 3.8, 3.10). The privileging of this word also serves Christine’s objective to desexualise the female body by casting the breasts as parental and nourishing rather than sexual. In metamorphising both the virginal and the maternal, Christine transforms these categories so that they are no longer mutually exclusive. The Cité thus allows all women, not just Mary and her mother, Anne, to assume both of these modes concurrently. As Reno points out,

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‘indeed, at the end of her work, Christine transforms virginity into a metaphorical rather than literal concept by encouraging all her readers to emulate the fortress’ most distinguished occupants: “you can all see yourselves here, especially in the lofty towers of this last part”’.43 Christine thus lauds all virtuous women, including ­proto-non-binary people. The gendering of the violence in Part III relates closely to the prologue of the Cité des dames, especially the manner in which Christine grounds her writerly authority in her female body – the same body that the tyrants intend to serve as site, visual sign, and text of the martyrdom of the female saints.44 Christine pointedly depicts a paradigm of martyrdom that is sharply gendered and highly erotically charged. However, she also deftly desexualises the saints and the martyrdom and, more generally, the female body itself – once she has desexualised her authorial persona as a means of (self-)authorisation. The Cité builds on the traditional religious inversions in martyrology where what is held to be of value in the terrestrial world, like the institutional power of the tyrant, is shown to be inherently worthless. Christine explores misogyny, gender, and proto-non-binarism, which not only fulfils her immediate goals of refuting and subverting the dominant literature of her time but also, in our own time, fosters an S/M reading of her work. Whereas the tyrants intend to subject the saints to a sadistic scene where the saints are publicly humiliated under the former’s control, the would-be sadism fails each time and what actually transpires is a desexualised masochistic martyrdom commanded instead by the saints. The onlookers, intermediary torturers, and wild animals are subjugated by the saints rather than the tyrants and the implements used to perform the violent acts are as impotent as the tyrant is revealed to be – another poignant means of desexualising the encounter. In voiding the sadism and desexualising the masochism, Christine’s Cité offers a rare instance of S/M that does not provide the reader a vicarious thrill either through reading or condemning the kink, as is usually the case with S/M in literature, film, the arts, law, and so on. The similarities between erotic and mystical ecstasy are already familiar. The Cité combines these two in a novel manner, one that depicts women removing themselves from the economy of male/sexual desire as part of a larger desexualisation



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of the ­religious (martyrial) experience. This masochistic martyrdom not only depicts  women, including proto-non-binary people, as freeing themselves from the confines of this earthly existence but also from the shackles of the limits that society places on them as women.

Notes   1 David F. Hult (ed. and trans.), Debate of the ‘Romance of the rose’: the other voice in early modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 1. I use the term ‘French’ to signify the language of the texts and not a notion of proto-nationality.   2 This chapter uses the term ‘Cité’/‘Cité des dames’ to refer to the book Le livre de la cité des dames and ‘city’ to denote the intradiegetic city that is under construction.   3 In the  Cité des dames, Rayson names the  Roman de la rose  as an example of misogynistic texts (1.3). Christine was also a key critic of the  Rose  in the public debate of the  Romance of the rose  (1401–3). Many scholars have remarked on the Cité’s function as a corrective to the Roman de la rose; see, for example, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Christine de Pizan and the misogynistic tradition’, Romanic review, 81.3 (1990): 279–92; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Christine de Pizan: gender and the new vernacular canon’, in Strong voices, weak history: early women writers and canons in England, France, and Italy, ed. Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 99–120, as well as his other articles on Christine de Pizan; Charity Cannon Willard, Christine De Pizan: her life and works (New York: Persea, 1990); Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of female authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Christine Reno, ‘Virginity as an ideal in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames’, in Ideals for women in the works of Christine de Pizan, ed. Diane Bornstein, Medieval and Renaissance monograph series (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981), pp. 69–90; Benjamin Semple, ‘The male psyche and the female sacred body in Marie de France and Christine de Pizan’, Yale French studies, 86 (1994): 164–86; and Lori Walters, ‘Metamorphoses of the self: Christine de Pizan, the saint’s life, and Perpetua’, in Sur le chemin de longue étude, ed. Bernard Ribémont, Etudes Christiniennes, 3 (Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, 1998), pp. 159–81.

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  4 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the implications for the rest of the Rose of my reading of the coilles passage as sexual assault.   5 See Kevin Brownlee, ‘Discourses of the self: Christine de Pizan and the Romance of the rose’, in Rethinking the Romance of the rose, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 234–61.   6 Quilligan, Allegory of female authority, p. 191.   7 Although not quite all of the saints in Christine’s hagiography are martyrs, this chapter uses terms such as martyrs, martyrdom, and martyrology to refer to the entire group of saints and their torments as a whole in the Cité. This chapter uses the designations saint and martyr to refer these figures even before their canonisation/death. The term tyrant is employed, as Christine uses the same term and it functions in both English and French. In the context of Part III of the Cité, the tyrant is the one who attempts to seduce the saint and who orders the torture to be performed; those who carry out the torments are termed torturers or intermediaries.   8 Quilligan, Allegory of female authority, p. 199.   9 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘“Femme de corps et femme par sens”: Christine de Pizan’s saintly women’, Romanic review, 87.2 (1996): 157–75 (157). 10 Quilligan, Allegory of female authority, p. 203. 11 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Christine de Pizan and the misogynistic ­tradition’, 289. 12 In this chapter, I delineate sadism and masochism as separate practices and employ ‘sadomasochism’ merely as a term of convenience that refers to both of these separate concepts. Contrary to some interpretations of sadomasochism, I neither associate sadism with men/masculinity nor masochism with women/femininity. More broadly, I do not consider any acts to be inherently gendered. It is also important to note that criminal acts of violence inflicted on another and sadism are two different phenomena. 13 The term kyriarchy was devised by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza in 1992 from the Greek kyrios for ‘lord, master, legal guardian’ and archein for ‘to rule, dominate’. In short it replaces the term patriarchy to reflect intersectionality, that oppression and privilege manifest in multiple, complicated ways, rather than a straightforward binary of male domination and female subordination. 14 See, for example, Virginia Burrus, The sex lives of saints: an erotics of ancient hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

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2004), where Burrus states, ‘ancient Lives of Saints, I suggest, are the site of an exuberant eroticism’ (p. 1), and Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, ‘The heroics of virginity: brides of Christ and sacrificial mutilation’, in Women in the Middle Ages and the renaissance: literary and historical perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 29–72, for how the Church fathers defended and encouraged the use of violence by Christian women to protect against sexual assault, considering such women virile. 15 As an example, in Robert Mills’s fine study Suspended animation, there is one instance of a saint, Margaret, who physically defends herself, being labelled as ‘in drag’. For this as well as an exploration of how hagiography can use the saint’s body to represent the ever threatened yet cohesive Church, see Robert Mills, Suspended animation: pain, pleasure and punishment in medieval culture (London: Reaktion, 2005), p. 124. 16 Maureen Curnow, ‘The livre de la cité des dames of Christine de Pisan: A critical edition’, 2 vols (PhD thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1975), 3.7. Translations of the Cité are from Earl Jeffrey Richards’s 1982 edition, sometimes lightly edited: Christine de Pizan, The book of the city of ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982). Citations from the Cité note the part and chapter numbers. 17 The brackets in this quotation are from the original. 18 For more on the passive egg myth, see Emily Martin, ‘The egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles’, in Feminism and science, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 103–20. 19 None of the studies consulted on the depiction of Mary in the Middle Ages makes mention of another work representing Mary as a warrior lord who commands knights. 20 The Cité also includes a mention of a saint, Eulalie, being a knight under Jesus: ‘Si fu mise ou nombre des chevaliers de Jhesu Crist et ot plusieurs tourmens’, ‘So she was ranked among the knights of Jesus Christ’ (3.8). 21 Critics, including Kevin Brownlee, Maureen Quilligan, and Earl Jeffrey Richards, have demonstrated how Christine has astutely regendered and desexualised the courtly authorial figure in crafting her own writerly persona. See Kevin Brownlee, ‘Literary genealogy and the problem of the father: Christine de Pizan and Dante’, in Dante now: current trends in Dante studies, ed. Theodore J. Cachey Jr, William and Katherine Devers. Series in Dante Studies: 1 (Notre Dame:

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University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 205–35; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Rewriting romance: courtly discourse and auto-citation in Christine de Pizan’, in Gender and text in the later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp.172–94; Maureen Quilligan, The allegory of female authority: Christine de Pizan's Cité des dames (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Earl Jeffrey Richards, ‘“Seulette a part”–the “little woman on the sidelines” takes up her pen: the letters of Christine de Pizan’, in Dear sister: medieval women and the epistolary genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 139–70. 22 In Middle French sergeant means ‘servant’ in addition to its military meanings. In the context of the Cité, it is, however, noteworthy that Christine chooses to employ a term with multiple martial meanings instead of an unequivocal term for servant. 23 A dungeon is, in contemporary terms, common nomenclature for a space in which S/M play occurs. It is interesting to note that the contemporary sense of an underground prison cell is a meaning that was acquired in the early fourteenth century and that the original meaning, reflected in the term donjon in the above quotation, referred to a tower. Thus, the sadomasochistic use of the term dungeon involves an additional layer of play between high and low, the obscene and the revered, which already lies at the core of S/M play. 24 Kevin Brownlee, ‘Widowhood, sexuality, and gender in Christine De Pizan’, Romanic review, 86.2 (1995): 339–53 (339). 25 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Femme de corps et femme par sens’, 165–6. 26 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Translating dismemberment: Boccaccio and Christine’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–92): 253–66 (256). 27 Reno, ‘Virginity as an ideal in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames’, p. 70. 28 Brownlee, ‘Rewriting romance’, p. 172. 29 Semple, ‘The male psyche and the female sacred body’, 182. 30 Ummni Khan, Vicarious kinks: S/M in the socio-legal imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 31 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1965–75). 32 My intention is not to split hairs over terminology around sexual violence as it pertains to oral–genital contact and vulvar–penile intercourse. As such I am following the more broadly accepted convention of terming the first instance sexual assualt and the latter rape, even though some definitions would designate both as rape. While not all scholars see the conclusion of the Rose as rape, almost all ­nonetheless

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recognize that it relates to oppressive patriarchy vis-à-vis women's bodies.   This chapter does not disagree with seeing the 'body' of the rose as problematised and hermaphroditic (as explored in studies like David Rollo, 'Venerating nature’s deviance in the Roman de la Rose', postmedieval, 9 (2018)147–160). Even if the body is hermaphroditic, this does not affect reading this passage as representing a rape. Moreover, some studies mistakenly reduce the female genitalia and sexual organs into one generalised notion of an always open/available 'vagina', the access to which is barred by a supposedly intact hymen. 33 For more on this see the important studies by Guynn (‘Authorship and sexual/allegorical violence’) and David Hult, ‘Language and dismemberment: Abelard, Origen, and the Romance of the rose’, in Brownlee and Huot, Rethinking the Romance of the rose, pp. 101–30. Hult’s mention of the ‘word-thing’ occurs on page 114 of the latter article. 34 Hult, ‘Language and dismemberment’, p. 113. 35 Theodor Reik, Aus leiden Freuden (London: Imago Publishing, 1940), pp. 6–7; translation taken from Masochism in modern man, trans. Gertrude M. Kurth and Margaret H. Beigel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Company, 1941). 36 Maria Marcus, A taste for pain: on masochism and female sexuality (London: Souvenir Press, 1981), pp. 122–3. 37 Marcus, A taste for pain, p. 124. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, le froid et le cruel. Avec le texte intégral de la Vénus à la fourrure, traduit de l’allemand par Aude Willm (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), p. 36. English translations of Deleuze are based on ‘Coldness and cruelty’, in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1989), modified in places. 39 For an illustration of the martyrdom that emphasises lustful desire, see the example of Martine, and for one that emphasises spirituality, see the passage about Saint Christine (both later in this chapter). 40 For an illustration of the torturers being converted, see the example of Saint Foste later in this chapter. 41 The spelling that Christine uses for vittoire is included in the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français as an alternate spelling for victoire and only cites Christine as a source that has employed this variant. Christine’s version sounds Italianate and may be a product of her Italian origin and knowledge of Italian. 42 For more on Christine de Pizan’s vita of Saint Christine, especially in terms of how Christine uses it to authorise herself as writer and rewrite Ovid’s Philomela, see Kevin Brownlee, ‘Martyrdom and the female

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voice: Saint Christine in the Cité des dames’, in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timia Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 115–35. 43 Reno, ‘Virginity as an ideal’, p. 76. 44 Tina-Marie Ranalli, ‘Christine de Pizan’s metaphoric womb’, Medieval feminist forum, 47.1 (2011): 32–51.

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The monastic pleasures of frustrated knowledge Karmen MacKendrick

The life contained by the cubiculum is a fragile one, marked by absence, departure, and hesitancy. Applied to the monastic existence that means that the possibility of failure … cannot be excluded. M. B. Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux

Pleasures that play with shame stand in strange relation to pride. The 2010 anthology Gay Shame, though not focused specifically on masochism or submission, draws these into the conversation around queer refusals of successful assimilation, while fully acknowledging the importance of contemporary pride movements. There is a BDSM pride flag of black and blue stripes superimposed with a bright red heart, but there is also a stubborn affirmation of failure and humiliation as sources of pleasure. Pride and shame are both affirmed and contradicted. Such paradoxes are not at all new. In medieval monastic contexts, similarly strange pleasures could flourish, though the tension among the elements is different in each case. Where pride is a virtue, as it is now, there is a double humiliation in desiring shame. Where pride is a sin, as it was then, one seeks the humiliation of failure – but to succeed in failing raises the concern of being proud of one’s success. Though it sounds rather abstract, one of the most fundamental of such paradoxical monastic pleasures is the search for impossible knowledge, creating a constant intellectual humiliation and persistent, frustrated desire.1 The knowledge sought, of both the god who grounds monastic obedience and the self who is constructed by obeying, is ultimately unknowable. This is a less spectacular asceticism than one finds in physical practices, whether of early monks or

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of contemporary masochists.2 It is, however, just as demanding. Like somatic asceticism and sadistic and masochistic play, the impossible desire to know (and to be known) can shatter the desirous self, pulled between the double needs for comprehension and knowledgeseeking, demanding the very failure that this doubleness sustains. Michel Foucault, in one of his many revisitations of the connections between knowledge and power, notes that Christianity imposes two distinct kinds of ‘truth obligations’. The first is the obligation to believe. He writes in ‘Technologies of the self’: Christianity … imposes very strict obligations of truth, dogma, and canon, more so than do the pagan religions. … The duty to accept a set of obligations, to hold certain books as permanent truth, to accept authoritarian decisions in matters of truth, not only to believe certain things but to show that one believes, and to accept institutional authority are all characteristic of Christianity.3

The obligation to believe and to say so is not unique to Christianity, but as Foucault points out, it may be exceptionally strict there.4 (Consider the Apostolic or Nicene creeds, lists of belief statements that begin with a declaration of the very fact of believing.) Christianity’s second set of truth obligations is more unusual: Each person has the duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires; and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and, hence, to bear public or private witness against oneself.5

As Mark Jordan points out, the confessions of faith and of self, though entangled, ‘are relatively autonomous and sometimes opposed. To declare true doctrine is not the same as to discover and express the truth about oneself. The two imperatives play back and forth across Christian history.’6 The imperatives are in tension, yet there is no choice between them. Both must be obeyed, and the tension between them sustained. Truth is not just information, nor even knowledge, but an obligation – to believe and to affirm; to find and to reveal. In Western Christianity, the focus of the present discussion, the two truth obligations become impossible demands, because neither

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gods nor selves are quite knowable. Foucault creates the term ‘alethurgy’ for the practices comprising ‘the manifestation of truth as the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten’.7 The term combines ‘theurgy’, ritual that draws the hidden gods into the world, and ‘alethia’, truth that is always hidden and must somehow be revealed.8 Alethurgy, therefore, works to manifest the truth by bringing it out of hiding – that is, it works by revelation, whether of God or of self. To complicate matters further, Foucault is not interested in revealing a pre-existing concealed truth. Rather, the manifestation and creation of alethurgical truth are the same. What is more, the whole of such truth cannot be known.9 Revelation always leaves more to be understood. One might also say that it leaves much to be desired – because desire, as I shall later emphasise, is integral to knowing. The partiality of revelation is a problem for the obligation to believe. Can a person really believe a claim without fully knowing what that claim says? This suggests that the first truth obligation, to believe and proclaim propositions, is unmeetable – but no less obligatory. The second obligation, to confess the truth of the self, is likewise impossible. One difficulty in meeting it is fairly obvious; we all lie or hide some things, sometimes. A deeper and more hidden difficulty is that no one can know one’s self fully. This means that even a confession that tries not to hide is going to be incomplete. The obligation to tell the truth of oneself, like the obligation to believe the truth of one’s god, is destined for failure. Told, heard, or accepted, the truth bears obligations that may well be unmeetable. But failure, too, has its festive features.10 There is pleasure in it, all the more intense for being painful and, like many paradoxical and perverse pleasures, rather sneaky. Monks take the impossibilities of Christian truth demands with exemplary seriousness. In so doing, they embrace the paradoxes and impossibilities rather than attempting to overcome them – as do those of any era who seek out pleasures caught up in pain. Monastically, the paradoxes lend themselves to the quest for humility, shading readily and pleasurably into humiliation and submission. The connection between the two kinds of obligations presents its own difficulties. The pure or purified soul sought through confession

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is held to be the only one suited to try to understand the sacred texts in which theological truths are presented.11 And in Western monasticism, this purity is regarded as impossible – a point made especially clear in the Augustinian rule from the fifth century. That is, the self to be constructed in the second obligation is unattainable, but only such a self can meet the first obligation. The contemporary Benedictine monk Jean Leclercq points to another connection, by distinguishing a clerical (priestly) from a monastic approach to knowing God. The approach purely through knowledge is properly clerical. Monastically, the truth-seeking obligation demands not only action (such as learning) but affection: it requires the love of learning, bringing desire into the domain of knowledge. Knowledge may seek finality and completeness, but the desire for God must be sustained – a monk who does not desire God has little reason to continue in monastic life. To sustain this desire and not simply abandon it in frustration, the monk must also be constantly aware of his own inferiority and limitation in the face of the unknowable god, and must find awareness of this inferiority itself a desirable state. The love of failure (to know God) and of humiliation (in the face of divine superiority) combine in an inadmissible pleasure. This pleasure includes an intentional emphasis on uncertainty, in sharp contrast to priestly scholasticism as a precise, logical, and thorough approach to theological questions. Scholasticism is aimed at knowledge, and it moves towards that aim through a careful formula of questions, possible answers, and the elimination of errors. Leclercq describes the exemplary scholastic method  of Peter Lombard: ‘To begin with, a clear distinction is introduced in absolutely impersonal terms, followed, as each term is defined and new divisions are proposed, by a series of other distinctions. The purpose of the procedure is indicated; the aim is to acquire knowledge.’12 Leclercq goes on to explain the distinction between scholastic and monastic learning: The scholastic lectio takes the direction of the quaestio and the disputatio. The reader puts questions to the text and then questions himself on the subject matter: quaeri solet. The monastic lectio is oriented toward the meditatio and the oratio. The objective of the first is science and knowledge; of the second, wisdom and appreciation.



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In the monastery, the lectio divina, which begins with grammar, ­terminates … in desire of heaven.13

Like most distinctions, this one holds up imperfectly, but monastic authorities could be harsh about what they saw as the smug certitude of the scholastic approach. In his famous disputes with the scholastic Peter Abelard, spanning the 1120s to about 1140, the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux mocks, as M.  B. Pranger writes, ‘Abelard’s dialectical sophistication’.14 In a particularly snide declaration, Bernard writes of Abelard that he is a ‘new theologian’: ‘Qui dum omnium quae sunt in coelo sursum, et quae in terra deorsum, nihil, praeter solum Nescio’, ‘He claims not to be ignorant of whatever is to be found in heaven above or on earth below, except of the phrase “I do not know”’ (Epistola 190, 1.1).15 Bernard was not simply annoyed by finding Abelard a know-it-all; he regarded the scholastic quest for certainty as sinful in itself: ‘et dum paratus est de oranibus reddere rationem, etiam quae sunt supra rationem, et contra rationem praesumit, et contra fidem’, ‘Being prepared to use reason in order to account for everything, even for that which surpasses reason, he proudly sins against reason, and against faith’.16 For his use of logic, Abelard is accused of the sin of (intellectual) pride. Bernard argues instead for the acceptance of doctrine and not the intellectual exploration of it, proudly declaring, ‘Ego Prophetas et Apostolos audio, obedio Evangelio, sed non Evangelio secundum Petrum’, ‘I listen to the Prophets and the Apostles; I obey the Gospel, not the Gospel according to Peter’.17 This declaration has become famous, though  – as Pranger points out – to perceive a simple opposition misses Abelard’s own innovations in affective devotion and Bernard’s own well-educated use of rhetoric.18 The scholastic emphasis is clearly on the first obligation, that of doctrine and creedal profession, the obligation to believe and to attest to canonical claims. By contrast, though monastic life dwells extensively on texts, the monastic aim is not comprehension but the combination of knowing with desire.19 The intensification of desire, rather than its satisfaction, is central to both corporal and abstract modes of sadomasochistic pleasure, even now. Without that intensity, desire does not approach the painful or humiliating

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levels that such pleasure requires; it does not become strong enough to break through the sturdy boundaries of self.20 Scholastic thought is exemplarily satisfying, presenting its answers as conclusive after weighing all sides of a debate. Monastic thought is no less intellectual, but deliberately evasive of satisfaction. For Bernard, Leclercq writes, ‘The important word is no longer quaeritur, but desideratur; no longer sciendum, but experiendum’.21 One desires the experience of God; one experiences the desire for God. To aim at desire is already somewhat strange, involving a regressive desire for the desire for an infinite and ungraspable something, precisely insofar as it is ungraspable: desire usually has an aim, so to aim at itself becomes a circle, or a spiral that swiftly eludes control. Leclercq points out that Bernard’s monastic injunction ‘assumes on the part of the teacher, and on the part of his audience, a special way of life, a rigorous asceticism, or as they say today a “commitment”. Rather than speculative insights, it gives them a certain appreciation, of savoring and clinging to the truth and, what is everything, to the love of God’.22 Knowledge and desire cannot simply be opposed. It is important that truth is the object of this clinging and savouring, just as it is of knowledge, and it is important that both priest and monk desire to know. The (oversimplified) difference is whether that desire aims at satisfaction. The painful joy that pairs ‘the love of learning and the desire for god’ structures monastic life. Both desire and argumentation can be trained: we can learn to want as well as to think differently. But unlike argumentative skills, desire resists formalisation, and it resists the finality that scholarship seeks: a desire satisfied risks being a desire ended, unless satisfaction carries its own contrary within it. The desire cultivated in monasticism is sustained not only by aiming at itself, but by the strange nature of its infinite and abstract object. Leclercq describes ‘an obscure possession, awareness of which does not last, and consequently gives rise to regret at seeing it disappear and so a desire to find it again. The “compunction of the heart”, “of the soul” … always tends to become a “compunction of love”, “of delectation”, and “of contemplation”’. He goes on to use language that, though initially surprising, verifies the strangeness of this desire to desire and its closeness to both the painfulness and the intensity

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that characterise masochistic pleasures. His description makes vivid the pleasure in the pain and the pain in the love: ‘Compunction is an act of God in us, an act by which God awakens us, a shock, a blow, a “sting”, a sort of burn. God goads us as if with a spear: he  “presses” us with insistence … as if to pierce us’.23 The joy and the pain form a paradox, a painful pleasure, of their own; the rupture of pierced skin ruptures self-containment too.24 Both are aspects of what the monastic tradition calls ‘the gift of tears’: ‘Two kinds of tears symbolize the two forms of compunction: the lower stream … is the stream of repentance; the higher … that of desire. Tears of love always accompany those of penitence, but more and more these are dominated by tears of joy’.25 We find, for all the contextual differences, something very like the masochistic paradoxes of painful – if not necessarily penitential – pleasure that are familiar today. Again, however, there is a significant difference in what can be acknowledged about that pleasure. Leclercq can point out the pleasurably stinging, goading, piercing, and penitential aspects of love. But he insists that the goal of these pains is the predominance of joy, as if it were other than pain even in accompanying it. In both earlier monastic thought and contemporary masochistic practice, the separation is, at minimum, considerably less emphasised. The desire to succeed in desiring must also be a desire to fail – to fail to attain the object of desire, to know it fully by either intellect or acquaintance. There is a tension between knowledge attained and the desire to know; between desire that seeks satisfaction and the desire for further desiring. The impossibility of knowing or possessing God helps to sustain these. The desire to fail, to drive oneself to failure, generates a perverse pleasure that may be denied even in the experience.26 In monasticism, the double failures of desire and knowledge create a tangle that may be perceived as vicious or delightful – or both. No less paradoxical is the creation and understanding of the subject who is supposed to know, connected to the second set of Foucauldian truth obligations, those involved in bearing witness against oneself – accusing oneself of any possible sin, revealing the thoughts and acts one wishes to hide. Monastic self-formation often occurs through self-denial, a simultaneous making and refusing. Pranger points out that Bernard did not reserve his sometimes cruel

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questioning only for others: ‘the brilliance of the inquisitor will turn out to be more than matched by the brilliance of self-accusation and  … will be seen to converge in one and the same monastic ­exercise’.27 No monastic rite can be entirely individual; the self who is accused, pitied, and justified emerges within the pastoral community. In a 1981 essay titled ‘The subject and power’, Foucault writes of ‘pastoral power’, the particular form of power that emerges early in Christianity and particularly in monasticism. This form of power, he writes, cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth – the truth of the individual himself.28

This power, then, is crucial to the second set of truth obligations. The subject created in the monastic community is at once an individual and very much a part of that community. That is, to be a member of such a community requires a particular self-formation; individuality with its inwardness can only emerge in the setting of communal sharing. Leclercq emphasises the nature of learning within that setting: ‘In general, the monks did not acquire their religious formation in a school, under a scholastic, by means of the quaestio, but individually, under the guidance of an abbot, a spiritual father.’29 Both abbot and monk face particular difficulties as they seek humility. The effort is most difficult for the abbot, whose worldly authority poses a constant temptation to pride, and whose self-humiliation must therefore be all the stronger. Both answer ultimately to a God whose demands are obscure and indirect yet require absolute obedience. And as in contemporary practices of obedience and submission, both may be driven further into the strange pleasures of subordination by difficulty itself, and by the constant need for more intense demands to keep the pleasure of the difficulty alive. The individuality that is obscured by this intense suppression of one’s will is also essential to the possible value of

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obedience; someone, after all, must obey. Leclercq emphasises of Bernard, particularly, that his teaching style ‘is personal [but] … not subjective; it is universal, it has value for all, insofar as each person is unique’.30 Both learning truth in scripture and creating the truth of self weave the created individual into the pastorally governed community. In Foucault’s analysis, the monastic subject is constructed or created as an inner self by the same process that reveals that self – the practice of confession, which has monastic roots. Monastic confession must construct both the truth and its teller, and in that it is quite different from the philosophical search for truth. It is less distant from more modern practices of interrogation, including those theatricalised in the demands of perverse pleasure. The term ‘philosophy’, says Foucault, describes ‘the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth’. In contrast, ‘spirituality’ is ‘the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth … researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc. … are the price to be paid for access to the truth’.31 The entanglements are evident; the access that philosophy seeks requires spirituality’s practices. Foucault suggests that we retain Tomaso de Vio’s sixteenthcentury description of confession as an ‘act of truth’. Thus, pastoral power demands ‘not only acts of obedience and submission but also “acts of truth”’.32 In the context of that power, as Mark Jordan summarises, ‘the truth can be made manifest only with the subject’s active compliance’.33 Truth is not only known, but done. Monks perform acts of truth by obeying the abbot, creating knowledge and even a way of knowing that depends upon their humility and even humiliation – a masochistic ontology drawn out by a ‘sadistic epistemology’.34 The abbot leads readings and offers sermons; he hears confessions and prescribes penance. But he has power only because the monks have chosen to obey; their actions must be complicit in the truths that the abbot knows. Foucault points out, too, that this obedience is meant to be both unconditional and, ‘in the form of

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humility, a permanent relationship with oneself and others’.35 The choice must be renewed, but it may not be changed. In a parallel with contemporary submissive practice, no small part of the challenge of obedience is this constant and wilful renewal. It is easy to overlook the strangeness of the demand to obey. Again, Jordan’s exegesis is valuable: ‘Christian notions of obedience require subjection to an individual, not to a principle or precept, and even to the point of absurdity. Obedience is not conditional upon a particular end; it continues indefinitely until its subject is erased in humility.’ Even the abbot can command ‘only because she or he has already been commanded. Christian obedience is demanded in the name of a prior obedience’, not only of the abbot to God, but even of God to God, in the exemplary obedience of the Son to the Father.36 When even God has to be obedient – if only to Godself – disobedience becomes spectacular arrogance. Perhaps obviously, the monks’ obedience cannot be partial: ‘The believing Christian is obliged to live under direction that oversees all episodes and periods of life, not just particular troubles or transitions. In this regard too, the new form of power … changes notions of salvation, law, and truth, but above all the notion of subjection.’37 A paradox emerges: the obedient monk must wilfully give his will over to the superior in the service of God (otherwise, the abbot is simply forcing the monk to act). But if the monk gives wilfully, then he retains his will and has not wholly given it. And if he gives his will so wholly that he has no desires of his own, then he is not obeying, because he can no longer will to follow the abbot. One needs to have a will in order to give that will over (and over again) to obedience.38 As in the desire to know the unknowable, this will to obedience generates paradox, and thus the pleasures that paradox makes possible, whether the submission demanded is to a devout monastic abbot or a secular (perhaps intentionally blasphemous) dom(me). Will-lessness, besides missing the essential doubleness of obedience, also misses the humility crucial to monastic formation. Humility entails thinking oneself below another. The difficulty of obedience enhances humility by reminding one of the resistance, reluctance, and necessary imperfection of one’s will (the unavoidable consequence of original sin, according to Christian dogma).

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And humility enhances obedience by aiding the will to give oneself over to another, better will. The monk, ideally, seeks to deepen both of these, to be as obedient and humble as it is possible to be. The limitations of that possibility reinforce humility: the monk can be humiliated by not having humility enough – and humility is never enough. Confession and obedience, then, are mutually enhancing.39 Confession’s ‘verbalization also involves intrinsic effects which it owes simply to the fact that it transforms the impulses of the mind into statements addressed to another’, writes Foucault. ‘In particular, the “sorting-out”, which is one of the aims of the examination, is performed through verbalization with the help of a … mechanism of shame that makes one blush at expressing any bad thought, the material realization of what is happening in the mind through the words spoken’.40 Verbalising not only clarifies the results of the ‘inward’ examination, but, by the very act of admission against the resistance of pride, intensifies the shame thus realised – and the possibility of its concomitant pleasures of failure and humiliation.41 Shame can be multiplied by failure, including the failure to confess the shameful. There is another twist in this tangle of imperatives. As Pranger summarises, in the Benedictine rule, Benedict takes ‘care to register the necessity of solemn silence and, if need be, the possibility of whispering speech’.42 Confession, ideally (though never actually), becomes all of the monk’s speaking, all other speech having been obediently stilled. Centuries later, as he works towards the reform of that same Benedictine rule, Bernard elaborates on the value of silence, criticising the monks he calls ‘light-minded’: Esurit et sitit auditors, quibus suas jactitet vanitates, quibus omne quod sentit, effundat quibus, quails, et quantus sit, innotescat. Inventa autem occasione loquendi. … Praevenit interrogantem, non quaerenti respondet. Ipse quaerit, ipse solvit, et verba collecutoris imperfecta praesciendit. [He hungers and thirsts for listeners to whom he can make empty boasts, to whom he can pour out all he feels, and whom he can tell what he is and how great he is. He finds an occasion to speak. … He butts in before he is asked. He does not answer other people’s

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questions. He asks the questions himself and he answers them, and he cuts off anyone who tries to speak. (‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 13.41)]43

This chatter is just as revelatory as confession – and potentially just as endless! – but in quite a different way. It displays the sinful frivolity of the monk’s soul, a superficiality so deep that it cannot even be properly told. Far from seeking to recall every error, ‘Cunctis quippe quae in se contemptibilia … a memoria rasis; bonisque, si qua sentit in se, adunatis vel simulatis ante oculos mentis’, ‘If anything has happened which would bring contempt on him … he wipes it from his memory. And if he notes any good things in himself he will add them up and parade them before his mind’s eye’ (‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 12.40).44 Pranger explains that the penalty for such monastic chatter is silence itself: ‘The monk who has improperly broken monastic silence … finds himself in the process of alienating himself from his community. … [A]lthough pretending to communicate by word and gestures, [he] talks in fact only to himself’.45 Frivolous chatter comes too easily, too lightly, and without being requested, and is finally silenced by the communal practice of nonresponse. It is precisely opposed to the confessional words that come against resistance, drawn out from the depths of impulses and actions, pushing through the forces of shame by an effortful obedience. Confessional words are required – and required, even demanded, to recur. Silencing chatter is humble; silencing confession arrogantly suggests that one has no sins to present. Confession’s necessary repetition also necessitates its failure, as Jordan points out: ‘What distinguishes Christianity, Foucault says several times, is not the invention of the fall but of its repetition. Christianity is the religion of backsliders’.46 Confession must continue to unearth and reveal truth not because the previous truth becomes a lie, but because truth and its telling are inexhaustible. (In other words, the second kind of truth obligation shares the necessary incompleteness of the first.) Confession’s aim is less the reform of behaviour, though this can indeed occur, than the endless examination and exposure of the imperfect self. The monk must continually monitor the self he confesses, unearthing every impulse with the potential to shame him. Describing Augustine’s sense of the problem of libido – not the psychoanalytic version but



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more broadly a problem of the will’s inability to control the flesh – Foucault writes, ‘[Libido] is not an external obstacle to the will; it is a part, an internal component, of the will’. The will is essentially and internally divided. Thus, he explains, the spiritual struggle consists … in turning our eyes continuously downward or inward in order to decipher, among the movements of the soul, which ones come from the libido. The task is at first indefinite, since libido and will can never be substantially dissociated from one another. And this task is not only an issue of mastership but also a question of the diagnosis of truth and illusion. It requires a permanent hermeneutics of oneself.47

To keep matters sufficiently difficult, the diagnosis itself must remain uncertain – even to the point of not quite knowing whose actions are being evaluated. Even the temptation to preserve ourselves from shame, Foucault writes, displays ‘the incompatibility between the Devil, who tempts and deceives while hiding in the recesses of consciousness, and the light that exposes [shameful thoughts] to view’.48 It becomes necessary not only to examine oneself for all thoughts and impulses, all the time, and to bring into words those one is most reluctant to admit, but also to seek the source of the thought or impulse itself, which might turn out to be other than oneself, a devilish or demonic temptation. This is just as dizzying as it sounds. Confessional techniques ‘were mainly concerned with the stream of thoughts flowing into consciousness, disturbing by their multiplicity the necessary unity of contemplation and secretly conveying images or suggestions from Satan’.49 The technology of the self – the way that the self is made – is driven by failure. Confession, says Foucault, ‘implies that there is something hidden in ourselves and that we are always in a selfillusion that hides the secret’.50 The self can only be made within by being externalised into speech. Even then, it cannot be sure if it is itself, or if what it finds ‘in’ its ‘self’ comes from some other (perhaps demonic) source. The monk constantly struggles to read the dim and illegible interior and to form it into speech. By bringing evil to light, verbalising can exorcise the one confessing: the Devil cannot bear the light, even when that light is aural and metaphorical, so the monk’s verbal confession of a devilish act or impulse not only

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exposes the Devil, but causes the Devil to leave him. The Father of Lies cannot withstand truth-telling, and, says Foucault, ‘Confession is a mark of truth’.51 By striving to speak the truth constantly, the monk also strives to keep the Devil from attaining too strong a foothold in his thoughts. But ‘this idea of the permanent verbal is only an ideal: it is never completely possible’. And, in a more strenuously ascetic move, ‘the price of the permanent verbalization was to make everything that could not be expressed into a sin’.52 It is not that there is nothing good ‘within’ the self, but any thought that does not make the circuit through verbalisation and hearing to become the self risks being the sinfulness of devilish temptation instead. Selfrenunciation demands self-verbalisation; a masochistic pleasure sneaks in, both in the push beyond the limits of the self and in the outpouring of shameful words. That which remains only within us, even unknown to us, must be sinful (and unavailable for any combination of pleasure or shame). The unsayableness of the inconceivable God extends to the unspeakableness of the tempting demons, and only if both could be said could they be properly sorted. The speaking monk, trying in perpetual obedience to say and thereby save himself, stumbles on the doubly impossible truth that would complete the self and the saving alike by knowing Truth as God. Clearly the aim of confession is not to maximise self-control. Instead, it seeks ‘humility and mortification, detachment toward oneself and the constitution of a relation with oneself tending toward the destruction of the form of the self’ – a paradigmatically masochistic aim.53 The Christian search for salvation is self-care by self-renunciation. There is thus some understatement in Foucault’s remark, ‘There is a paradox in the care of the self in Christianity’.54 To accept the asceticism that obeys pastoral power, the monk must reject himself in the very act of self-making, and in the very act of trying to keep himself only himself, keeping the Devil out. He humbles, and indeed humiliates, himself by telling what he is most reluctant to tell, knowing that even in his effort towards humiliation, he humiliatingly fails. As confession means nothing without a trace of the resistance found in shame, so too renunciation means nothing without some desire for the self that is given up. A self too easily renounced was never worth renunciation.55 Verbalisation becomes not just an act

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of giving, but a sacrifice; the self is made so that it may be given up. The double task of finding-and-creating the self and renouncing the self ‘gives place to a task that cannot be anything else but undefined’. Foucault refers to this task as a ‘spiral of truth formulation and reality renouncement’, where the reality renounced is the self discovered, and the self must be discovered in order that it may be renounced.56 There is one more guarantor of failure: the exemplary humility and obedience of Christ. Bernard writes, Nam illa mors, illa crux, opprobria, sputa, flagella, quae omnia caput nostrum Christus pertransiit, quid aliud corpori ejus, id est nobis, quam praeclara obedientiae documenta fuerunt [For that death, that cross, the opprobrium, the scorn, the beatings which Christ endured, what else were they but outstanding examples of obedience for his body, that is, for ourselves? (‘De gradibus ­humilitatis’, 3.7)]57

No monk can measure up to the humility and obedience of a god willing to undergo the humiliation of a grotesque and public execution as a criminal. Even to think that one has measured up (or down) would be humility-negating, something closer to ancient hubris or modern arrogance. The monk attempting to equal this ultimate depth of obedience and humility would not only face an impossible task, he would also be neither obedient nor humble if he thought himself worthy of trying to equal God’s own humiliation. Even to take such an exemplar, to have such an aspiration at all, is perilously near to arrogance. To be proud of one’s humility is a greater risk than that of being humiliated by one’s pride. Bernard himself, having written of the descent of Christ into humiliation and the ascent of the soul towards the truth that Christ alone can show, runs into a related and painful realisation. As Pranger summarises, ‘It is the ego of the author … which has to admit to its failure to become identical with the processes described. He suffers from his own authority and he, of all people, is the one doomed to stay behind, spiritless and worn out’.58 He has either written falsely or failed by his own standard. What the monk has to confess, then, must include confession’s own failure as an act of truth construction. Confession ‘succeeds’

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only as an act of responsive desire – but it must be interminable, making ‘success’ into a peculiar notion. It ‘succeeds’ as an act of knowing – but only of knowing how much more remains unknowable. The knowledge created is not false, but it is necessarily and perpetually incomplete. As obedient and humble, under a lifelong obligation of submission and confession, the monk wills failure – and thus guarantees it. If he succeeds, he has failed to fail. If he fails, he has failed to succeed. Working both towards and against a state of such perfect inner purity that only silence could express it, the abbot also helps the monk to continue failing, by desiring and demanding still more of this failed speech. This ‘inward’ search for an agent, with its multiple choices of self, Devil, or God, in turn inflects the continuing strangeness of the monastic search for an even less knowable Truth. That is, the confessional construction of the unknowable self returns us to the impossible search for the truth about the God who both exemplifies obedience and is to be known, desired, and obeyed. Here we recur briefly to clerical scholasticism. As intellectual historian John Willinsky points out, scholarship in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages displayed a lively encyclopaedic urge towards completeness in knowledge, the urge to assemble a full and organised presentation of human learning.59 The scholastic thinker optimistically sought completeness by both encyclopaedic expansiveness and mathematically precise division. Despite the difference between scholastic and desirous approaches, monasteries played their own role in this knowledge collection. As places where the laborious task of copying texts could best be performed, they ‘proved to be the perfect spot in which to produce, accumulate, and retain manuscripts’.60 This encyclopaedic urge displays not only the quiet selflessness of monastic labour, but the love of learning, even given the awareness that the God at the heart of the endeavour could never quite be known. Learning here thus proceeds less confidently than it does on the scholastic model; the monastic love of learning is another love of the impossible. The resemblance to self-renunciation is clear in Leclercq’s observation about the creator of the Benedictine rule: ‘in the life of Benedict we find in germ the two components of monastic culture: studies undertaken, and then, not precisely scorned, but renounced and

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transcended, for the sake of the kingdom of God’.61 In consequence, the Benedictine tradition was ‘to embrace the teaching of learned ignorance, to be nurtured by it and to transmit, recall, and keep it alive face to face with the cultural activity of the Church, as an inevitable paradox’.62 The entanglement of the two kinds of truth obligation is thus also an entanglement of demands for humiliating failure. Bernard explicitly links humility to the knowledge of truth: ‘Denique sicut finis legis Christus, sic perfectio humilitatis, cognition Veritatis. … Innotescit autem humilibus’, ‘Just as Christ is the fulfillment of the law, so the end result of humility is the knowledge of truth. For he makes himself known to the humble’ (‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 2.5).63 Bernard envisions pride as a negative of the Benedictine way of humility, and he views humility as ascent that can only be achieved by lowering oneself. Pranger notes that ‘the superstructure crowning the steps of humility’ for Bernard is ‘first and foremost … truth. “I am the way the truth and the life”, the Gospel of St. John says.’64 But the thought that one can know that truth runs into the same problem as thinking that one can be perfectly humble  or obedient: that proud thought undoes the ‘success’ of humility. The truth that humility strives to reach can only be approached through the constructed and renounced self. The truth of that self cannot be the same as the Truth itself, since that Truth is identified with Christ, and Christ is certainly not to be renounced. Christ, again, is an exemplar for the humble self, but also that which the self cannot attain, a guarantor of the failure by which humility succeeds. The practices of spirituality establish a renounced self, one fit to pursue truth philosophically. Neither pursuit can succeed. Bernard adds an extra complication. Though he agrees that truthknowing begins in self-knowing, for him it moves from there not directly to Christ-knowing but to the kind of fellow-feeling, the knowledge of others, that is essential to the monastic community: ‘Inquiriumus namque vertitem in nobis, in proximis, in sui natura’, ‘Truth himself teaches you that the nature of truth must first be sought in our neighbours before we seek it in itself’ (‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 3.6).65 The neighbour is to be loved; the self, renounced. But neither embrace nor renunciation is knowledge,

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even of the Truth that teaches one love and renunciation.66 In fact, love, hate, and other strong emotions such as fear all make our judgements even less reliable, says Bernard. In consequence, as Pranger writes, ‘In order to know, man must realize the utter unreliability of his own judgment as part of the general misery of human life.’67 This realisation, with the knowledge it permits, is the monk’s pursuit, the aim of his desire. Searching within, he finds himself so sinful that he renounces the self that he has found through obedience in both speaking and silence, stifling all words and even noises that are not ashamed, becoming ashamed of them too. Even in that renounced self, though, there lingers the remainder of an uncertain other – possibly a demon, but who can judge? The uncertainty sustains the search; the search demands a sustained desire that works against the possibility of its own fulfilment. ‘Knowledge obtained in such a manner’, writes Pranger, ‘makes one see oneself as the nihil one actually is. … Only then and there is Christ near, enabling man properly to judge himself.’68 This knowledge is impossible – to know oneself as nothing is to be absent as a possible knower – and this impossibility is masochistic ecstasy, knowing the absence or destruction of the self. So this is who can judge, after all – only Christ, one of the personae of the unknowable God – and to know oneself is to know oneself as nothing, so that one is no one, and not there to know. Nothing remains after the rejection of the self – save the self, rejecting. Shame can never go low enough as long as there remains a self to be ashamed of itself. Without that, there is nothing, seeking knowledge. As knowing expands from self to neighbour, so too does shame. Self-knowledge extends into a low opinion of humanity. In ‘utter self-alienation’, Bernard cites Psalm 116:11: ‘Everyone is a liar!’69 Truth itself told us to seek the truth in our neighbours, but all of them lie too. There is nowhere to be sure of finding the truth that started one on this path to unhappy ecstasis, wherein one stands beside oneself to judge oneself lacking. So where is Truth? Bernard has one more step, that of contemplation, in which the knowledge that the Son makes possible moves the mind towards the love of the Trinitarian God. The movement cannot reach its goal, of course – to say that one can grasp God, after all of that



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s­ elf-annihilation, would be at least peculiar, if not contradictory. So Christ, ‘the Word and Wisdom of the Father’, acts upon truth:

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potenter erigens, prudenter instruens, introrsum trahens, ac mirabiliter utens tanquam pro se vicaria, ipsam sibi judicem statuit, ita ut pro revenetia Verbi cui conjungitur, ispa suit accusatrix, testis, et judex, contra se Veritatis fungatur official. Ex qua prima conjunction Verbi et rationis, humilitas nascitur. [[He] lifted it by his power, instructed it by his wisdom, drew it within himself and employed it in a wonderful way on his behalf as a judge. It is truth’s task to judge. That is why, out of reverence for the Word to which it is united, human reason becomes its own accuser, witness, and judge (Prv 18:17). From this first union of the Word and reason is born humility. (‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 7.2)]70

With God’s help, the rational human knows that it cannot know what God is. Humans are so worthless that they need help to perceive their own worthlessness. The abbot can provide the initial assistance, then the monastic community pushes its members to know themselves among the nothingness of human sociality, but only God can really let anyone know his or her own nothingness, taking and turning the seekers back to themselves again, not remade so much as more deeply undone. With the assistance of wise divine love, the monks can know that they are worthless, the only proper judgement of themselves – a masochistic judgement that a worthless person is surely unworthy to make, and of which such persons might crave constant verbal reminders. The Word allows the monks to articulate this worthlessness – and the Word, salvific of humanity, also makes of that worthlessness something priceless. As Foucault’s alethurgy reminds his readers, bringing forth into words makes a kind of truth – a practical point embraced in consensual scenes of interrogation and shame even today.71 But for the monk, this knowledge can come only through the unknowable, through Christ as God. The monk is not even good enough to know, to grasp as certain, that he is worthless. He sinks more deeply into a pleasure that he cannot acknowledge. Thus it is that monastic knowing begins quite classically, with knowing the self, just as the Apollonian Oracle at Delphi

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recommended. But Christian complexity both commands and doubts that reflexive possibility, and so the self to be known can only turn inwards and come to itself through exteriorisation to others by a process of examination, verbalisation, and imperatives demanding speech, silence, and actions taken or constrained. There are prior constraints on that self as well; it cannot be known as desirable or good, despite the obviousness with which it is desired, the greed for its expression, and even its visibility in the monastic community. Benedict describes the twelfth and best level of monastic humility in his Rule: Duodecimus humilitatus gradus est si non solum corde monachus sed etiam ipso corpore humilitatem videntibus se semper indicut … aestimans iam se tremedo iudicio repraesentari aestimet, dicens sibi in corde semperillud quod publicanus ille evangelicus fixis in terram oculis dixit: Domine, non sum dignus, ego peccator, levare oculos meos ad caelos. Et item cum Propheta: Incurvatus sum et humiliates sum usquequaque. [The twelfth step of humility looks as follows. The monk presents a continuous display of humility for those who watch him not only in his heart but also through his body. … [H]e pictures himself as having to appear already before the frightful judgment, repeating all the time in his heart, looking down, the words of the publican in the Gospel: ‘Lord, I, a sinner, am not worthy to raise my eyes to heaven’, and, as the Prophet says: ‘I am continually bent and humiliated.’ (7.62–6)]72

The monk looks down because this is the only way up. ‘Humility is a virtue, so Benedict says, through which man debases himself in true knowledge’.73 The monastic path to knowledge not only proceeds by a paradox of ascent and descent; it also finds the self as nothing, finds others nothing, finds Truth itself beyond its knowledge. But the self, having found itself to be nothing, is not there to find the Truth that only this realisation allows. What, finally, does the debased monk find, in finding himself nothing? What is the truth of the Truth? Bernard reiterates the levels of ascent into humility: Quos ergo per humilitatem ad primum coelum Filius vocat, hos in secondo per charitatem Spiritus aggregate, ad tertium per



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contemplationem Pater exaltat. Primo humiliantur in veritate, et dicunt, in veritate tua humiliaste me. Secundo congaudent veritati, et psallunt, Ecce quam bonum, et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum! De charitate quippe scriptum est, Congaudet autem veritati. Tertio ad arcana Veritatis rapiuntur, et aiunt, ‘Secretum meum mihi, secretum meum mihi.’ [Those whom the Son has called to the first heaven by humility, the Spirit summoned to the second by love, the Father exalts to the third by contemplation. In the first they are humbled in truth and say, ‘In your truth you have humbled me’ (Ps 118,75). In the second they rejoice together in the truth and sing, ‘How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity’ (Ps 132,1). For we read that ‘love rejoices in truth’ (1 Cor 13,6). Third, they are carried away [rapiuntur, to carry or bear away, is ravishment too] to the secrets of truth and they cry, ‘My secret is mine, my secret is mine’ (Is 24,16). (‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 8.23)]74

The deciphering of the self that Foucault puts at the heart of Christianity ‘implies that there is something hidden in ourselves and that we are always in a self-illusion that hides the secret’.75 And the Truth, which the self renounces itself in order to know, is finally another secret – in the text, however carefully gathered and dissected; in the doctrine, however fervently attested; in the divinity that assists in humility within the contested self. The desire to know either kind of obligatory truth is sustained by the impossibility of its object, in a manner that blends frustration with self-destruction for a most satisfying dissatisfaction, for the triumph of failure. Most monastic frustrations, humiliations, and pains are far more evident than this one, which in its intellectual character seems rather austere not only as a version of pleasure but as a kind of pain as well. But monasticism is also an intellectual preoccupation, its alethurgic practices inseparable from the severity of its truth obligations. The truths permit the practices, give them an ontological grounding for their persistence in the pursuit of more intense experiences of inadequacy. And in its strange way, like ascetic (or masochistic) and obedient (or submissive) action, this unfulfillable truth-seeking resists the modes of power that form it: pastoral power demands full knowing and individualising of those in its community, and it demands that knowing as the price

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of the knowledge of God. The incompletion of self-knowing keeps the power that demands confession from its own completeness. The impossibility of obedience drives the demand for more demanding imperatives. And the God that lifts up the subject that confession produces likewise eludes any knowing, by the monk or the community or the abbot. The pleasure in sustaining this uncertainty, incompletion, and unknowing in tension with the double desires to know and to tell all is no less violent or masochistic for its quietness, no less perverse for its dogmatism, no less delightful for its pain.

Notes  1 This essay includes a number of fairly complicated claims. Rather than make the impossible attempt to spell out the arguments for each of them here, or provide lists of possible sources, I have taken the rather unattractive step of citing the earlier works in which I have made the supportive arguments for those claims. Those works also provide references to other source material. To begin with, claims of common ground among secular and religious BDSM pleasures and the role of paradox in creating intensity are both central to the arguments of counterpleasures (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). The role of the search for knowledge in the pleasures of obedience and humiliation (again both secular and religious) is discussed throughout Failing desire (New York: State University of New York Press, 2018). An earlier version of that argument appears in ‘Humiliated subjects’, in Pornotopias: image, apocalypse, desire, ed. Louis Armand, Jane Lewty, and Andrew Mitchell (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2008).   2 On such pleasures, see particularly the chapters ‘Asceticism: seducing the divine’, in counterpleasures, and ‘Uncovering: the failure to see’, in Failing desire.   3 Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 223–53 (p. 242).   4 Michel Foucault, On the government of the living: lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 81–2. This first kind of ‘confession’ of truth, Foucault writes here, ‘designates an act meant to reveal both a truth and the subject’s adherence to that

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truth … not merely to affirm what one believes but to affirm the fact of that belief; it is to make the act of affirmation an object of affirmation, and hence to authenticate it either for oneself or with regard to others’.   5 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 242.   6 Mark Jordan, Convulsing bodies: religion and resistance in Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 135.   7 Michel Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 7.   8 The notion of unveiling or unconcealing truth has its own history of violence, as ‘truth’ is often found within bodies. This is an important argument in Page duBois’s Torture and truth (New York: Routledge, 1991).   9 ‘[T]hat which we call knowledge (connaissance), that is to say the production of truth in the consciousness of individuals … is only one of the possible forms of alethurgy’ (Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 7). 10 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The genealogy of morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor, 1956), Second Essay, §6: ‘Punishment too has its festive features’. 11 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 242. 12 Jean Leclercq, The love of learning and the desire for God: a study of monastic culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 3. 13 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 72. 14 M. B. Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux and the shape of monastic thought (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 29. 15 ‘S. Bernardi Abbatis contra Quaedam Capitula Errorum Abelardi: Epistola CXC seu Tractatus Ad Innocentum II Pontificem’, in Sancti Bernardi: Opera omnia, vol 1, ed. D. Joannis Mabillon (Paris, 1839), pp. 1441–61 (pp. 1441–2); cited and translated in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 29. 16 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Epistola CXC’; cited and translated in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, pp. 29–30. Pranger here wryly notes that Bernard sprinkles his accusations with self-pity: ‘But in that genre his adversary excelled’. 17 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Epistola CXC’, 5.12, p. 1451; cited and translated in M. B. Pranger, ‘Religious indifference: on the nature of medieval Christianity’, in Religion: beyond a concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), pp. 514–23 (p. 521). 18 Pranger, ‘Religious indifference’, p. 521. 19 The connection of divinity and desire is not unique to monasticism, even within Christianity – that one approaches God through eros is

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an idea that appears at least as early as the commentaries on the Song of Songs from late ancient theologians such as Origen of Alexandria. Although the approach does not become mainstream in Christianity, neither does it ever disappear. For examples of contemporary work on the connection, see Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (eds), Toward a theology of eros: transfiguring passion at the limits of discipline (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 20 For more detail on this claim in ascetic practice, see ‘Asceticism: seducing the divine’, esp. p. 79, and ‘m-powerment’, esp. p. 112, both in counterpleasures. On subject-shattering, see counterpleasures, throughout. 21 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 5. 22 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 4. 23 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 30. Leclercq cites but does not quote Gregory the Great, Moralia, sive Expositio in Job, Patrologia Latina Series One, vols 75–6 (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1849–57), 32.1. The reference to piercing invokes both Christian scripture (John 19:37, itself invoking Zecharia 12:10), and the very influential anonymously penned fourteenth-century English text on mystical contemplation called The cloud of unknowing, ed. and introduced William Johnstone and Huston Smith (New York: Image, 1973), in which love is a ‘sharp’ and ‘longing’ dart that might pierce the dark cloud. At base, of course, is crucifixion imagery. 24 On piercing and the value of wounding in a Christian context, see my ‘Sacred hearts’, in Word made skin: Figuring language at the surface of flesh (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 25 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 30. Drawing on Gregory the Great, Moralia, 2.79. 26 These pleasures and the central paradox of aiming at failing are the subjects of Failing desire. 27 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 26. Cf. p. 31, where Pranger identifies ‘Bernard’s self-accusation as part of the monastic rite, and … his accusion of others as an extension of the monastic duty’. 28 Michel Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, Critical inquiry, 8.4 (Summer 1982): 777–95 (783). Though Foucault argues that this form of power is introduced to the West by Christianity, he argues too that it had already emerged, without some of the same technologies of subject making (notably confession), ‘in the East, … above all, in Hebrew society’. When Christianity develops in and then outside of this society, it gradually enhances the practices of both individualisation and care for the ‘flock’. See Michel Foucault, ‘Security, territory,

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and p ­ opulation’, in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, pp. 67–71 (p. 68). See also On the government of the living, p. 83. 29 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 2. I have discussed different aspects of this dynamic in greater detail in ‘Asceticism: seducing the divine’, in counterpleasures; ‘Unwilling: the failure of autonomy’, in Failing desire; and ‘Freedom in submission’, in Seducing Augustine: bodies, desires, confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 30 Leclerc, The love of learning, p. 6. 31 Michel Foucault, The hermeneutics of the subject: lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 15. 32 Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 81, citing Father T. De Vio, ‘De Confessione questiones’, in Opuscula (Paris: Regnault, 1530). 33 Jordan, Convulsing bodies, p. 137. 34 The rather elegant phrase ‘sadistic epistemology’ comes from a reading of Masha Raskolnikov’s chapter in this volume, where she gives a detailed history of its use. 35 Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 81. 36 Jordan, Convulsing bodies, p. 130. 37 Jordan, Convulsing bodies, p. 130. Jordan cites Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 2004), pp. 183, 187. 38 For elaboration of this point, see ‘Freedom in submission’, in Seducing Augustine; ‘Unwilling: the failure of autonomy’, in Failing desire; and ‘Consent, command, confession’, in Querying consent: beyond permission and refusal, ed. Jordana Greenblatt and Kesha Valens (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 39 Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 81: ‘Unconditional obedience, uninterrupted examination, and exhaustive confession form an ensemble with each element implying the other two; the verbal manifestation of the truth that hides in the depths of oneself appears as an indispensable component of the government of men by each other, as it was carried out in monastic – and especially Cenobitic – institutions beginning in the fourth century.’ 40 Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 81. 41 Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 84. 42 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 86. 43 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Tractatus de gradibus humilitatis et superbia’, in Sancti Bernardi: Opera omnia, ed. D. Joannis Mabillon (Paris: n.p., 1839), pp. 1281–322 (p. 1311). Cited in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 102 (ellipsis in Pranger). Translation from Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘On the steps of humility and pride’, in Bernard of Clairvaux: selected

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works, trans. G.  R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), in the section ‘The fourth step: boasting’, pp. 132–3. 44 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humilitatis’, p. 1311; ‘On the steps of humility and pride’, p. 132. 45 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 103. 46 Jordan, Convulsing bodies, p. 136. Citing Michel Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France (1979–1980) (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 2012), pp. 175, 222. 47 Michel Foucault, ‘Sexuality and solitude’, in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, pp. 175–84, (p. 182). 48 Foucault, On the government of the living, p. 84. 49 Foucault, ‘Sexuality and solitude’, p. 183. 50 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 247. 51 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 248. 52 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 248. 53 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 84. See also Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 249: ‘Throughout Christianity there is a correlation between disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and the renunciation of self’. For a more detailed account of the processes aiming at the shattered self, see counterpleasures, chapters 3–6. 54 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 285. 55 See Virginia Burrus, Saving shame: martyrs, saints, and other abject subjects (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 111: ‘One must want, at least a little, to be broken, to be exposed, or the confession is sterile: it makes no truth; worse still, it forces stillborn lies. One must also resist, at least a little, being overcome by this desire, or the confession, rendered glib by the promise of cheap grace, is equally fruitless.’ 56 Foucault, ‘Sexuality and solitude’, p. 178. See also Jordan, Convulsing bodies, p. 82. 57 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humilitatis’, p. 1287. Cited in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 111; from Bernard, ‘Humility and pride’, p. 107. 58 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, pp. 117–18. Citing (not quoting) Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Humility and Pride’, 9.24, pp. 120–1. 59 John Willinsky, ‘Learning in the early Middle Ages’, Chapter 3 in The intellectual properties of learning: a prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 43–72. 60 Willinsky, Intellectual properties, p. 23. 61 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 12. Leclercq notes by several further examples that this pattern is not unusual in the lives of early monks.

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62 Leclercq, The love of learning, p. 12. 63 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humilitatis’, p. 1285. Cited in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 109; from ‘Humility and pride’, p. 105. Bernard, in turn, refers to Romans 10:4: ‘Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes’ (NIV). 64 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 109. The Biblical reference is to John 14:6. 65 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humilitatis’, p. 1285. Cited in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, 110; from ‘Humility and pride’, p. 106. 66 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humilitatis’, 4.14, p. 1292: ‘Amor vero, sicut nec odium, Veritatis judicium nescit’; ‘On the steps of humility and pride’, p. 112: ‘Neither love nor hatred can give a judgement of truth’. 67 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 112. 68 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 112. 69 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 113. 70 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humilitatis’, p. 1297. Cited in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 114, from ‘Humility and pride’, p. 117. Proverb 18:17 reads: ‘In a lawsuit the first to speak seems right, until someone comes forward and cross-examines’ (NIV). 71 See Failing desire, p. 53. 72 Benedict of Nursia, S. Benedicti Regula, www.intratext.com/IXT/ LAT0011/_P8.HTM (accessed 21 December 2021). Cited and translated in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 86. 73 Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, p. 95, citing Benedictine Rule, ch. 7. 74 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De gradibus humlitatis’, pp. 1299–300. Cited in Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux, pp. 115–16, from ‘Humility and pride’, pp. 118–20. 75 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, p. 247.

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5 The pains of being pure at heart: sadomasochism in Richard of St Victor’s On the four degrees of violent love Christopher Michael Roman In an interview in 1982, Michel Foucault comments that ‘S&M is … this mixture of rules and openness [that] has the effect of intensifying sexual relations by introducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension, and a perpetual uncertainty which the simple consummation of the act lacks’.1 Foucault’s emphasis on rules and openness that leaves S/M practitioners suspended, leads to a process of desire and love beyond that of heteronormative constructs. His brief rubric opens up Richard of St Victor’s On the four degrees of violent love (1170), a Victorine meditation on the levels of love, which also outlines a programme of disciplinary love that leaves the beloved both focused on and rapt by the love of God. Richard focuses on the pain and discipline of the soul in order to unleash a love hitherto unknown to the devotee. This chapter explores Richard’s sadomasochistic circuit with the Divine, bent to create a love out of domination, bondage, submission, and obedience. Richard explores the pleasure of divine domination and the pains of submission that both echoes modern sadomasochistic practice, but also suggests a very different kind of S/M, one that challenges the soul to go beyond its capabilities and explore a new kind of love born out of a disciplinary intensity that is available to those lovers of the Divine willing to undergo the process. God becomes the great discipliner and the devotee must trust and submit in order to experience greater love and transcendence. In this way, my reading of Richard’s On the four degrees of violent love explores his text as an S/M manual for the soul. Richard sets down the rules of submission while withholding determinacy, exploring

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the relationship between lover and God and servant and Master within new spiritual-erotic pathways. Why project contemporary frameworks of sex, such as S/M, into the Middle Ages, especially a religious treatise on God’s love? One answer to this question has to do with thinking about sexual identity historically. Medieval scholarship has pointed out that it is difficult to export contemporary sexual identities onto medieval subjects who may not have thought of themselves as LGBTQ+ or hetero. These sexual identities are helpful in touching the past but do not allow us to fully explore the multidimensional sexual positionality of the medieval period.2 For example, much work has been done on medieval virgins as a particular religious identity having to do with purity and a rejection of penis-in-vagina sex for an erotically charged relationship with God.3 It is also clear that transgender people, cross-dressers, and same-sex couples existed. But by exporting our modern categories of sexual identity, we lose out on a fuller range of sexual identities that existed in the Middle Ages (and it precludes us from exploring the very queerness that our contemporary culture absorbs in the normative). Rather than a focus on fixed identities, S/M, with its rituals of pain and excess, submission and dominance, as well as the unlocking of a kind of sex that does not require insertion or, even, orgasm, is queer in its experimentation. Its opening of horizons allows us, critically, to explore the ways in which religious submission and the shattering of the self is inimical to a religious desire that is constituted by  affectivity, mysticism, and scholasticism as Richard’s tract traces. On the four degrees of violent love, as I will discuss in more detail below, is ultimately about desire and pleasure in the unity of God’s love. The question is how do we account for this kind of desire and pleasure in a historical text removed from our own frameworks of love and desire, and, at the same time, explore these contours that may seem similar but in a different context. S/M is ultimately about pleasure. As Michel Foucault commented in another 1982 interview, ‘they [practitioners of SM] are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body, through the eroticisation of the body. I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise’.4 This creative enterprise allows for play, identity change, role reversal, pain,

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non-insertive (de)sexualised pleasure, as well as the ‘eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations’.5 Pain-during-sex stretches back to the ancient world where it is reported that an example of foreplay involved ‘slapping a partner with a sandal’.6 Sadomasochistic practices have echoes in a number of features of the Middle Ages. For example, images of Christ in pain became a centrepiece of lay practice as Christianity moved from depictions of Christ the King exemplified in the Anglo-Saxon poem The dream of the rood, in which Christ places himself on the cross, towards a contemplative practice centring on the passion and humanity of Christ. In the later Middle Ages, this image of Christ as personable, human, and suffering can be seen in works such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations in which Julian spends time observing the blood running down Christ’s face, or The Book of Margery Kempe, a text in which Kempe seeks Christ’s readily available advice and where a very handsome Christ appears seated on the foot of her bed to comfort her.7 In the realm of courtly love, the lover and beloved create a strategic game out of power and love. Sex may (or may not) be the end result; the point is the game. We also see masochistic imagery when we take into account the larger hagiographical corpus. Robert Mills has done considerable work examining hagiography and male martyrdom as a site of pain, and a ‘queer optic’ which ‘opened up spaces for an alternative conception of masculinity to the one imparted by hegemonic discourse: a vision of masochistic passivity and objectification that fall outside the normative phallic pale’.8 While Mills works with a masochism that ultimately ends in the death of the masochist, my work here explores S/M as a site of pleasure in which one loses identity in fulfilling the pleasure created in the space of S/M. Much work has been done on masochism in the Middle Ages; however, this essay addresses the totality of the sadomasochistic circuit evident in Richard’s treatise. In fact, Richard of St Victor creates an S/M space, four degrees of love, in which the contemplative experiences desire and want, pain and pleasure, while alive; in other contemplative works, one can only experience the ultimate love of God after death. S/M practice, then, allows us to reconfigure the sites of pleasure in this medieval work to account for Richard’s ultimate degree of a



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love that is insatiable, but one that is created in a space of love, play, and strategic power relations. Foucault’s account of religious parresia in his 1982–83 lectures borrows first from Plutarch and provides us a framework to examine truth-games that are revealed in the context of S/M practice: And then this notion is also found in the field of religious experience and the religious theme where there is a very strange and interesting change, a slippage, almost a reversal of the poles of this notion of parresia. To start with we find parresia meaning that the master is obliged to tell the disciple all the truth that is necessary, and then we find it again with the idea that it is possible for the disciple to tell the master everything about himself. That is to say, we pass from a meaning of the notion in which parresia refers to the master’s obligation to tell the disciple what is true, to a meaning which refers to the disciple’s obligation to tell the master the truth of himself.9

The rhetoric of Master and disciple will find its way into the discourse of S/M, as well. The ritual of S/M requires a truth-telling, one which allows the Master to know the degrees of pain and the degree of submission that the masochist can endure – even wants, and perhaps does not know they want. It is only in this religious and sadomasochistic space of parresia that the identity games can begin to change, that the pleasure can be discovered. There is a pleasure in truth-games, in being able to say what feels good, what allows one to let go, dissolving the self. Foucault comments on the technique of power that is ‘pastoral’ power: one in which ‘the tie with the shepherd is an individual one’.10 Pastoral power values obedience as a virtue; within this technique of power it is a ‘permanent state’ of submission.11 In order to derive from submission and learn about the individual, pastoral power uses self-examination and the guidance of conscience. These, in tandem, create a submissive subject in which ‘mortification is a kind of relation from oneself to oneself’.12 This self-knowledge is a site of truth, as well as a stage in which the Christian is always becoming, learning of themselves in order to understand the relationship between the soul and the Divine (the Master). As has become clear through this journey of Foucault’s own views on S/M and pastoral power, issues surrounding the body,

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power, pleasure, and truth are shared in these discourses. In order for the body to properly submit, the truth of the self must be revealed. In order for the Master to know the masochist, the truth of the masochist must be revealed. In order for the ritual of S/M, as well as the game of self-knowledge, to produce truth, to produce a site of pleasure, to experiment with the body and the identity of both Master and submissive, the technique of power must be exercised on the willing. Thus, Foucault’s discussions of S/M and religion bring us to the framework of contemporary S/M discourse. Romana Byrne writes that S/M can be called an aesthetic sexuality. With its enlacement of algolagnia (love of pain) and aesthetics, S/M introduces us to an ars erotica in which ‘sexual pleasure is not considered in terms of forbidden or permitted experience and knowledge but is valued and assessed according to its quality and intensity’.13 In this way, S/M resists an ‘essentialized ontology of sexuality’.14 Byrne’s observation is key to transporting S/M frameworks transhistorically; rejecting an essentialised anchor, one can see the ways in which S/M manifests itself locally and contingently, but retains something of its contours and shapes. S/M endorses a non-normative embodiment. For a basic definition of S/M, we can turn to Steven Seidman’s The social construction of sexuality: Sadomasochism (S/M) involves the use of power or roles of dominance and submission for the purpose of sexual arousal. Sexual pleasure is based on exercising (sadism) or submitting to (masochism) power. S/M may involve physical acts (for example, bondage, slapping, whipping) and verbal acts (for example, orders, commands, submissive statements).15

Even in this concise definition one must note that sex is intertwined with power. In terms of what happens within this power game, there is no prescriptive or essentialised formula. As David M. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott write, ‘BDSM is the eroticization of power. Power is a dynamic that people often try to ignore or dismiss, but its presence is undeniable in sexuality and society. … Using power, manipulating power, playing with power, identifying the presence of power is not something to be afraid of’.16 These power dynamics

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play out in different ways, and perhaps this is what makes S/M so portable, so applicable and useful as we look through our queer lens at the Victorine, Richard of St Victor. Ummni Khan writes that ‘practitioners tell us that s/m rests on appropriating social hierarchies, restaging power imbalances, and/ or re-signifying pain within a consensual context. As such, s/m desires are based on the drive to retell a particular story’.17 One of the stories is the shattering of the self, or, at the least, an erasing of boundaries of the body allowing non-normative relations between subject and object. It is important to note that this shattering of self parallels the concept of roles and identities at play in S/M practice. For example, one might be a ‘Sir’ (male or female may identify as such) who is in charge or control of the activity. ‘Discipline’ and ‘dominance’ involve the power dynamics at play; discipline involves the rules that the submissive (the person who gives over control in the power relationship) must follow, while dominance may be the role the Sir takes on within a specific period of time or for the life of the relationship. As Ortmann and Sprott note, ‘identities’ and ‘roles’ are different. An identity is a set of characteristics that the Dominant or submissive subscribes to; it can be ‘fixed’18 or ‘fluid’ (gay, straight, bi, pan, trans, queer). A role is the more impermanent aspect of the S/M relationship; one might be a dominant Daddy one night, and a submissive pup the next. When one is playing within an S/M drama, one might become a principal or student, or a prison warden or prisoner. Ortmann and Sprott encapsulate this fluid exchange between roles and identities in this example: a leatherboy may identify as a submissive and that identity may be one that he carries throughout his leather journey. However, in the course of a corporal punishment scene, he may find himself in the role of miscreant schoolboy or disciplined football jock, a role that he will relinquish at the end of a scene though his identity as a submissive and leatherboy remains consistently a part of his identity construct.19

This relationship between one’s identity and role reflects the ways in which an S/M scene can shatter the identity that one holds elsewhere in life. This uncertainty and play is another way to describe ‘abjection’. Khan uses the term abjection to capture the uncertainty in S/M practice:

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‘abject’, an unstable terrain between subject and object where the borders around identities and categories are most susceptible to leakage, permeability, and violation … Abjection instills anxiety about the collapse of categories, order, and meaning but it is also associated with jouissance – an enjoyment that derives from the shattering of a unified self. … Abjection is thus a site of defiant thrill as well as uncertainty, oppression, and harm.20

Abjection highlights the shattering and uncertainty of S/M practice, as well as the contemplative’s practice (as we will see). The above discussion of S/M practice as it works with abjection, a shattering of the self, and shifting identities found within truth-games, finds its medieval realisation in the purposeful practice of medieval writers who are classified under the umbrella term ‘mystics’. As Marla Carson writes, mystics empty themselves through pain and prepare the way for a new birth. … The medieval mystic understood herself to transcend the carnal by being raptured away to another, higher realm. Her vision was both corporeal and spiritual, a merging with God.21

This joining of material and spiritual into a new configuration is a type of abjection, a shattering of the self. In the case of S/M, the shattering of the self merges the submissive and the Dominant within the space of S/M itself. French philosopher Michel de Certeau, heavily influenced by the work of Foucault, notes that early modern mysticism has twin impulses: ‘a withdrawal (ecstatic) brought about by the seduction of the Other, and a virtuosity (technical) in making words confess what they are unable to say’.22 In the space of S/M, spirit and matter touch, and there is a new presence of being in their merging. The medieval mystic and practitioner of S/M also touch through history as they shatter their selves in order to make something both deeply carnal and transcendent.23 One of the key questions we can ask in witnessing an S/M scene is, what is produced in this particular scene? Margot Weiss writes that, by dramatizing power in often spectacular ways, effective SM connects individuals with social and national imaginaries, and private fantasies with culturally legible social hierarchies. In so doing, it produces new sexualities, embodiments, and subjectivities, and it often reproduces not only the economic, cultural, and social regimes that



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are from and give form to SM performance, but also the unresolved contradictions and complexities within these regimes.24

Weiss calls our attention both to the ways in which S/M creates a space for the novel and the new, but also to how it relies on cultural power dynamics either to subvert or reinforce. Thus, when S/M scenes play out gender, race, class, or age dynamics (often called culture trauma play), the scenes rely on institutional structures (family dynamics, race relations, as well as other forms of exploitation) in order to create something new or, on the contrary, problematically reinforce systemic forces already at work in the world. We can turn to the medieval mystics’ own social forces for the ways that they use existent power dynamics in order to produce something productive in terms of identity, a new form of love, or novel ways to express desire and need. Richard’s own historical context speaks to the myriad expressions of divine love in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Inspired by the Bible book the Song of Songs, and filtered through PseudoDionysus’s apophatic mysticism and Bernard of Clairvaux’s somatic metaphors of divine love in his Sermons on the song of songs, the concept of rapture, in which one becomes ‘seized’ by the Divine, becomes a part of many communities of women mystics and Beguines who write erotically charged treatises of their experiences and visions. Dyan Elliott points out that ‘in a medieval context, this term [raptus] was used to denote both the trance-like state of abstraction induced by proximity to the Godhead and the crime of rape. The evolution of medieval mystical discourse eventually provides a bridge between these two extremes, anticipating the erotic hybrid of modern parlance’.25 Richard contributes to this ‘bridge’, as his work, though not romantic by any definition of the time, does intertwine love and a physical seizing in his degrees of love. Richard’s experience of love bridges the convenient but imprecise divide between an affective (kataphatic) and feminine mystical experience and an intellectual, antivisionary (apophatic), and masculine one – a tradition modern scholars have inherited from the medieval French theologian Jean Gerson (d.1429).26 Love is not romantic in Richard’s work, but it is embodied. This embodiment is not necessarily gendered, though the love we see throughout the

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text is written on a body. Ola Sigurdson, writing on the kinds of love that Christian theology wrestles with, comments that ‘love, whatever we mean by it, is more than just a feeling as it, in fact, concerns how we perceive of our “attitude”, or relation towards God, our fellow human beings, and ourselves’.27 For Richard, love is an all-encompassing emotion aimed at a divine other who, in turn, demands submission in order to harness the body’s potentiality to experience love in new and intense vectors. Richard of St Victor’s On the four degrees of violent love discusses the fourfold path to contemplative union with God. There are scant details regarding Richard’s life. It is thought he came from Scotland or northern England, and entered the abbey of St Victor somewhere between 1145 and 1150. While in the abbey, Richard became sub-prior in 1159 and prior in 1162, a position he held until he died in 1173.28 St Victor itself was a centre of culture and learning by the time Richard arrived. As Dale Coulter writes, ‘when Richard entered St. Victor in the second half of the 1140s, he came to a place and an order at the centre of the Gregorian reforms in Paris’.29 By the time the dust had settled, St Victor was known for its ideals, ‘the beauty of the moral life and its relationship to true philosophy’.30 Besides Richard, St Victor can also claim a number of other influential theologians: Hugh, Adam, Achard, and Godfrey all contributed significant treatises on love, exegetical tracts, and theological exercises. As Hugh Feiss writes, ‘the Victorines do not speak of theology as an academic study or profession. They more often speak of doctrina, teaching as activity and content, which was an element in a vital progression from faith in hope and love to eternal life with the Triune God’.31 It is difficult to date Richard’s works and it is unclear for whom he was writing them.32 Scholars agree that On the four degrees is a later work along with On the trinity, perhaps Richard’s most influential work.33 Nico den Bok summarises Richard’s theology thus: Richard’s oeuvre, then, has two poles, the study of God and of man, with a special interest in their – asymmetric, two-sided and dynamic – relation. This relation can be called personal in many respects; for instance all spiritual and mental powers are involved in reaching out for the other.34

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As we will see in On the four degrees, Richard explores this asymmetric relationship within the bounds of pain, binding, wanting – an erotic space in which God commands submission in order to explore higher and higher degrees of intense love. Richard of St Victor’s exploration of love is experiential in nature. Hugo Feiss comments, ‘experiential knowledge is possible at every level of cognition, but what is most important for him is what one can learn through the experience of one’s own inner life and efforts’.35 On the four degrees, dated to 1170, outlines four degrees of love, each increasing in intensity. Richard’s four degrees suggest a transhistorical model of S/M that helps us set up a conversation on love and the way it is represented in a religious context. But before turning to think through this text with S/M and its practices, I want to proceed with a discussion of the four degrees themselves. Richard cycles through a number of permutations of each level of love. The first level of love (amor vulnerans) he initially calls a wounding (276).36 In this level, the heart is pierced with love resulting in a ‘fiery sting’ (276). This level of love is also impermanent. The contemplative may go about their business but return to this level of love where they may ‘boil and pant, groaning deeply and drawing long, deep breaths’ (277). Richard highlights the physical nature of this level of love, which can be overcome. One can resist this love, but Richard suggests one should submit. Richard continues his discussion later in the treatise when he calls this love ‘unconquerable’ (284). The soul ‘thirsts’ for God (287), and also in this level, ‘God enters the mind, and the mind retreats into itself’ (287). This is a foundational stage in the process of loving God, full of phenomenological expression. The senses of ‘being stung’, of ‘thirst’, of ‘entering’ are ways in which the body is being primed for the sensation of love to become more permanent once the contemplative gives themselves over completely to God’s love. When the mind is ‘intoxicated, and … provoked to dare all the more’ (289), the contemplative has begun a journey of love in which God will become their sole point of focus. The second degree of love (amor ligans) binds. In this level, which Richard later calls ‘inseparable’ (284), the contemplative makes the ‘fiery sting’, the sense of deep passion and longing that exists in the

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first degree, into a constant. This degree focuses on the mind, as Richard’s metaphors and discussion revolve around the concept of not forgetting, keeping the idea of love constantly in the forefront of the contemplative’s thoughts. Binding here means that ‘sleeping, a man dreams of it, awake, he considers it anew every hour’ (277). There is no break, there is no escape, there is no shut-off valve to this degree of love. In order to move to the third degree, Richard posits, thinking about or meditating on love can never stop, and thus, once the mind has been shaped to want this single thing, the body will be also. Richard remarks that even in this degree of love, people can go about their daily lives and act, but their thoughts will always be on fulfilling this love. After dealing with the mind and heart of the contemplative, Richard proceeds to the third degree of love, which he calls ‘singular’. Singular love (amor languens) leaves the contemplative completely focused on the One. Harkening back to the previous degrees of love in which all thought is turned to understanding, here in the third degree love exists ‘when the mind can know nothing but its desire’ (282). A hallmark of much of medieval contemplative p ­ ractice is knowing the self. In this third degree, the mind is so focused on the One and its love that all it understands is the desire to have that love fulfilled. In this degree, the contemplative understands the matter of desire. Here they begin to understand how to fulfil that desire, but Richard wants the contemplative to take this time to contemplate desire for God. In this singular degree, the outside world ceases to matter, as love is the only thing the contemplative wants. Richard indicates that in this degree love occurs with the entire soul (284). In the first degree, the heart was involved, in the second degree the entire heart began to love, and now in this degree the entire soul has given itself to love. These increments of love indicate the ways in which the contemplative slowly gives themselves over to God. We can also see the incremental changes when Richard plays with the concept of thirst. In the first degree, as was discussed, the contemplative thirsts for God, in the second the play on prepositions moves the contemplative to thirst towards God (287). In the third degree, the soul thirsts ‘into’ God. The singular degree that characterises ‘into’ is key here, as the contemplative has given over their desire into the God-object. One can imagine a physical manifestation of thirst, like

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a suspension bridge, delicate, perched above the water, connecting the two landmasses that are God and the contemplative. Richard finishes his word play with the fourth degree, as the contemplative ‘thirsts in accordance with God’ (287). The fourth and highest degree of love (amor deficiens) is called ‘insatiable’, indicating the state of ever-loving in which the contemplative immerses themselves. The fourth degree makes itself present when ‘nothing at all can satisfy the desire of the boiling mind any longer’ (280). Therefore, this state is insatiable and leaves the contemplative permanently thirsty no matter how much love they drink. This may sound like a horrible state to be in: it is characterised by a constant sense of dissatisfaction, unquenchability, wanting, but Richard values this positively. The fourth degree leaves one wanting more and more love, overflowing the boundaries of want into a perpetual state of being filled with love, and wanting to be filled more, more than the contemplative can even take. This fourth degree of love is intense in its sense of being; if the third degree of love created a bridge that joined two landmasses and in that joining made them one, this degree has made those landmasses teem with love, creating a constant exchange and overabundance of life. Thus, the landmasses become indistinguishable. As Richard writes: When it is completely surrounded by that fire of divine love, the mind is penetrated deeply, it is inflamed wholly, it casts itself off thoroughly, it dresses itself in a sort of god-like feeling, and, conformed entirely to the beauty it has beheld, it passes into a different glory. (292)

Once the contemplative has taken on this insatiable desire, they no longer are a unique self. They have given themselves over to desire itself, which is love. As a way into the S/M of On the four degrees, the critique of heteronormativity, the very queerness of the text, needs to be addressed as well. It is important to note that Richard’s four degrees of love exist in two manifestations. One is that each degree leads to the other as the contemplative gives themselves over to unity with God until their entire being is subsumed by an insatiable desire that is love – there is no difference between wanting and love itself. For Richard, this overflowing and unceasing love is attainable on earth,

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as is the very pinnacle of God’s love. However, the second manifestation of the four degrees is the way that this love is produced in human relationships. As the four degrees of love proceed, they get worse in human relationships. Richard differentiates the four degrees of love (‘amor’) found in union with God from the love (‘dilectiones’) found in human relationships. He writes, ‘of course among these [degrees of love] are the feelings of kindness, of friendship, of marriage and familial relationships, of fraternity’ (276). He is quick to separate out normative constructions of love in order to proceed towards a love that is unique to the experience of the Divine. By, in effect, queering love, Richard is able to explore ways in which love is experienced non-normatively. If, as was discussed above, the fourth degree of love places the contemplative in a permanent state of insatiability, one can see that familial or fraternal love clearly has limits. However, this is not the only place where Richard discusses the shortcomings of heteronormative love. Richard’s critique begins with conceding that the first degree of love, as it exists in a marital context, is good: ‘in the marriage bed that degree of love (“amore”) that is accustomed to being master over all other feelings can be good’ (283). However, this is the only love in the schema that is good for human relationships; the rest of the degrees cause problems. The second degree, for example, does not allow for the lover to consider anything else: ‘this desire often steals both care for those things that should be provided and provision of those things that should be put in order’ (283). The third degree is both bad and bitter: ‘it is not always possible to enjoy at will what one wishes, and one cannot draw consolation from any other thing’ (283). Finally, the fourth degree is the most destructive of all: ‘what can be found that is worse than what not only disfigures the soul but also makes it miserable? What is more miserable than always being wearied by desire for things, the enjoyment of which can never satisfy you?’ (283). As Richard outlines, the problem with the four degrees of love is that, ultimately, they cannot fit the normative structure of marital love. The feedback loop that is the love one would find in human relationships, one which is (theoretically) reciprocal and fulfilled (by penis-in-vagina sex, for example), is always short-circuited in

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the four degrees that bring the contemplative to God. In the nonhuman relationship, the four degrees of love ultimately end in a state of unfulfilled desire; the point of that love is to never be satiated. And that longing is always the residual feeling of experiencing the Divine (and wanting to do so again). For Richard, then, there are two paths regarding the four degrees of love. On one, the contemplative rises to a higher and higher intensity of love and desire; on the other, the human relationship ends with ‘tempers’ flaring; where lovers ‘engage in noisy quarrels, and when genuine causes of enmity are not at hand, they devise false and utterly implausible ones’ (281). The four degrees of love are destructive to human relationships when they manifest themselves in such a context. In this way, one can see the way desire is queered here. Considering courtly love (as in Cappelanus) in a larger sense, one was not to consummate the love of the Lady; her favour was the satisfaction. God does not provide such an outcome in the four degrees of love, as keeping the contemplative desiring, and thus heightening the desire without consummation, is a hallmark of the schema that Richard frames. The desiring self/body is the locus of S/M practice. Michel de Certeau writes that the body is the central question of mystical discourse: ‘what is the body? Mystic discourse is obsessed by this question. What it focuses on is precisely the question of the body. It haunts the suburbs of the body, and if it enters it is in the manner of the Hebrews who once marched around Jericho with their trumpets until the city opened of its own accord’.37 This interest in the body, and its relation to God concern Richard, as well. How does the body fit with the love ritual that is played out in On the four degrees, a love ritual that requires the contemplative to lose the self, to gain a role and lose an identity, in the face of God’s dominance? The answer has to do with the way that love wounds the body. There is a ritual to Richard’s technique; on is required to place oneself before God to receive painful love, a love that is ultimately beyond any love experienced before. God is the Dominant, the contemplative is the submissive, and On the four degrees is the S/M handbook that must be followed in order for the contemplative and God to discover the techniques of love. As Richard comments, ‘beyond all of these degrees of love (“dilectionis”) is that burning and seething love (“amor”), which penetrates the heart

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and e­nkindles emotion, piercing through the soul itself to the very marrow of the bones, so that the soul may say, “I have been wounded by love”’ (275). The wound of love is the mark that is left when the ritual is over (if it ever is), a tattoo of love. Richard points to the ways in which love acts: ‘Love wounds, love binds, love makes one languish, love leads to weakness’ (275). As Bernard McGinn writes, ‘caritas cannot be the paradigm of all love unless its violence and insanity surpass the most extreme forms of human love-madness’.38 This litany of love’s actions parallels the ritual of S/M laid out in this text. Wounding, binding, languishing, weakness – by the end of the session, the contemplative is spent, wanting more, never letting go of desire, of the kind of love discovered in dominance and submission. As Elaine Scarry has written, pain is inexpressible in language.39 Although Scarry’s discussion is situated in the context of torture, critics have taken up her work to discuss the intersection of pain and pleasure in S/M. It should be stated that not all S/M practice involves pain, but for many it is central to the appeal of S/M. Thus, critics such as Darren Langdridge have indicated the ways in which pain dissolves the body and language: Pain … inevitably involves the destruction of language, our primary source of objectification and self-extension. … in SM pain play, the tendency of pain to destroy speech is enacted in obvious and exaggerated form. Through control of power – consensually agreed in SM – the top can control the slow and steady destruction of language, turning speech and non-linguistic verbalizations on and off at will.40

Pain provides a space in which bodily horizons are ‘fused’, what Langdridge calls ‘a fleshly intertwining across a divide of otherness’.41 Richard begins this ‘fleshly intertwining’ when he describes the first degree of love: a wounding love. Wounding love is the kind of love the contemplative/submissive first experiences. Before binding themselves, before exploring the full panoply of desire, the submissive is wounded, pierced by love. In piercing the contemplative, God creates a space for love to take root, to grow, to scar – the contemplative bears the brand of Dominant God. This level of love ‘can be avoided, but not overcome’ (278). For Richard, this level of love manifests itself

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physically: ‘ablaze with desire; he seethes with feeling. He boils and pants, groaning deeply and drawing long, deep breaths’ (277). When one sees someone whose heart has been pierced in this way, one may think they are ill. However, with this level of love, Richard indicates that though one may be distracted by the outside world, ‘the boiling fire returns more intensely, and it enkindles the already shattered mind more sharply and burns it more vehemently’ (277). Thus, this love increases in intensity, as it prepares the submissive for the next degree of love. To reinforce the idea that the first degree of love is a physical manifestation, Richard’s discussion of this degree is rife with rich, metaphoric language. For example, to indicate how this love is unquenchable, he quotes Song of Songs 8:7: ‘many waters cannot extinguish love, nor will the rivers flood over it’ (284).42 He also describes how this degree ‘smashes and draines bodily strength, until it finally subjugates the soul to itself and prostrates it’ (277). This physical beating that the body takes here, tenderises it, prepares it, so that it opens itself to a new kind of desire and love. What kind of love does God express in their dominance? First, God’s love is connected with the ‘chains of love’, which Richard indicates are the ‘benefits of God, blessings of nature, grace, and glory’ (276). These chains of love are an entangling love – Richard indicates that the original chains of love were broken by Adam; however, God refuses to lessen their grip: ‘with strong hands … he has bound us more tightly to himself and entangled us more completely’ (276). Freedom is ‘wicked’ (276), as the chains of love are symptomatic of the love that God expresses. To be unbound, to be without chains, indicates that one is not on the path of overwhelming love. Richard writes that he cannot escape these chains (unless Sir says so), but the contemplative would never wish to be unbound from chains as they express redemption within captivity. Richard writes that ‘if the strength of love (“amoris”) is master of everything, if the magnitude of love (“amoris”) swallows up everything, in what way, I ask, can it extend itself further?’ (280). Love is the Master of everything; it is this dominance that the contemplative must face. To assert one’s will is freeing; the goal is to be bound with God’s love. These chains of love provide the contemplative/ submissive a sign of God’s love. Thus, in Richard’s S/M ‘schema’,

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the chains of love are a freedom, one that allows the contemplative to feel a love that is unavailable in traditional structures of love. God’s love does extend further, as the third degree of love brings the contemplative closer to understanding desire. The third degree of love breaks down the barriers of the self, allowing the submissive to lose boundaries of self within God’s dominance. Richard writes, ‘they who reach this third degree of love (“amoris”) no longer do anything at all to their own decision. Rather, they commit all things to God’s managing’ (293). God, then, manages the body, soul, and will of the submissive: the soul ‘in this state easily adapt[s] itself to every wish of the divine will, nay, rather it adapts itself with spontaneous desire to each of God’s decisions and forms its every wish in accordance with the measure of divine benevolence’ (293). In this degree, the soul has become the ideal submissive, one in the circuit of power with the dominant. God has so trained the submissive in the bounds of love that the submissive acts with God’s desire. As Richard writes, the submissive thirsts ‘into’ (287) God in this degree. The ‘into’ is key in that the soul has become one with God’s dominance in this power feedback loop; in other words, the submissive’s thirst, a kind of desire, has become one with God’s own desire, acting and reacting accordingly with God’s love. The submissive’s desire is God’s desire. The submissive’s desire is subsumed within humility in the fourth degree of love. It is in the fourth degree that the contemplative actually becomes submissive. Here, as Richard writes, the submissive ‘is conformed to the humility of Christ’ (296). God’s dominant love in the fourth degree makes the submissive Christ-like: ‘everyone who wishes to touch the highest degree of consummated love ought to conform himself to this pattern of the humility of Christ’ (294). In humility, one finds there is no greater love. It is in this degree that the submissive desires to give back; it is insatiable love: ‘What might I render to the Lord for that he has rendered to me?’, the contemplative cries out (284). If in the other three degrees of love the submissive is being trained to be wounded, bound, thirsty, humbled, desiring, in the fourth degree of love, when the submissive has ultimately submitted, they find within the submission that there is nothing to satiate desire. This degree of love – as they all have been

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ever increasing in intensity – proves itself to be so intense that the desire that is expressed within it is unfathomable. One can imagine it is a desire that never wants to be unwounded or unbound. Thus, this fourth degree of love reveals the submissive’s everbecoming body. In other words, during the S/M process, the submissive self and body are never stable entities. They are also becoming. If S/M is a process, one which trains the submissive to give themselves over to desire, to a love that is only expressible within the realm of S/M, then Richard’s four degrees of love reveal a submissive who wants never to return to normative desire and love. It is a touch of heaven on earth.43 The fourth degree ‘leads to weakness and makes a man despair of a remedy … now he can do nothing more, nor should be hope for anyone else to do anything for him’ (281). With the submission of the self’s will, the submissive has no will but the one expressed by God’s dominant desire. The fourth degree of ‘violent love exists when nothing at all can satisfy the desire of the boiling mind any longer’ (280). Richard’s configuration of this level of violent love is unique from the other three because it exists in a holding pattern, one in which the submissive can only experience it as unsatisfying. It is a perpetual tease. It is the soft caress of the Master’s whip on hot skin where the submissive is waiting for the subsequent lash. When will the whip strike? It is the blindfold, and not knowing if it will come off. It is the cage, and not knowing if it will be unlocked. It is being cuffed to the saltire (the St Andrew’s cross) and not knowing what is coming next – it is hot wax? a lash? being left for hours? The satisfaction of these moments is not coming, and it is there in the waiting, the delicious anxiety of the moment, that the fourth degree of love is found. God will not bring down the whip, for in that moment, the power circulation between Dominant and submissive reveals the boiling, uncontrollable, unsatiable fourth degree of love. Ola Sigurdson concludes, ‘the restlessness or hunger of the human heart is a divine gift, and if difference is the motor, beyond all calculation, in the love that moves us towards the other, then an uncancellable difference only corresponds to an eternal desire’.44 Richard’s On the four degrees of violent love becomes an S/M guide towards submitting to the love of the Dominant God. God, in the role of Sir, wounds, binds, humbles, teases, and loves. This regimen

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of love reveals the violent and humbling love that is unlike any other kind of love that the contemplative could experience. What is remarkable about Richard’s degrees of love is the way that they take the contemplative deeper and deeper into desiring God. At the end of the cycle, however, love is not satiated. There is no final whip crack; the desire experienced by the contemplative is always becoming. Richard leaves us with this final formula: ‘all of these things appear to be almost entirely more than human’ (296). Considering the complex ways in which desire and bodies intersect, Richard suggests that the love that is finally revealed in his schema of violent love pushes the body, mind, and soul beyond an easy mapping of gender and sex into an uncharted and unchartable star map in which the contemplative is identified with a quivering, throbbing, scintillating, undulating, and never-ending desire.

Notes   1 Michel Foucault, ‘Sexual choice, sexual act’, in Foucault live: interviews 1961–1984, ed. Slyvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnson (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 331.   2 Readings of queering the Middle Ages in exploring local, contingent, multiple, and fluid sexualities and practices include: Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (eds), Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting medieval: sexualities and communities, pre- and postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); ‘Chaucer’s queer touches/a queer touches Chaucer’, Exemplaria, 7.1 (1994): 75–92; ‘Got medieval?’, Journal of the history of sexuality, 10.2 (April 2001): 202–12; How soon is now? Medieval texts, amateur readers, and the queerness of time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); William Burgwinkle, ‘Etat present: queer theory and the Middle Ages’, French studies, 60.1 (2006): 79–88; Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncracies: female sexuality when normal wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A Schultz (eds), Constructing medieval sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Virginia Burrus, ‘Queer father: Gregory of Nyssa and the subversion of Identity’, in Queer theology: rethinking the Western body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 147–62; The sex lives of saints: an erotics of ancient ­hagiography

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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Amy Hollywood, ‘The normal, the queer, and the Middle Ages’, Journal of the history of sexuality, 10 (2001): 173–9; ‘Queering the beguins: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch of Anvers, Marguerite Porete’, in Queer theology, pp. 163–75; Robert Mills, Seeing sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Tison Pugh, Chaucer’s (anti-)eroticisms and the queer Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014); Queering medieval genres (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004); Michelle M. Sauer, ‘Uncovering difference: encoded homoerotic anxiety within the Christian eremitic tradition in medieval England’, Journal of the history of sexuality, 19.1 (2010): 133–52; Greg. J. Wilsbacher, ‘Something queer is going on: sex and methodology in the Middle Ages’, College literature, 30.2 (2003): 195–203; Anna Klosowska, Queer love in the Middle Ages (New  York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer, and Dianne Watt (eds), The lesbian premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Christopher Roman, Queering Richard Rolle (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).   3 See Barbara Newman, From virile woman to womanChrist: studies in medieval religion and literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), in which she comments that virginity ‘conferred both status and freedom’ (p. 7). It is the virgin that afforded women Christ-like respect. For a discussion of the soul as virgin and wife, see Amy Hollywood, The soul as virgin wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), in which Hollywood explores the interplay between gender and subjectivity as it manifests in the uniquely erotic and fleshly mysticism of Mechtild and Porete (and to a lesser extent Eckhart).   4 Michel Foucault, ‘Sex, power, and the politics of identity’, in Foucault live: interviews 1961–1984, pp. 382–90 (p. 384).   5 Foucault, ‘Sex, power’, p. 387.   6 Julie Peakman, The pleasure’s all mine: a history of perverse sex (London: Reaktion, 2013), p. 210.   7 See, for example, Julian of Norwich, The Book of Shewings, Book 7, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton (Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Press, 1994), and Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, Part I, Book 1, ed. Lynne Staley (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, 1996), Chapter 1.   8 Robert Mills, ‘“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: masculinity, masochism, and queer play in representations of male martrydom’,

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Exemplaria, 13.1 (2001): 1–37 (28). See also Robert Mills, Suspended animation: pain, pleasure and punishment in medieval culture (London: Reaktion, 2005).   9 Michael Foucault, The government of self and others. Lectures at the College de France (1982–83), ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 47. 10 Michel Foucault, ‘Pastoral power and political reason’, in Michel Foucault: Religion and culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carette (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 135–52 (p. 142). 11 Foucault, ‘Pastoral power’, p. 142. 12 Foucault, ‘Pastoral power’, p. 143. 13 Romana Byrne, Aesthetic sexuality: a literary history of sadomasochism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 1. 14 Byrne, Aesthetic sexuality, p. 7. 15 Steven Seidel, The social construction of sex, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 2015), p. 243. 16 David M. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott, Sexual outsiders: understanding BDSM sexualities and communities (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p. 11. 17 Ummni Khan, Vicarious kinks: S/M in the socio-legal imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 11. S/M is still often enlaced with concepts of perversity and abnormality in the legal realm. Cases exist where children have been taken from their mothers because S/M was practised in the home (See Khan, ‘The legal fondling of s/m pornography’, Chapter 4 in Vicarious kinks). In psychoanalytic circles, S/M is often pathologised as an acting out of childhood trauma; see Hariett I. Basseches, Paula L. Ellman, and Nancy R. Goodman (eds), Battling the life and death forces of sadomasochism: clinical perspectives (London: Karnac, 2013). For a critique of S/M as intertwined with Nazi ideology see Alison M. Moore, Sexual myths of modernity: sadism, masochism, and historical teleology (Lanham: Lexington, 2016). In her introduction, Moore explores the invention of the terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ in the nineteenth-century imaginary. Moore comments, ‘even as SM is not widely attributed the status of substantive sexual desire to be salaciously referenced in creative practices and ardently defended in sexual liberation movements, so too has it been more than ever decried as a dangerous perversion of which liberal societies should be wary’ (p. 12). This connection between S/M and ‘dangerous perversion’ is also connected to notions of homosexuality as aberrant and unnatural in conservative and religious discourse. Moore’s book works to trace the ways in which this ideological ­collapse of terms occurred,

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as well as examining how it has worked its way into contemporary thought on (deviant) sexual practices. 18 Ortmann and Sprott, Sexual outsiders, p. 19. 19 Ortmann and Sprott, Sexual outsiders, p. 19. 20 Khan, Vicarious kinks, p. 17. 21 Marla Carlson, Medieval and post-modern martyrs, mystics and artists (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 80. 22 Michel de Certeau, The mystic fable. Volume 1: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 29. 23 For a discussion of the ways queer community-building occurs through history and touch, see Dinshaw, Getting medieval, esp. pp. 19–22. 24 Margo Weiss, Techniques of pleasure: BDSM and the circuits of sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 23. 25 Dyan Elliott, ‘Raptus/rapture’, in The Cambridge companion to Christian mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 189–99 (p. 189). 26 For a history and critique of this tradition see Amy Hollywood, Sensible ecstasy: mysticism, sexual difference, and the demands of history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 27 Ola Sigurdson, ‘Desire and love’ in The Oxford handbook of theology, sexuality, and gender, ed. Adrian Thatcher (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2017), pp. 523–37 (p. 529). 28 See Dale M. Coulter, Per visibilia ad invisbilia: theological method in Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 21. 29 Coulter, Per visibilia ad invisibilia, p. 19. 30 Coulter, Per visibilia ad invisibilia, p. 20. 31 Hugh Feiss, ‘Introduction’, in On love: A selection of works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, and Godfrey of St. Victor, ed. Hugh Feiss (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 33. 32 For a discussion of audience, see Jean Leclerq, The love of learning and the desire for God: a study of monastic culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974). 33 See Nico den Bok, Communicating the most high: a systematic study of person and trinity in the theology of Richard of St. Victor (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 98–9. 34 Den Bok, Communicating the most high, p. 107. 35 Feiss, ‘Introduction’, p. 36. 36 I am using Andrew Kraebel’s translation of On the four degrees of violent love. As Kraebel notes, the translation of ‘violentae’ can also mean ‘vehement’ or ‘passionate’ (see p. 263 n. 2). I am retaining ‘violent’

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(as Kraebel does) to mark the intensity of this love, especially as I am using the lens of sadomasochism to think through Richard’s own sense of submission to God. All citations are from Richard of St Victor, On the four degrees of violent love, trans. Andrew B. Kraebel, in On love: A selection of works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, and Godfrey of St. Victor, ed. Hugh Feiss (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 261–75. All citations indicate page number. When the Latin is necessary for clarification, I cite Ives: Épitre a Séverin sur la charité, Ricard de SaintVictor: Les quatres degrees de la violente charité, ed.  G.  Dumeige (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955), pp. 126–77, also by page number. 37 Certeau, The mystic fable, p. 80. 38 Bernard McGinn, ‘The abyss of love’, in The joy of learning and the love of God: studies in honor of Jean Leclerq (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), pp. 95–120 (p. 102). 39 See Elaine Scarry, The body in pain: making and unmaking the world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 40 Darren Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable: S/M and the eroticisation of pain’, in Safe, sane, and consensual: contemporary perspectives on sadomasochism, ed. Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 91–103 (p. 92). 41 Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable’, p. 93. 42 For a discussion of liquidity in mystical imagery, see Robert E. Lester, ‘The image of mixed liquids in late medieval mystical thought’, Church history, 40.4 (1971): 397–411. 43 For a discussion of Victorine eschatology, see Hugh Feiss, ‘Heaven in the theology of Hugh, Achard, and Richard of St. Victor’, in Imaging heaven in the Middle Ages: a book of essays, ed. Jan Swago Emerson and Hugh Feiss (New York: Garland: 2000), pp. 145–64. 44 Sigurdson, ‘Desire and love’, p. 537.

6

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Humiliation as penance in some early penitentials Erin Abraham

Social sadomasochism plays important roles in the discipline of sinners as advocated in the early penitentials. These manuals, created between the sixth and ninth centuries to facilitate the discipline of sinners, employ a consistent ‘rhetoric of disgust’ in their discussions of various sins and appropriate punishments according to a principle of curing a sin with the imposition of its opposing virtue.1 For conspicuous sins, such as disobedience, sexual deviance, and violence, the prescriptions make use of public mechanisms of shame and vengeance to concurrently and conspicuously reject transgressive behaviours and ‘sanctify the community of normalcy’.2 Through prescriptions ranging from public degradation to exile, the manuals reveal a shared intent to both punish the sinner through shame and appease their victims through the ‘cathartic pleasures of expelling or destroying’ the source of their own shame.3 In this, the early penitentials follow a programme of curative social sadomasochism that publicly identifies and punishes the transgressor, while simultaneously satisfying the need for conspicuous punishment necessary for the spiritual welfare of all involved, including the sinner, their victims, and the community overall.4 As such, these manuals provide a glimpse into a process of social sadomasochism, whereby penance, often with public components, sought to satisfy a need for punishment, both social and spiritual. While the penitentials as a whole denounce sensual pleasures as inherently sinful, they nevertheless employ mechanisms of penance that imply an understood value for the conspicuous imposition of shame and physical discomfort as means to desirable ends. It is, of course, impossible to determine to what degree, if any, penitents

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and witnesses may have derived erotic pleasure from the performance of penance involving the degradation of the sinner. Yet these manuals do imply that there is an understood pleasure involved in the atonement of sin, not least through the conspicuous ­humiliation of the sinner. In this way, penance provided a social arena for the sinner’s own masochistic need for punishment as a means of spiritual reconciliation with God, and simultaneously provided a socially visible form of vicarious vengeance for their victims, thus allowing for the victims’ own sadistic satisfaction.

Humiliation and the principle of contraries Throughout these manuals, public shame and humiliation emerge as integral components of the penitential process, even for the least obvious or egregious of sins, namely transient sins of thought. For example, the sixth-century text known as the Penitential of Finnian, one of the earliest surviving penitentials proper, advises that anyone who ‘in corde suo per cogitationem peccaverit et confestim penituerit, percutiat pectus suum et petat a Deo veniam’ (1) (has transgressed by thought in his heart and repents without delay should beat his breast and seek pardon from God and make satisfaction), and thus be restored to spiritual health.5 This admonishment follows the principle, as expressed in the seventh-century manual known as the Penitential of Cummean, that ‘contraria contrariis sanantur’ (contraries are cured by contraries).6 In this model, which informs the basis for all of the early penitentials, the vices underlying individual sins were to be corrected by the imposition of their opposing virtues. Developed by Evagruis and transmitted to the West by John Cassian, this model identified eight interrelated and increasingly egregious primary vices, beginning with gluttony. Just as overindulgence was understood as a culpable and intentional basis of sin, fasting served as the foundation of all almost all penance, because it functions as a direct contrary to the spiritual and physical origin of the most basic of all transgressions. Indeed, the physical imposition of a contrary was intended to root out the spiritual source of vice through holistic contrition involving the mind, body, and soul.7

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Humiliation as penance in early penitentials 181

As a fundamental basis of contrition, shame occupies an important place in repentance. Within the principle of contraries, humiliation and debasement of the individual before God and others is the vehicle through which pride, the fundamental vice leading to all sinful behaviour, is to be expunged. As such, displays of humiliation and debasement manifest contrition and are integral to the penitential discipline that this and other early penitentials sought to facilitate. As conspicuous transgressions, sins involving disobedience, sexual reproduction, and violence (among others) were, according to the principle of contraries, subject to correlatively publicly visible penance. The way individuals might appropriately demonstrate this posture varied according to the circumstances of the specific sin, including, among other factors, the motivations of the sinner and, perhaps more importantly, the consequences of their transgression. This was, simply put, a subjective process, but one in which humiliation played an important role. Penance was in part a punishment for sins but was also understood to circumvent potential negative repercussions, both social and spiritual, of those transgressions. The intent, explicitly expressed by the authors of these manuals, was to heal the wounds of sin, for the penitent as well as their community. In addition to functioning as a contrary for the spiritual health of the sinner, humiliation also had important social roles in addressing the social implications of their transgressions. In other words, while humiliation was understood to have spiritual benefits as a direct opposing force against the vices underlying sinful behaviours, it also had specific social functions geared towards the restoration of honour damaged by that behaviour. Aspects of penance designed to impose a position of humility on the transgressor also served to restore the honour of their victims and the victims’ families. Humiliation, whether through visible abstinence, personal abasement, or exile, both publicly lowered the status of the sinner while elevating that of their victims. In this way, humiliation as penance provided an outlet for those damaged by another’s sin, an indirect form of vengeance that would ideally satisfy the injured party in part by providing a form of sadistic pleasure at the offender’s social and, at times, physical pain.

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Accordingly, sins with more visible social consequences were disciplined with more conspicuous elements of humiliation, from temporary seclusion to permanent exile, or temporary loss of status. Within religious communities, disobedience visible to other members living under the same rule would potentially undermine the strength of that rule. The penitentials address such infractions with equally visible conditions of penance, in order not only to reorient the sinner towards obedience but also to reinforce the visible order established by the rule governing the behaviour of the community’s members. While not necessarily committed in public view, sexual sins could have conspicuous consequences, such as the birth of a child or the disruption of other relationships such as marriages or the status of parents. Penances for such transgressions thus likewise required some visible components, as did methods for addressing sins of violence. Since violence, like many sexual sins, might create the potential for further violence in order to re-establish status through vengeance, some sort of public discipline in accordance with the premise of contraries. Within the mandate of the penitentials, then, public components of penance met at the intersections of social and spiritual: on one hand, penances sought to repair the wounds of sin for the souls of those affected, but also to repair the wounds those transgressions might pose to the wider community. The conspicuous elements of penitential discipline were thus intended as prophylactics against possible ripple effects of sin, as well as demonstrable forms of imposed pain, thus providing a vehicle for evident social masochism on the part of the sinner.

The early penitentials as sources Although none of the early penitentials are known to have survived in the original, these manuals, along with linguistic evidence of their earlier composition, were copied for centuries by compilers of later manuscripts. The earliest date from the sixth century, and were composed for Christian communities including members under vows and others. Widely considered the first surviving penitential proper, the Penitential of Finnian has been attributed to various Irish or Welsh saints. It shows a number of close parallels to the

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Humiliation as penance in early penitentials 183

contemporary anonymous manual known as the Ambrosian penitential, which likewise originated in Ireland or Britain in the seventh century. Both of these manuals evidently influenced the compilers of the other two manuals used in this examination: the Penitential of Cummean and the Penitential of Columbanus. The former, likely composed in Ireland in the mid-to-late seventh century, is comparatively longer than its predecessors, and is arranged primarily according to the scheme of eight principal vices. In comparison, the Penitential of Columbanus was developed for use in the saint’s communities in Gaul. Revised following Columbanus’s death in 615, this manual survives as a composite of two parts, known as the A- and B-texts, with the first focusing on those under monastic vows and the second more broadly concerned with various transgression of the laity and clergy.8 As sources for the social history of the early Middle Ages, the early penitentials have significant limitations. As prescriptive texts, they illustrate ideals, both in terms of what their authors deemed sinful behaviour, and the appropriate ways of addressing those transgressions for the benefit of the penitent sinner and their community. They do not record the actual exercise of such remedies, nor do they necessarily anticipate actual sins. As such, they cannot be used as records of the lived realities of the individuals for whom they were intended. They do, however, provide a useful glimpse into the moral economy of their authors and how those ideas might have operated. Among the most significant of these ideas is the shared notion among these manuals that penance was to be determined subjectively, according to the circumstances of the sin and the sinner. As the Penitential of Cummean insists, ‘hoc in omni paenitentia solerter intuendum est, quanto quis tempore in delictis remaneat, qua eruditione inbutus, qua inpugnatur passione, qualis existat fortitudine, qua videtur adfligi lacrimabilitate, quali compulsus est gravatione peccare’ (epilogue, 1) (it is to be closely considered in all penance how long one has remained in fault, what learning he has received, what passion assails him, how much strength he shows, the intensity of his weeping, and the oppression that has driven him to sin). Similarly, the Penitential of Columbanus notes that ‘Diversitas culparum diversitatem facit paenitentiarum’

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(B, ­ prologue) (diversity of faults produces a diversity of penances).9 Just as ‘corporum medici diversis medicamenta generibus ­conponunt … Ita igitur etiam spiritales medici diversis curationum generibus animarum vulnera morbos dolores aegritudines infirmitates sanare debent’ (B, prologue) (physicians of the body compose medicines of diverse kinds … so too ought spiritual physicians treat the wounds, sicknesses, pains, diseases, weaknesses of souls with diverse kinds of cures). As these sentiments indicate, the early penitentials were not rigid mandates listing definitive schedules of penances for sins, but were rather compendia of relevant decisions to be used in consideration of various circumstances in determining the appropriate penances on a case-by-case basis. Among the factors that emerge throughout their considerations of various sins are the visibility of the transgression in question and its potential to create further social and spiritual repercussions. In this way, the penitentials advocate the use of penance to facilitate the dispute of settlements in the social sphere, reflecting their role as vehicles of the moral authority of the Church and the perceived intersection of social and spiritual concerns involved in that authority. As Rob Meens has noted, humiliation played an important role in the settlement of disputes, and these ‘rituals of reconciliation’ are quite similar to the rituals and prescriptions of humiliation and abasement found in the early penitentials.10 Indeed, as these manuals suggest, the dichotomy between secular and religious in the arena of dispute settlement is flimsy at best; by including similar rituals in their recommendations, the early penitentials assigned confessors an important role in resolving conflicts within communities.11 Such efforts would have been inseparable from the penitentials’ shared goal of facilitating a healing of the wounds of sin. As prescriptive texts, then, the early penitentials participated in a moral economy in which humiliation played important roles in circumscribing behaviours deemed disruptive or damaging to the spiritual welfare of an individual and their community. By identifying and prescribing penalties for specific behaviours, these manuals also set out the parameters of practice that help define such a moral economy, providing a template for the interplay of ‘affects, values,

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and their associated practices … within a given framework of relations and collaborations’.12 The inclusion of value in this model is key, as it helps explain the power of emotional prescriptions, not just from the top down but as a collaborative social system to be followed or challenged.13 Of the values that play important roles in the use of humiliation as a component of penance, vengeance is particularly important, especially when viewing shame as a means of restoring another’s honour. It is, of course, impossible to derive from the penitentials the experiences of those who were subject to such discipline, as these manuals record ideals, not outcomes. For the same reason, it is also impossible to determine what the experiences or responses might have been from those whose honour would have been restored by their neighbour’s public shame. It is, however, possible to infer that such discipline would have provided some satisfaction to those injured by another’s sinful behaviour, and that this satisfaction might have fulfilled a sadistic desire for vengeance. While such desires were not necessarily erotic, it is possible that those who benefitted socially from such vengeance might have experienced them as such. In terms of social sadism, the desire for vengeance, which could promote retaliatory violence and thus spur on further sin, can itself be understood in terms of pleasure derived from the social pain of another person. In the estimation of the authors of the penitentials, then, this social sadism was a potential positive, if channelled through the public humiliation of a sinner in ways that could restore the honour of their victims and thus prevent further sin in response. Despite the limitations for what the penitentials can demonstrate about lived experience, however, it is plain that the authors, individually and collectively, had a shared understanding of the role that vengeance, and the desire for it, played in the communities for whom they created these texts. In other words, the authors of the penitentials perceived the need to address the possibility of retaliatory violence and the social mores that made it likely among the pool of potential penitents. Indeed, based on the ways they address such desires, they saw it as a very real and even valuable component of behaviour modification for both perpetrators and victims. On one hand, they adapted public humiliation as a form of penance to

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address the sins of the penitent; on the other, they took the privilege of inflicting such shame away from the victims and abrogated it to the Church via the confessor. In this way, the penitentials do reveal an intent to apply the erotic pleasures of sadism for the greater glory of God, so to speak, even as they sought to suppress eroticism itself within these communities.

Disobedience While not all of their attention is focused on purely communal concerns, the early penitentials do devote space to issues, like disobedience, that might arise among members of a religious community living under a rule. All of these manuals discuss some aspects of potential deliberate disobedience to a superior, as well as various possible infractions of an unspecified regula, ranging from sins of thought to those of deed. When discussing appropriate penances for sins related to disobedience, the manuals in general include visible penitential elements relative to the visibility of the sin in question. The most illustrative examples of this principle applied to sins of disobedience appear in the Penitential of Columbanus and the anonymous Ambrosian manual. The importance of penitential discipline within a religious community is explicit in the Penitential of Columbanus, which shows many parallels with the saint’s Regula Coenobialis, the ‘Rule of common life’.14 Indeed, the first twelve censures in this manual, comprising the entire A-text, focus solely on the potential sins of those living under such a rule, including what it describes as ‘minutis morum inconditorum’ (A.8) (small matters of undisciplined behaviour), many of which are verbal transgressions. For example, the manual groups together its discussion of appropriate discipline for a penitent who might decide something for himself without seeking permission, or contradicts a direct order with a verbal rejection of the command, or simply murmurs, likely in opposition to such a command. The distinction of penance depends on the seriousness of the matter: if severe, the recommended penance is three special fasts, referring to fasts performed in silence; if minor, one.15 The manual also prescribes special fasts

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for ­slanderous speech ­concerning other members of the community. In such cases, the penances range from three special fasts for those who engage in or listen intentionally to such insults, to a week of such fasts if the detraction is directed against the superior of the community.16 The special fast again appears in censures of contradictory speech: whereas ‘simple’ disagreements are subject to fifty strikes, contentious speech is to be corrected with a special fast, specifically in silence.17 In contrast, the manual recommends expulsion for those who put themselves before their superiors out of pride, or who blaspheme against the rule, unless the individual responsible apologises sincerely and immediately.18 The manner and duration of penance in such scenarios reflects the perceived severity of the infractions, in part determined by their visibility to other members of the community. Expulsion is perhaps the most immediately obvious penance for disobedience, but the other conditions here likewise involve some degree of conspicuity. The special fast, which also appears in relevant censures in the Regula Coenobialis, would be conspicuous in a communal environment, where meals were taken together.19 Such visibility would in turn reinforce the authority of the rule and, perhaps more importantly, that of the superior, while simultaneously meeting the principle of contraries by imposing a lack of community for those who sought to disrupt it, as well as silence for those who used their voices in the commission of their sins. Indeed, the comparison of these penances underscores the importance of contraries: the special fast, referring to a penance performed in silence, imposes an opposing state commensurate with a verbal transgression, just as a verbal apology opposes prideful speech. It also illustrates the value of restored honour and the associated pleasure of the offended party in having a form of vengeance visible to others. This conspicuity would signal to others that the transgressor was being punished, and provide pleasure for the aggrieved. By doing so, the performance of penance would thereby alleviate any need to exact a personal vengeance while simultaneously providing a visible and vicarious element of social masochism on the part of the penitent to satisfy the socially sadistic need for vengeance among his brethren. The Ambrosian penitential is also dominated by concerns about potential sins of those living under a rule but, unlike the Penitential

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of Columbanus, it applies more explicitly conspicuous and often more punitive considerations in its discussions of disobedience and disruptive behaviour within a religious community. Identifying such transgressions as consequences of pride, this manual prescribes public accusations against those who utter or willingly listen to slander against a fellow member of the community. If the accused ‘ex corde conpuncto agnoscit’ (acknowledges his fault from his heart), the manual recommends he make satisfaction to the person so disparaged and refrain from further disparaging speech; otherwise, without a public acknowledgement of the fault, the penitent is to be ‘alientur’ (expelled).20 The penances here are all visible, reflecting the nature of the sin and its potential consequences for the transgressor, his audience, his target, and the wider community. Slander is by its nature not a private sin; it requires an audience of at least one other person. In accordance with the premise of contraries, the discipline should also be, at least in part, public. Thus, the accusation is made publicly, as is the acknowledgement of fault. Further, making satisfaction to the individual so disparaged of the slander would presumably involve a public display of humility that would in turn serve to repair any damage done to the target of such abuse and reinforce the authority of the communal rule in opposition to the individual. Indeed, the reassertion of the communal rule is inseperable from the restoration of the aggrieved individual’s honour: the latter, if not restored, presents a liability for the continued effectiveness of the rule because it operates as a rift in the community and a source of continued potential sins of pride. The sinner’s public punishment and visible humiliation thereby function as a ritual of social masochism to meet the socially sadistic need for curative abasement and the reinforcement of order.

Sexual transgressions of clergy Similar concerns emerge in the manuals’ discussions of sexual transgressions, especially those committed by members of the clergy. Such potentialities are a paramount concern in all of the early penitentials. These manuals address a range of potential sexual sins, from sexual fantasy and dreams, to auto-eroticism, to

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mutual masturbation and diverse forms of sexual acts with various partners, including partners of the same sex, heterosexual partners, and animals. Penances for sexual transgressions vary in large part according to the nature of the specific act, about which the penitentials can be very precise but are also sometimes quite obtuse, depending heavily on the conspicuity of the transgression and its consequences. The latter is particularly evident in censures of penitents under religious vows who engage in sexual liaisons that result in the birth of a child. Highlighting the importance of visibility, the Penitential of Finnian acknowledges the possibility that a cleric might ‘ruina fornicationis ceciderit et … coronam suam perdiderit’ (fall miserably through fornication and … lose his crown), with the caveats that the appropriate penance depends on whether the sin has happened only once, and if it ‘celatum est hominibus sed notuit coram Deo’ (10) (is concealed from men but known before God). In such instances, the penitential recommends a one-year fast on bread and water, as well as two years abstaining from wine and meat, but does not advise loss of office, since, it insists, ‘in absconso absolvi esse peccata per penitentiam et per studium diligentius cordis et corporis’ (10) (sins can be absolved in secret and by very diligent devotion of heart and body). The first caveat reflects the weight placed on frequency as a measurement of intent, and relates directly to the conspicuity, or lack thereof, of the transgression, at least in terms of public visibility. Thus, the manual also recommends a greater penance of six total years, to include loss of clerical office, should the sexual relationship continue, even if it remains hidden from public notice, because ‘non minus est peccare coram Deo quam coram hominibus’ (11) (it is not a smaller thing to sin before God than before men). The distinctions between these censures clarify the ways the authors of these manuals understood conspicuity in relation to the relative severity of a sin in different circumstances. As a basic premise, while a sin may remain unknown to other people, it could not be hidden from God. Hence, the secrecy of the penance here is not absolute, but is relative to the degree of secrecy of the sin, again reinforcing the notion of contraries. Even in secret, however, humiliation remains integral. While the penitent in such cases might not be required to make a public confession, he is required to

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express contrition through a conscientious effort, and to perform a penance that would, in a religious community, be visible, through abstinence and, in the latter instance, loss of office – a consequence that certainly falls within the classification of social masochism, since it secures a visible and humiliating loss of honour. Despite its insistence that sins hidden from view are no less serious than those under public scrutiny, the Penitential of Finnian does attach greater severity to sexual transgressions that result in the birth of a child and hence come to the attention of men. In comparison with the above censures, the manual stipulates a much greater penance for such cases. Specifically, it recommends that a cleric who, ruina maxima ceciderit et genuerit filium et ipsum occiderit, magnum est crimen fornicatio et homicidium, sed redimi potest per penitentiam et misericordiam Dei. Tribus annis peniteat cum pane et aqua per mensura in fletu et [lacrimis atque] orationibus die ac nocte et postulet de Domini misericordia si forte habeat remissionem peccatorum et tribus aniis abstineat se a vino et a carnibus sine officio clericatus … [et] extorris existat de patria sua donec impleatur numerous VII annorum et ita iudicio episcopi vel sacerdotis suo officio restituatur. (12) [(falls to the depth of ruin and begets a son and kills him … shall do penance three years with an allowance of bread and water, in weeping and tears, by prayers day and night, and shall implore the mercy of the Lord, if he may perchance have remission of sins; and he shall abstain for three more years from wine and meat, deprived of his clerical office … and be an exile from his own country until a period of seven years is completed, and so by the judgement of a bishop or a priest he shall be restored to his office.)]

Notably, the manual follows this with a brief qualification that if the cleric in such a case ‘non occiderit filium, minus peccatum sed eadem penitentia’ (13) (has not killed the child, the sin is less, but the penance is the same). This particular penitential formula employs numerous forms of humiliation across of a spectrum of visibility, with personal shame through contrition at one end, and exile at the other. On one hand, the penitent is expected to maintain a constant state of emotional

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mortification, displayed through measurable displays of shame. On the other, he is subject to an extensive exile, thus facing loss of status in multiple places. As the most conspicuous form of penitential discipline, exile is reserved for those sins understood to pose the greatest possible repercussions in the community. To apply it in cases of the birth of a child through an illicit sexual union speaks to the concerns such cases raised for the author of this and the other early penitentials, and the roles they understood penance to serve in both spiritual and social contexts. A child in such cases was irrefutable evidence of sin with real world consequences for various individuals in the community, especially the mother of the child and her family. Exile not only removed the cleric from the public view of that community and prevented the continuation of the relationship between him and his sexual partner, it also removed the object of potential strife and thereby provided a way of reducing the possibility for further repercussions of the sin, such as retributive violence, by providing a means of restoring the honour of the aggrieved party in a highly visible way. As such, exile functioned as an effective mechanism of social sadism: by rescinding the transgressor’s membership in this way, the community participated in a collective form of punishment intended to restore order through the imposition of suffering on one individual. The significance of conspicuous results of such transgressions is clear in the comparable penances which the Penitential of Cummean assigns for sexual transgressions committed by clerics of different rank and status, as well as the penance it prescribes for sexual transgressions that result in the birth of a child. According to this manual, a bishop who breaks his oath of celibacy is subject to degradation and a penance of twelve years, while a presbyter or deacon under monastic vows is subject to a slightly shorter penance of seven years.21 Comparably, the penance for fornication for a monk of inferior status is three years, as is that for a presbyter or deacon who has not taken monastic vows.22 In all cases, the performance of penance would be visible to other members of the community, but loss of office is reserved here for only one type of penitent, namely the bishop. This reinforces the understood severity of the sin in relation to the status of the penitent, which in turn is used as an implied measurement of intent. A bishop was understood to have

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more knowledge of the rules; his violation of vows was of greater significance and thus required a more visible form of discipline. Rank, however, becomes less significant if the violation resulted in the birth of a child. As the manual explains, in such cases, a cleric, without respect to his rank, should be subject to ‘VII ann[os] peniteat exul’ (2.17) (seven years’ penance in exile), the same penance prescribed to a female under vows of virginity for the same sin. Echoing the earlier manual, the Penitential of Columbanus likewise emphasises the seriousness of procreation as a consideration in clerical transgressions of celibacy. Clarifying the importance placed on the conspicuity of such transgressions, the manual considers the possibility that a cleric might ‘fornicaverit quidem cum mulieribus sed non filium generaverit et in notitiam hominum non venerit’ (B.4) (commit fornication with women, but has not begotten a child, and it has not become known among people). In such cases, the penance depends on the clerical status of the penitent, ranging from three years for a simple cleric, to five years for a monk, to seven years for a priest, and twelve years for a bishop.23 There is no mention here of exile or degradation, but elsewhere the penitential does insist on an exile of ‘septem annis peregrinus in pane et aqua’ (seven years as a stranger on bread and water) for a cleric, without consideration of rank, who ‘ruina maxima ceciderit et filium genuerit’ (B.2) (has fallen to the depth of ruin and begotten a child). The exile in such cases should end only when the penitent has satisfied the terms of his penance at the discretion of a priest. This final condition underscores the public quality of the penance in such cases. Not only is the guilty cleric subject to a conspicuous and long separation from his community, he is expected to perform his penance under the scrutiny of a priest, suggesting his contrition must be as equally visible and hence measurable as the penitent required to display his shame through tears and weeping. A different but equally conspicuous form of separation appears in related censures of those under religious vows who resume sexual relations with their pre-ordainment spouse. Again illustrating the lesser weight placed on rank in such situations, the Penitential of Columbanus recommends a penance of seven years on bread and water for a ‘clericus aut diaconus vel alicuius gradus, qui laicus fuit in saeculo cum filiis et filiabus, post conversionem suam iterum

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suam cognoverit clientelam et filium iterum de ea genuerit’ (B.8) (cleric or deacon or some other grade, who was a layman in the world with sons and daughters, who after his conversion has again known his spouse, and again begotten a child of her). Similarly, the Penitential of Finnian explains that a cleric of any rank who was ‘laicus ante fuerit cum filiis et filiabus suis et cum clentella habitet et redeat ad carnis desiderium et genuerit filium ex clentella propria sua’ (formerly a layman with sons and daughters and lives with his spouse and returns to carnal desire and begets a child with her) has transgressed just as if ‘clericus ex iuventute sua et ita est ut cum puella aliena peccasset’ (he had been a cleric from youth and sinned with a strange woman), referring to a female who was not previously tied to him in marriage, ‘quia post votum suum peccaverunt et postquam consecrati sunt a Deo et tunc votum suum inritum fecerunt’ (27) (since they have sinned after their vow and after they have been consecrated to God and then made their vow in vain). The recommended penance in such cases thus extends to both partners: ‘III annos peniteant cum pane et aqua per mensura et alios III abstineant se a vino et a carne et non peniteant simul sed separantur’ (27) (they shall do penance for three years on a measure of bread and water and abstain for another three from wine and meat, and shall not do penance together but shall be separated). These censures reinforce the importance placed on the visibility of sin in the determination of penance. The cohabitation of a cleric and his partner from a pre-conversion union would be conspicuous, but the possibility that they might resume their sexual relationship might not be, unless it resulted in the birth of more children. Both manuals indicate that such scenarios were equal to the previous transgressions involving clerics, although in these cases, both partners were subject to penance, since both were under the same vows. Above all, however, these manuals stress the publicly visible consequences of such transgressions and the recommended penances apply the premise of contraries in seeking to address that element of the sin. Separation of the partners in such scenarios not only prevented the recurrence of sexual relations between them during this period of penance but also served as a visible consequence for an equally visible transgression. Just as their sins had, through the arrival of another child, come to the notice of men, so too would

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their parting be apparent to those who knew of their status as a couple. Undoubtedly, such separation would create hardships for those involved, not to mention emotional pain, in addition to the conspicuous loss of status for both partners. The penance, therefore, again highlights the socially sadistic elements of penitential practice.

Sexual transgression of the laity The early penitentials also show a great deal of interest in addressing the potential sexual transgressions of the laity, especially those of male lay penitents whose transgressions presented possible social consequences for the wider community. In line with these concerns, their discussions of such scenarios focus heavily on the status of those involved, both in the initial sin and in its potential social repercussions. In all cases, the manuals prescribe some element of public humiliation as a component of penance, ranging from temporary loss of status, to financial compensation, to permanent separation. It is important to emphasise here that participation in penitential discipline was less obligatory for lay penitents than it was for clerics and monks. While it is of course impossible to know how many lay members did perform penance, this voluntary quality does underscore the masochistic value of suffering as atonement. In the Penitential of Cummean, it is the status of the sexual partner rather than the penitent himself that emerges as the paramount concern in determining appropriate penances for extramarital liaisons, with secondary consideration given to any procreative result. The most conspicuous penitential remedies in this area emerge in the manual’s discussion of a layman who ‘puellam Dei maculaverit’ (2.24) (dishonours a maiden of God). If the transgression results in the birth of a child, the penitential recommends the layman be given a penance of three years, including loss of his right to carry weapons and sexual abstinence from his own wife. If the liaison does not result in a child, the recommended penance is halved to a year and a half, ‘sine deliciis, sine uxore peniteat’ (2.25) (without delicacies and without his wife). The loss of weapons as a component of penance here is equivalent to a public loss of status

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that is commensurate with the visible consequence of the transgression. The birth of a child is not in of itself sinful; rather, it is a conspicuous consequence of a sin with social repercussions. To lose the right to bear weapons is to lose a visible symbol of free status. The same ideas inform the recommended penances for sexual relations between a man and his female slave, with the greater penalties again reserved for instances when those relations result in the birth of one or more children. Both the penitentials of Cummean and Finnian explore this potentiality. In its brief discussion of the issue, the Penitential of Cummean states that a man ‘ad suam intrat ancillam vendat eam et I ann[o] peniteat’ (who enters his female slave shall sell her and do penance for one year), unless ‘genuerit ex ea filium’ (2.26–7) (he begets a child of her), in which case she is to be set free. Whether the duration of the penance changes in such cases is unclear, but the liberation of his slave would be a conspicuous consequence directly related to the penitent’s public status – not to mention that of the freed slave’s. As it is preserved in a manuscript from St Gall, the Penitential of Finnian provides more space to its discussion of such potentialities.24 In the case that ‘laicus cum uxore propria intraverit ad ancillam suam’ (a layman with his own wife enters his female slave), the manual explains he should sell the slave and ‘ipse per annum integrum non intrabit ad uxorem suam propriam’ (39) (he himself shall not enter his own wife for an entire year). The consequences are more publicly visible, however, ‘si autem genuerit ex illa ancilla filium unum aut duos vel tres’ (40) (if he begets by this female slave one or two or three children). In this case, the penitential recommends he should be forbidden from selling the female slave, but ought to set her free and separate himself from her. Reiterating this last point, the censure continues: ‘peniteat annum integrum cum pane et aqua per mensuram; et non intret amplius ad concubinam suam, sed iungatur propriae uxori’ (40) (he shall do penance for an entire year on a measure of bread and water and he shall not enter his concubine again, but shall be joined to his own wife). The public elements of this penance are perhaps less obvious than earlier prescriptions, but emerge in consideration of the shift in terminology used to describe the penitent’s sexual partner in relation to his penance. No longer is she an ‘ancillam’ (a female slave), but the

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penitent’s ‘concubinam’ (concubine), albeit one with whom he is prohibited from having future sexual relations with. The implication is that she is now his dependent. This shift in the female partner’s status implies a form of public humiliation that would in effect alter the public status of the male penitent and potentially the status of his offspring, legitimate and otherwise. A greater degree of public humiliation related to status appears in penances for extramarital liaisons involving a layman and a female neighbour. In the Penitential of Finnian, the recommended penance for a layman who ‘maculaverit uxorem proximi sui aut virginem’ (36) (dishonours the wife or unmarried daughter of his neighbour) is one year, on bread and water, during which he is to abstain from sex with his own wife. Afterwards, the manual stipulates the male penitent ‘recipiatur ad communionem et det elymosinam pro anima sua’ (36) (be received for communion and give alms for his soul), promising to never again engage in extramarital sex. While understated, honour is an important consideration in this censure. The sexual transgression here is specifically described as a form of dishonour committed against the female relation of a male neighbour. The penance includes some public elements, which might go some way to re-establishing that honour, as would the requirement that the penitent make a vow, upon being received back to communion, not to commit the sin again. Made at his reception back to the communion of the Church, such a vow would in effect serve as both a public acknowledgement of his sin and a reinstatement of the offended neighbour’s status. As a highly visible consequence, such vows were in effect an expression of social masochism that, via the public humiliation of the transgressor, sought to restore the honour of his neighbour and thus alleviate the latter’s need for sadistic vengeance. The Penitential of Columbanus is, in comparison, more explicitly concerned with the social implications of such potentialities. According to this manual, the appropriate penance for a layman who ‘de alterius uxore filium genuerit, id est adulterium commiserit toro proximi sui violato’ (has begotten a child by another’s wife, that is, committed adultery by violating his neighbour’s bed) is three years, abstaining from ‘cybis suculentioribus et a propria uxore, dans insuper praetium pudititiae marito uxoris violatae’

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(B.14) (succulent foods and from his own wife, giving in addition the price of shame to the husband of the violated wife). Similar compensatory elements appear in this penitential’s discussion of appropriate penances for a layman who ‘ornicaverit de laicis cum mulieribus a coniungio liberis, id est vidius vel puellis’ (has committed fornication with women free from marriage, that is, with widows or maidens). If the penitent is guilty of sexual relations with a widow, the manual recommends a penance of one year. If the sexual partner is an unmarried female, however, the recommended penance is two years, with the added stipulation that the penitent ‘reddito tamen humiliationis eius praetio parentibus eius’ (B.16) (render the price of her humiliation to her parents). The presumptive role of the priest  or other confessor as an arbiter of social and spiritual disputes is clear in these censures. The penance in such scenarios seeks to meet the premise of contraries in both the dietary and sexual ­abstinence applied to the penitent, while the payment of an honour price to the offended neighbour pursues social ­reconciliation through public restoration of his honour, in part through the humiliation of the penitent. By applying these dual conditions on the penitent in such circumstances, the manual supplies a combined social and spiritual method for addressing not only the spiritual wounds of the sin for the penitent, his sexual partner, and their respective families, but also the potential ripple effects such damage might prompt in retaliation. Thus, in addition to its spiritual function, the principle of contraries also provides a social purpose: the humiliation of the penitent serves as a contrary to the humiliation of his neighbour.

Violence The duality of this principle is most apparent in the ways the early penitentials employ spiritual and social reparation in the discipline of sins of violence, ranging from non-lethal brawls that might result in physical injury, to unplanned lethal violence, to premeditated homicide. Such transgressions are by their very natures conspicuous and carry the potential for further repercussions, both social and spiritual, for the penitent, his victim, their families, and by

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extension the wider community. Violence, simply put, occurs in a social environment and involves at least two individuals, but the repercussions of such acts are rarely confined to its principal actors, especially when honour plays such an important role in society. The early penitentials illustrate the value placed on restoring honour as a means of healing the wounds of sin caused by violent discord. Public humiliation of the penitent is key to this process, as it seeks to alleviate the need for further vengeance while simultaneously providing a visible outlet for any socially sadistic desires of the offended party. The Penitential of Finnian distinguishes between two forms of non-lethal violence: a general reference to brawls, and violence leading to bloodshed. In each, the manual emphasises the status of the penitent and his victim over any details about the acts themselves, which is likely intended to allow for flexibility in the actual determination of penances for various cases. In the first scenario, the penitential suggests that a cleric or minister of God responsible for a violent quarrel, presumably without injury, should perform a penance of seven days with bread, water, and salt. In addition, it recommends that he ‘petat veniam a Deo suo et proximo plena confessione et humilitate’ (5) (seek pardon from God and his neighbour, with full confession and humility), to be reconciled with both God and the offended party. While the requisite confession to God might be private between the penitent and his confessor, the other elements of this penance are not. Again, the dietary restrictions would have been evident to others in the community with whom the penitent took his meals, but more importantly in terms of public humiliation is the expectation that he should seek, with humility, reconciliation with the offended party. This expectation increases when violent quarrels result in injury. Insisting that these acts are akin to murder, the Penitential of Finnian recommends a year-long penance for any cleric who ‘percusserit fratrem suum aut proximum et sanguinem effuderit’ (strikes his brother or his neighbour and sheds blood), with the additional stipulation that the penitent perform his penance ‘cum pane et aqua et sale et sine ministerio clericatus; et orare debet cum fletu et lacrimis ut misericordiam consequator a Deo’ (8) (with bread and water and salt, without clerical office, and pray, with weeping and tears,

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that he may obtain the mercy of God). If the penitent is of lay status, however, the penance is reduced to forty days, with the added stipulation that he should compensate his victim an amount arbitrated by a priest or other party.25 While only the lay penitent in such cases is subject to a monetary penalty, both censures include public humiliation as a form of compensation for the damage caused by physical violence. In the case of the cleric, the ­compensation takes the form of visible emotional humiliation in addition to the equally visible loss of office, both of which provide a counter to the loss of honour suffered by his victim. For the lay penitent, the determination of appropriate monetary compensation by a priest or other judge makes the case against him a public one, and provides a public venue for the restoration of the victim’s honour. The other early penitentials follow similar parameters in their discussions of non-lethal violence. Echoing the basic elements above, the Penitential of Columbanus in one instance simply recommends that a cleric who ‘per rixam proximum suum percusserit et sanguinem fuderit’ (B.9) (has struck his neighbour in a brawl in a quarrel and shed blood) should perform a year’s penance, while the same transgression by a layman is subject to forty days’ penance. Returning to this potentiality in a later censure, the manual recommends further that a member of the laity who ‘scandalum sanguinem fuderit aut proximum suum vulneraverit aut debilitaverit’ (has shed blood in a quarrel or wounded or disabled his neighbour) should be compelled to make restitution for the damages. If the penitent lacks the resources to make such restitution, the manual allows him to instead ‘opera proximi sui primum agat quamdiu ille infirmus est medicumque quaerat’ (B.21) (first perform his neighbour’s work while he is infirm and obtain medical care), then perform the aforementioned forty days’ penance after his victim is healed. Similar considerations emerge in the Penitential of Cummean and the Ambrosian penitential. For striking a neighbour without causing injury, the Penitential of Cummean recommends one to three fasts on bread and water.26 In comparison, the Ambrosian penitential includes additional penitential elements related to the humiliation of the penitent who strikes without causing a disabling wound. In addition to one or two fasts on bread and water (or a year if a cleric), this manual also recommends that the penitent

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‘placeat fratri largitate et supplici satisfaction’ (4.7) (placate his brother with liberal and suppliant satisfaction). For violence leading to injury, these manuals provide nearly verbatim censures. Per the Penitential of Cummean, in addition to a half-year of penance, ‘qui per rixam ictu debilem vel deformem hominem reddit, inpensa in medicos curat et maculae pretium et opus eius donec sanetur restituat’ (4.9) (he who by a violent blow renders a person disabled or disfigured shall provide for the cost of medical care and the price of the dishonour, and fulfil his work until he is healed). If the penitent is unable to meet these requirements for restitution, the manuals allow for an alternative of an entire year’s penance.27 There is nothing private about any of these penitential remedies. Just as the transgressions in such cases resulted in conspicuous injury to the victim, be it social and/or physical, the penances stress the need for public humiliation through payment to, or service on behalf of, the victim. Reflecting the relative severity of lethal violence in comparison to non-lethal transgressions, the penances for the former include more elements of public humiliation and reveal even more clearly the underlying combined social and spiritual interests of the ­penitentials’ authors. As in censures of non-lethal violence, compensation plays an important role in the discipline of lethal violence, as do various terms of exile. Both function as visible mechanisms for the expression of humiliation on the part of the penitent, thereby providing for the expression of contrition necessary for spiritual redemption and simultaneously providing for the social wellbeing of the community. There is an underlying acknowledgement here that the restoration of honour through rituals of masochistic humiliation are integral to restoring order: by ensuring the conspicuous suffering of the sinner, the penance provides an alternative for personal vengeance and thus prevents a cycle of retributive violent sin. Focusing primarily on intent as a determining factor, the Ambrosian penitential prescribes ‘dampnetur’, referring to permanent exile, for someone who ‘per furorem et non ex meditatione occiderit hominem’ (4.4) (kills a person through anger and not with hateful meditation), unless he agrees to a penance determined by a priest, to include three years of fasting combined with alms and prayers. In contrast, if he instead ‘homicidium odii meditatione

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per insidias fecerit, dampnetur, nisi reictis armis usque ad mortem saeculi voluptatibus’ (commits homicide through hateful meditation, he shall be damned, unless he rejects until death weapons and the pleasures of the world), makes compensation, and performs penance ‘ad iudicium sacerdotis secundum legem’ (4.3) (according to the judgement of a priest and the law). Similarly, the Penitential of Cummean stipulates the guilty party should ‘relictis armis usque ad mortem mortuus mundo vivat Dei’ (abandon his weapons until death and shall live unto God, forgotten by the world), unless it is ‘post vota perfectionis’ (after vows of perfection), in which case the penitent ‘peregrinatione perenni mundo moriatur’ (4.5–6) (shall be forgotten by the world in perpetual pilgrimage). Intent seems negligible in the ways such transgressions are addressed in the other manuals under consideration here. Instead, they focus on exile, followed by personal and public confessional service on behalf of the victim’s family. For example, in its prescription for homicide of a neighbour, the Penitential of Columbanus advises a penance of three years ‘inermis exsul in pane et aqua paeniteat’ (unarmed in exile, on bread and water), after which the penitent should be permitted to return to his community, ‘reddens vicem parentibus occisi pietatis et officii’ (rendering repayment of responsibility and duty to the parents of the slain) before he is ‘iudicio sacerdotis iungatur altario’ (B.13) (restored to the altar at the discretion of the priest). If the penitent in such a case is a member of the clergy, the penitential recommends ten years’ penance, to be performed in exile, ending only when he has met the following conditions: that he has ‘bene egerit paenitentiam in pane et aqua’ (discharged his penance well on bread and water), has the approval of the bishop or priest overseeing his penance, and ‘ut satis faciat parentibus eius quem occidit vicem filii reddens et dicens “quaecunque vultis faciam vobis”’ (that he make satisfaction to the parents of he whom he has killed, rendering repayment of a child and saying ‘Whatever you wish I will do for you’). If, however, the penitent refuses to fulfil these obligations to the parents of his victim, the manual says he should ‘nunquam recipiatur in patriam, sed more Cain vagus et profugus sit super terram’ (B.1) (never be received in his native land, but like Cain, be a wanderer and fugitive upon the earth).

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As a probable source for Columbanus, the Penitential of Finnian likewise recommends a cleric guilty of killing his neighbour be exiled for ten years and perform his penance for seven years in another location. Only after completing this penance in exile well, and only with the approval of the supervising abbot or priest, should he be ‘recipiatur in patria sua et satis faciat amicis eius quem occiderat et vicem pietatis et oboedientie reddat patri et matri eius si adhuc in corpore sunt et dicat “Ecce ego vobis pro filio vestro; quecumque dixeritis mihi faciam”’ (23) (received in his native land to make satisfaction to the friends of he whom he killed and render to his father and mother, if they are still in the flesh, the price of piety and obedience, saying ‘Behold, I am for you as your son; whatever you set for me I shall do’). Like the Penitential of Columbanus, this manual too insists that a penitent who refuses to carry out his obligations in this way should remain an exile in perpetuity. Again, these penances belie any possibility of secrecy. Rather, they emphasise the value of public humiliation as a means of restoring the wounds, both spiritual and social, caused by sins of violence. Such transgressions are themselves necessarily public, as they involve not only the penitent and his neighbour or brother, in the language of the penitentials, but also the family of the victim and the wider community. Exile served to remove the penitent from the environment damaged by his sin, thus protecting him from retribution and, by extension, preventing others from committing their own sins of violence in seeking vengeance. The duration of the exile itself points to the severity of such sins and the effects they were understood to have on the community. So too does the expectation that the penitent be allowed to return only if he agreed to submit, publicly and verbally, to the service of the victim’s family, thereby compounding the loss of status imposed by the other components of his penance. Further, such submission was entirely voluntary; the penitent had alternative options for fulfilling the penance. By offering himself in place of the victim, the offender in such cases voluntarily entered into a servile relationship. As in cases of lay penitents performing penance for sexual transgressions, this voluntary element again highlights the masochistic value of suffering as a component of repentance.



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Conclusion It is important to stress that humiliation was not imposed merely for the sake of shaming the penitent guilty of violence or other sins, although shame was deemed a valuable and necessary component of contrition. Indeed, the penitentials themselves make use of the language of shame in their prescriptions, but this is inseparable from their overall goal. Humiliation as a spiritual medicine was understood to facilitate contrition; shame for one’s sins was requisite to true repentance. Further, humiliation also played important social roles, inseparable from the spiritual. Shame attached to humiliation served to restore order and operated within the principle of contraries, even as it supplied a channel for the victims of another’s sins to gain some sense of pleasure in response. Exile was a visible penalty for sins of violence and, in some cases, illicit sexual relationships, imposing loss of community on those whose sins damaged the same community. Similarly, the visible exclusion of the disobedient set them apart from their community and imposed humiliation as a contrary to pride. In all cases, the humiliation of the penitent was integral to restoring the honour of another party – including a superior in a religious community, a neighbour, and God – and preventing further escalation of disobedience, sexual sin, or violence by the sinner, his partner, or others. Cumulatively, humiliation as penance reveals some of the ways these early penitentials sought to integrate established customs within a penitential framework that would serve a larger moral economy that belied arbitrary boundaries between social and spiritual.

Notes  1 Ummni Khan, Vicarious kinks: S/M in the socio-legal imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p, 18.   2 Khan, Vicarious kinks, p. 19.   3 Khan, Vicarious kinks, p. 20.   4 Theodor Reik, Masochism in sex and society, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove Press, 1962), pp. 306–9.

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  5 Penitentialis Vinniani (hereafter P. Vinniani) 1, ed. Ludwig Bieler, The Irish penitentials,Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 5 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963), pp. 74–94 (p. 74). Hereafter, numbers referring to specific canons will follow in parentheses; all translations are my own.   6 Paenitentiale Cummeani (hereafter P. Cummeani), prologue, ed. Bieler, pp. 108–34 (p. 110). Hereafter, numbers referring to specific chapters and canons will follow in parentheses; all translations are my own.   7 See inter alia Columba Stewart, ‘Evagrius Ponticus and the eight generic Logismoi’, and Carole Straw, ‘Gregory, Cassian, and the cardinal vices’, in In the garden of evil: the vices and culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 18 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), pp. 3–34 and 35–58.   8 Erin Abraham, Anticipating sin in medieval society: childhood, sexuality, and violence in the early penitentials, Knowledge Communities, 2 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 19–25; Rob Meens, Penance in medieval Europe, 600–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 45–61.   9 Paenitentiale S. Columbanus (hereafter P. Columbani), B, prologue, ed. Bieler, pp. 96–106. Hereafter, numbers referring to specific books and canons will follow in parentheses; all translations are my own 10 Meens, Penance in medieval Europe, p. 11. 11 Meens, Penance in medieval Europe, p. 11. 12 Rob Boddice, The history of emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 196. 13 Boddice, History of emotions, p. 196. 14 Meens, Penance in medieval Europe, p. 54. 15 P. Columbani, A.9, pp. 96, 98, ‘Qui facit per se aliquid sine interrogation vel qui contradicit et dicit “non facio” vel qui murmorat, si grande sit, tribus superpositionibus, si parvum, una paeniteat’. 16 P. Columbani, A.10, p. 98, ‘Qui autem detrahit aut libenter audit detrahentem, tribus superpositionibus paeniteat; si de eo qui praeest, septimana paeniteat’. 17 P. Columbani, A.9, p. 98, ‘Verbum vero contra verbum simpliciter prumptum L plagis vindicandum est, vel si ex contentione, silentii superpositione’. 18 P. Columbani, A.11, p. 98, ‘Qui autem per superbiam suum praepositum dispexerit aut regulam blasphemaverit, foras repellendus est nisi confestim dixerit “penitet me quod dixi.” Si autem se non bene ­humiliaverit, XL diebus paeniteat, quia superbiae morbo detentur’.

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19 T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The penitential of Columbanus’, in Columbanus: studies on the Latin writings, ed. Michael Lapidge, Studies in Celtic History, 17 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), pp. 217–39. 20 Paenitentiale Ambrosianum (hereafter P. Ambrosianum), 8.6, ed. Ludger Körntgen, Studien zu den Quellen der frühmittelalterlichen Buβbücher, Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht im Mittelalter 7 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1993), pp. 258–70 (p. 266). Hereafter, numbers referring to specific chapters and canons will follow in parentheses; all translations are my own. 21 P. Cummeani, 2.1–2, p. 112, ‘Episcopus faciens fornicationem degradatus XII annos peaniteat. Presbiter aut diaconus faciens fornicationem naturalem praelato ante monachi votu VII ann[os] peniteat’. 22 P. Cummeani, 2.3–4, p. 114, ‘Si inferior gradu quis positus sit monachus, III quidem annos peniteat… Si vero sine monachi voto presbiter aut diaconus sic peccaverint, sicut monachus sine gradu peniteant.’ 23 P. Columbani, B.4, p. 100. 24 The other surviving manuscript of the Penitential of Finnian from Salzburg addresses this issue in nearly verbatim language as the Penitential of Cummean. 25 P. Vinniani 9, p. 76, ‘Si autem laicus fuerit, XL dies peniteat et det aliquam pecuniam quem percutit, quantum arbitratus fuerit sacerdos aut iustus quisque’. 26 P. Cummeani, 4.11, p. 120, ‘Qui ictum proximo suo dederit et non nocuit, I vel II vel III Xlmis in pane et aqua peniteat’. 27 P. Cummeani, 4.10, p. 120, ‘Si vero non habeat unde restituat haec, I annum peniteat.’ Cf. P. Ambrosianum, 4.6, p. 264, ‘Qui per rixam ictu debilem vel deformem hominem reddet, impensa medicis et maculae praetium et opus eius, donec sanetur, restituat et dimidio anni. Si unde reddat non habet, reconciliatione eidem et anno ad iudicium sacerdotis cum pane et aqua poeniteat’.

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Part II

Courtly and secular (con)texts

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7 ‘I am not having what she’s having’: female sexual (un)pleasure medieval and modern Juliana Dresvina In 2017 there began a wave of #MeToo stories, articles on the female price of male pleasure, and discussions of how womenspecific pain is routinely ignored. It still takes on average almost ten years of suffering to be diagnosed with endometriosis; when women talk about ‘good sex’, they still often mean sex without pain while men often mean they had orgasms. The #MeToo movement has been met with a significant backlash with a ‘small yet clear shift against victims’, according to a poll in The economist.1 None of these topics will be new to a teacher of medieval history and literature, as I hope to demonstrate with this essay. A recent monograph on the history of frigidity defines this sociopsychological phenomenon as follows: Frigidity is the product of a masculine misapprehension of female bodies and their differing pleasures. It typically involves a narrow intolerance of forms of jouissance that do not sufficiently conform to the singular narrative of heterosexual coitus in which all sexual acts, aside from penis–vagina penetration, are conceived as peripheral and preparatory.2

Even though as premodernists we would perhaps find this definition (and the concept itself) anachronistic, it is still profitable to use the presence or absence of female sexual pleasure, and more specifically of orgasm, as a springboard for a broader discussion of our canonical understanding of medieval texts. My thinking of this topic was initially aroused by two particular personal experiences. One was watching When Harry met Sally during my first year at university in the company of a married friend

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who was ten years older. She was considered by us, her younger course-mates, a model – smart, beautiful, feminist, happily married to a progressive, educated, and handsome guy who doted on his wife and their son. When it came to the famous restaurant scene where Meg Ryan fakes orgasm and the woman says ‘I’ll have what she’s having’, my friend suddenly turned away and uttered with deep sadness: ‘I am not having what she’s having’. I was a seventeen-yearold without sexual experience, and this was the first time I realised that contrary to what pop culture teaches us, not all women experience orgasm through conventional intercourse (the often-depicted thirty seconds with the macho hero up against the wall) and that many consequently feel ‘faulty’ or ‘incomplete’, leading them to fake it. Later I was to encounter more and more such women and became aware of the performative femininity present in our culture. Back then, the best consolation I could come up with was ‘she’s not really having that either’. The second personal experience resulted from discussing the character of Queen Guinevere with my students. While looking into medieval medico-theological views on women in the central and later Middle Ages, I mentioned the theory of the female seed emission and its necessity for conception, jokingly suggesting that perhaps some medieval readers (or writers) would explain Guinevere’s infertility though her inability to climax during the conventional intercourse. The students immediately reacted to this by asking, ‘So, was Guinevere frigid, then?’ I initially thought this was not a core issue for our course and forgot all about it. But the question kept troubling me and later I decided to run the idea past several senior female colleagues to see if there was anything my students could read on Guinevere’s infertility as a potential biological factor. My esteemed colleagues, however, could not accept that either Guinevere or Isault would not experience orgasm when having intercourse with their lovers, even if they could not have it with their husbands. They all agreed that if it were just a matter of orgasm, Lancelot and Tristram should have been able to fix  things  even if Arthur and Mark could not. From their perspective, having a lover would guarantee an orgasm. ‘It’s not the right kind of question to ask’, said one. ‘It is not about biology’, said another.

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The kind of ‘wrong’ questions, asked by students, often prove extremely useful in thinking about what medieval culture, seemingly distant, has to say about our modern state of affairs. A poignant example is a whole collection published in 2018 which arose from a single student’s query – ‘How do we know she was really raped?’ – during a classroom discussion of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s tale; this demonstrates how many medievalists are faced with the need to respond to the medieval texts they teach and research in a specific modern – and often sensitive – context.3 It is true that there is always a danger in eagerly embracing anachronistic approaches and/or becoming too emotional or political, forgetting that in the literature classes we are reading fiction. But, as many scholars have pointed out, examining medieval literary writings only as topoi or metaphors is equally dangerous as we only focus on the figurative and sidestep the real, which further leads to silencing both the physical and psychological phenomena often underlying these ‘figures’ we find in ancient texts.4 Although I accept my colleagues’ point that the childlessness is required by the Arthurian narrative to sustain the love triangles, the underlying psychobiological premise of these responses is rather depressing. It is a reality that some (many) women can be in love with a man but not be able to climax with him – at least not through conventional intercourse – and with all the medical knowledge we have in the twenty-first century it still comes as a surprise and makes these 10, 25, or up to 50 per cent of women, as some research suggests, a silent, ‘unnatural’, ‘faulty’ minority.5 It previously appeared inappropriate to ask the question whether the characters such as Guinevere or Isault were even supposed to have any pleasure out of their adulterous relationships, other than psychological and emotional. As one of my colleagues summarised during a post-conference discussion of love in medieval romances, ‘Of course you would climax with your lover – that’s why you have the lover!’ As it increasingly becomes evident, this rationale is not necessarily valid, although it is too easy to assume it is all about sex. And perhaps we could use the good old fictional Ginny as a safe aide to talk about it with our students. Interestingly, in our present society there is still no consensus about female orgasm. First of all, medical researchers (most of

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whom happen to be male) cannot even agree whether every female orgasm is a clitoral one, or there are others.6 Sex coaches insist all women are capable of vaginal and cervical orgasm and talk about orgasmic birth (there may be a few lucky ones among the readers, but mine and my friends’ were far from orgasmic), implying that those who do not are lazy, adding to the sense of faultiness.7 In early 2019, when the Osé robotic sex toy for women was banned from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (while the unrealistically proportioned sex robot for men was allowed to stay in 2018, illustrating that disregard of female pleasure is not a sign of historical alterity), the media repeatedly reported that the hands-free toy was designed to produce blended orgasm – that is, a combination of clitoral and vaginal climaxes.8 Clitoral orgasm is often labelled immature – cue Freud with his less than charitable view of women as incomplete men with penis envy, or, if you are prepared to go deeper, the Aristotelian view popular in the Middle Ages that the woman is an underdeveloped man. The idea of the one-sex model, in which female anatomy was seen as that of a lesser male, with vagina as underdeveloped penis and uterus as imperfect scrotum, did not disappear in the eighteenth century, in Thomas Laqueur’s own admission, despite his initial optimistic hope of finding it would have (and neither did the female pleasure from the theory of conception).9 In spite of having had the opposite intention, Doris Lessing effectively supported this view in her famous Golden notebook of 1962: A vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalised sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively … ‘Do you know that there are eminent physiologists who say women have no physical basis for vaginal orgasm?’ ‘Then they don’t know much, do they?’10

(Reading this at twenty-six, I was searching my memory in vain for any warm whirlpools, felt fake, and concluded I did not know much either.) Luckily, Lessing was almost immediately rebuked



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by Anne Koedt, who wrote her classic feminist essay ‘The myth of vaginal orgasm’ in 1968. It begins: Whenever female orgasm and frigidity are discussed, a false distinction is made between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. Frigidity has generally been defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms. Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis.11

All in all, despite multiple research papers, personal testimonies, and websites like OMGYES.com that offer to help you ‘constantly explore new ways to increase pleasure based in new research, videos and simulations’ for a monthly subscription, the moderni are still arguing about the nature of the female orgasm. What about the Middle Ages? It comes as no surprise that there was no consensus then either. Overall, the question of female pleasure did not often come into focus, and when it did, it was often in a negative light. Even such supposedly ‘empowering’ references to medieval women enjoying sex – real like Margery Kempe or fictional like the Wife of Bath – have already been re-examined to highlight their fitting snuggly into the centre of the traditional patriarchal discourse.12 Sure enough, in a society where sex was technically seen as the activity during which a man ejaculates, female sexual pleasure was less of a consideration than male pleasure, especially in fiction. Asking my twenty-first-century students – many of whom have studied feminist or queer theory – during their first encounter with medieval English literature in the form of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ as to why Lady Bertilak spent so much time and energy pursuing and offering herself to Gawain, usually yields depressing results. The most popular response is (drumroll) ‘because she was in love with him’. For f*ck’s sake, literally. Of course this is a tricky question to answer: Lady Bertilak famously says in her almost scandalously sexual first address to Gawain: ‘3e ar welcum to my cors, Yowre awen won to wale’, ‘you are welcome to my body, to do as you please’.13 But what is it that pleases her? The answer is far from straightforward: part of late medieval literary tradition does indeed expect women to fall in

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love with Gawain on sight, yet another part of the same tradition portrays him as a self-confident yet failed lover, poorly attuned to women’s desires.14 An additional complication is the issue of the wife’s agency over her own body: Lawrence Warner observes that, when Lady Bertilak makes a point on the second day that she would never refuse Gawain ‘because he is strong enough to force her anyway, he responds, again, that it is the husband’s prerogative, not hers, to offer her body to him’.15 However, it is almost painful that many students’ automatic response – before being confronted with these subtleties – is that a smart wealthy woman would try to jump in bed with a man she sees for the second time in her life simply to please him. The picture grows even grimmer when we ask ourselves how much the people of the past actually knew about female anatomy and particularly its connection with pleasure. As Monica Green demonstrated, it was considered normal in the Middle Ages that male medical practitioners would not examine or even touch female patients.16 Barely any dissections of female bodies were conducted, and one of the most widespread female diagnoses since antiquity was ‘suffocation of the uterus’, which was believed to wander round the female body at will.17 The rare medieval diagrams of female organs predominantly deal with the position of an embryo in the womb, or, in extremely rare cases such as that of one illustrated thirteenth- and fourteenth-century collection on medicine, prognostication, and arithmetic held in the Bodleian Library, are downright confused and unhelpful.18 Green observes: ‘Anatomical illustrations of the female body were rare’; indeed, she was able to find a ‘highly schematised image of the internal female genitalia’ in only four late medieval Western manuscripts.19 These diagrams confirm graphically that the primary function of a woman in the minds of medieval physicians was that of a breeding machine.20 However, even for that aspect one had to consider female pleasure, which in GallenicSoranic theory was necessary for conception. The theory, based on the teleological principle (i.e. that every part of female reproductive anatomy is an imperfect reflection of that of a man), that conception was only possible if the woman also orgasmically emitted seed during intercourse was actively used in the forensic context of rape: it was argued that if the woman became pregnant as a result of

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rape, she enjoyed it at least carnally, even if her mind might not.21 William de Conches, in his widely copied mid-twelfth-century encyclopaedia Dragmaticon, seems to be the earliest authority to state concisely that, ‘[a]lthough raped women dislike the act in the beginning, in the end, however, from the weakness of the flesh, they like it’.22 This opinion seems to derive directly from Soranus’s observation that, ‘even if some women who were forced to have intercourse have conceived, one may say with reference to them that in any event the emotion of sexual appetite existed in them too, but was obscured by mental resolve’.23 Admittedly, the theory of the female seed was not the only view available, but it appears to be the one prevailing even until early modernity.24 This view rode on top of the widespread belief that all women have a constant sex drive due to their cold and moist nature, based on Galenic humoral medical theory.25 The authors of Malleus maleficarum summed it up succinctly, claiming that all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, ‘women being insatiable’.26 A less-known yet telling example from everyday life – a case of the rape of Joane Bellinger, a fifteen-year-old servant, by her master, Steven Jeffrey the tailor – has been discovered by Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh of the University of Kent. It is worth citing her transcript here in full, with Sweetinburgh’s kind permission, as it illustrates what has been said above: The examynation of Joane Bellinger, Late servaunt with Steven Jeffrey of the cyty of Canterbury, tayler, of the age of xv yeares or thereabowtes. Taken beffore Richard ffurner, alderman of the cyty of Canterbury, of the xxijth day of november in the yeare of our Lord 1571 in the presence of Richard Walleys. She saythe that Steven Jeffrey hir master, on munday last past at night being the xixth day of november aboute vj of the clock, hir dame then being at supper at Goodman Somers house, bad hir this deponent to come to him and when she was come to him the said Steven did take hir by the arme, and then did cast hir vpon the bed in the parler of his howse and then he shued his privy partes vnto hir and then pulled vp hir clothes and wold haue put his yard into hir, and then she slyd away from him of the bed and went owte of the parlor into the hall from hym and then he came after hir and toke hir by the arme and pulled hir into the parlor againe, and then laid hir on the bed there

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and pulled vp hir clothes, and made rowme in hir privy partes with his fyngers, and then had carnally to do with hir, and laid hir legges vpon his back lest she shuld slyde away ffrom hym, and she saythe she put hir handes beffore hir to defend hir from him as well as she cold, but she saythe she did neyther crye owte nor call for helpe to anye nor did complayne to any of yt, and she saythe that she did tell him that he did hurte hir, and he said ‘no Joane J do not hurte the, for this dothe me good and thee no harme’, and she saythe further that the said Steven hir master caused this deponent to sweare that as gode shuld iudge hir she wold nether tell ffather nor mother nor any other of yt, and she saythe further that the said Jeffrey wold haue had his pleasure of hir twyse or thryse but she with stode yt. ffurther thre honest women, viz Goodwyff Throwley, Goodwyff Raynoldes and Goodwyff Wallopp, being appoynted by the said Mr ffurmer to searche the said Joane Bellinger, do say and affarme that she, the said Joane, is very sore hurt in hir prevy partes, by suche meanes as she hathe confessed, and they say yt manifestly appeareth diuerse ways that she hathe bene carnally knowen and that she is so hurt by that meanes.27

Once again, a man knew better what is good for a woman sexually, and her consent did not matter; although in some earlier medieval legal examples there are provisions that lack of consent means punishable rape (even if the woman is known as the man’s concubine),28 popular medical and fiction narratives, including widely performed lyrics, seem to suggest that the female ‘no’ really meant ‘yes’.29 Moreover, Steven’s words to Joane betray the gendered cultural assumption that female hurt does not equal female harm: here, however, I suspect not an expectation of a masochistic pleasure but rather the more theologically informed idea that any sexual or reproductive pain is ultimately the price paid for Eve’s mortal sin and the divinely established female role as a man’s animated properly. One of the questions a scholar finds herself asking while looking for female pleasure in medieval medical literature and profane imagery is, ‘Where the heck is the clitoris?’ An extra complication is establishing the terms one should be looking for; this is still very much the case today. ‘There are no shared words yet for the details’, says OMGYES.com, a website dedicated to the exploration of and spreading knowledge about female sexual pleasure. One

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does not have to be a cunning linguist to realise that the coyness of many medieval literary examples would result in the absence of a clearly defined name for the relevant body parts, partially due to haphazard use of the terms of male anatomy applied to the female organs believed to be their imperfect mirror images, such as testicles for ovaries.30 Moschion, a Greek physician whose works are only known through later quotations, allegedly noticed the clitoris and gave it its name (κλειτορίς) in the first century AD, but his finding did not seem to take off,31 perhaps unsurprisingly given that none of his securely identifiable writings have survived. His betterknown Greco-Roman colleague Galen ostensibly referred to clitoris in passing as ‘nymph’, seeing its role as protection of the uterus (some theorists later suggested that it, along with other external parts, stops women from being impregnated by the wind, which apparently did its job by blowing); the same term is present in the roughly contemporary (early second century AD) work Gynaecia by another Greco-Roman physician, Soranus of Ephesus. Soranus does not seem to know what the part is there for and so avoids providing an explanation, usually present for other parts of the female anatomy. While discussing the labia, he observes: anteriorly they end in the so-called ‘nymph’. This latter is the origin of the two labia and by its nature it is a small piece of flesh almost like muscle; and it had been called ‘nymph’ because this piece of flesh hides like a bride. And beneath the nymph another small piece of projecting flesh lies hidden which is the end of the neck of the bladder. It is called the ‘urethra’ and its rough wrinkled interior is called the ‘lip’.32

Some Latin translations of Soranus’s Gynaecia call clitoris landica, although it is not clear whether the word comes from the Greek original – the main edition of the Latin Soranus notes the Greek marginalia ΛΑΝΔΥΚΑ in one of the manuscripts used, while the Greek text cited by the same edition still has νυμφ used in a similar context.33 These texts display the usual conflation of confident scientific tone and obscurity, typical of premodern medical writing: What is this sinus (cavity) in women? A nervous membrane similar to the large intestine: very spacious on the inside, on the outside, in which coitus with men and venereal acts take place, is truly narrow;

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it is in common speech called ‘cunnus’; outside of which are the labia, called ‘pterigomata’ in Greek, in Latin, ‘pinnacula’, and from the upper part descending in the middle is what is called the ‘landica’.34

Another term for the organ used occasionally in the medieval West seems to be ‘tentigo’, ‘a word whose fortunes from the time of late Latin civilization are not easy to follow’, further adding to the confusion of the already confused tradition.35 The Arabic medical tradition was only interested in the organ if it got out of hand and became an anomaly: in this case it was described as the ragadia of the womb (an inside growth protruding outside), which was often conflated with the hypertrophied clitoris; both of these were to be removed surgically. These texts also feature another part of female anatomy, batharum (or baccharum), transliterated from Arabic, and badedera, both probably meaning clitoris – the evidence suggesting that the Latin translators did not recognise it as the already existing nympha, landica, or tentigo.36 Neither Arabic nor Christian writers of the central Middle Ages seem to have been willing to challenge the symmetrical beauty of the teleological representation of the male/female organs, and even the beginning of the fourteenth century saw a famous surgeon, Henri de Mondeville, identifying the clitoris as the extremity of the urethra, apparently following the Soranic tradition.37 The most famous medieval compendium of women’s medicine, the Trotula, which originated in twelfth-century Salerno and consisted of several different works, says nothing about it at all.38 Avicenna and his followers seem to be the first medical writers to talk explicitly about foreplay, but even they recommend ‘rubbing the area between the anus and the vulva’,39 without any specific details. The Middle Eastern medical-sexual treatises appear to have been much more explicit and advanced, especially in the central Middle Ages, making use of both ancient Greek texts, Indian tradition, and local research, as attested in the Book of conversation with friends on the intimate relations between lovers in the domain of the science of sexuality, by scientist and physician Al-Samaw’al ibn Yah.yā al-Maghribī, a Jewish convert to Islam, in the middle of the twelfth century. He freely discusses homosexual practices among both men and women, and in the case of lesbianism he

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acknowledges the role of the clitoris – but even he ‘clearly dissociates clitoral pleasure from vaginal orgasm’, finding the former deficient.40 Such advanced thinking, however, never seems to have been embraced in the medieval West: in the early fourteenth century, Peter of Albano finally got specific and indicated that it is possible to bring a woman to orgasm by ‘having their upper orifice near the pubis rubbed’, but does not give a name to the part.41 Yet this new knowledge had to compete with the old idea that the ultimate penetration was the source of female pleasure: writing at the same time as Peter of Albano, John of Gaddesden, who taught medicine at the University of Oxford, suggested that to avoid uterine suffocation in unmarried women, ‘the midwife should insert a finger covered with oil of lily, laurel or spikenard into her womb and move it vigorously about’.42 Middle English does not even seem to have its own name for clitoris, other than a hypertrophied one, labelled ‘kikir’ in a fifteenth-century translation of Guy of Chauliac’s surgical treatise, while its male counterpart, ‘yerde’, had by then enjoyed a long and versatile circulation.43 Other potential candidates, such as the Old French ‘chose’ or its Middle English equivalent ‘thynge’, used by the Wife of Bath, generally referred to female genitalia overall – once again, clitoris is not a part even of the Wife’s vagenda. Another place one would go looking for pleasure-related words, the genre of medieval penitentials, does not seem to contain references to clitoris even as they get very graphic about potential sexual transgressions.44 Interestingly, early penitentials apparently do not recognise the concept of oral sex performed on a woman – only on a man – and even female masturbation most likely implied the use of an artificial phallus. Bede, prescribing penance for lesbian relationships between nuns, also assumes the use of an instrument, his text later repeated in subsequent penitential manuals: ‘Sanctaemoniales cum sanctaemoniale per machinam, anno vii’, ‘If nuns with a nun using an instrument, seven years’.45 Fornication ‘per machinam’ apparently added four more years to the penance, as earlier canons ascribed only three years ‘si mulier cum muliere fornicaverit’, ‘if a woman fornicated with a woman’.46 Confessional manuals of the central Middle Ages are more moralising and less detailed, with constantly repeated advice not to ask too much, lest one gives the confessees wrong ideas to act upon

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later; general consensus, however, seems to be that any act done outside of the proper vessel (i.e. any non-vaginal sex) should be defined as a vice against nature. Given that John Rykener, working as a female prostitute in late fourteenth-century London, was not discovered to be a man until having been arrested, non-vaginal sex must have been quite common, at least in certain circles, and did not raise any ­questions – besides, there is no record of him ever being ­punished.47 Sometimes there are intriguing references to the use of not simply the opposite or same-sex partners or beasts for pleasure, but also ‘inanimate objects such as images or other things’.48 When it comes to the question of auto-erotic acts, most of the details and the language pertain to male masturbation, even if women are sometimes obliquely mentioned in the preamble as well – a­ ttesting, once again, to the phallocentric perspective.49 Furthermore, in line with the ideas of male views on women’s sex drive, the question of frigidity is only discussed in the light of male  impotence and general sterility, not the lack of female pleasure.50 If you cannot name an object properly, does it exist? Medieval art is quite good at representing the unnameable and unmentionable, although sometimes indirectly.51 The same OMGYES.com remarks: ‘We live in an era when graphic violence is acceptable but even the word, “clitoris”, gets bleeped out on TV’; we might thus hope that the visual art is going to be more explicit (indeed, my Google image search history for this chapter was quite something), but that is not necessarily the case. It is well known that he (and historically it is usually a he, individual or collective) who controls the image controls the narrative. Antiquity apparently knew how to depict female anatomy, as demonstrated by a Pompeii bronze lamp from the first century AD, but preferred not to, as attested to by classical art museum collections displaying female nudes with perfectly smooth pelvises.52 As one can witness from the most famous representations of female external genitalia, Vulva on Pilgrimage and Sheela-na-gig, the clitoris is not there in medieval art either.53 Of course these representations are not supposed to be anatomically correct as vulvas do not normally sprout little hands and feet, but surely the details that get included are significant. Aye, there’s the rub: to the medieval audience, the female genitals consisted of hair, labia, and the opening – unless it is the clitoris that is disguised by

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Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain (fl. 1460–1502) as a ‘tender frieze/ hedge’ in her ode to female genitals (Cywydd y cedor).54 It therefore looks like medieval Western medical culture was pretty icliterate. But did the Renaissance see the rediscovery of the clitoris, as Katharine Park famously suggests?55 I think not. We historians are used to our ancestors ignoring empirical evidence in favour of prior cultural politics and established authorities. Nor am I as optimistic as Karma Lochrie in her Heterosyncrasies, where she seems to overstate the medieval awareness of the clitoris and its function for female pleasure. A handful of scholars like Albertus Magnus followed Galenic cues and viewed the clitoris as homologous to the penis: the Latin virga, often used for penis, sometimes appears in relation to female genitalia; Gilbert the Englishman also uses ‘nervus’, for the same application.56 However, precious few who succeeded them agreed. Vesalius even argued in the sixteenth century that the clitoris did not appear in healthy women.57 It is true that in 1485 the Malleus maleficarum famously suggested that the clitoris was one of the ‘Devil’s teats’, and, if found on a woman, would prove her status as a witch. However, it had nothing to do with pleasure but rather with the unnatural mimicking of male anatomy and subversion of the God-created universal order.58 (To paraphrase a famous meme about white men on the Internet, the clitoris has around eight thousand nerve endings and still is not as sensitive as a medieval theologian writing about female sexuality.) It is also true that the Renaissance saw a rise in interest in clitoris-centred female sexual pleasure, coupled with more regular use of dissection, which appears to be an alarming combination, omitting the possibility of asking the clitoris-owner about it – but was this a sign that many of the owners had no idea about its function? Honoré de Balzac wrote in 1829: ‘A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman’; he was to stay unmarried for another twenty years.59 Dutch gynaecologist Theodoor van de Velde, who first demonstrated that women only ovulate once in each menstrual cycle, added to this notion a century later, noting that ‘careful study may obviate the need for actual dissection’.60 It was, however, not until 1981 that the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Clinics created anatomically correct images of the clitoris, and not until 2009 that a 3D model of the clitoris was produced.61

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From a review of medieval literature, it looks like some knew about the clitoris as a separate organ, and some of those realised its role in female pleasure, but the impact of this knowledge was minimal. I do not accept that ‘instrument’ (l. 149) or ‘queynte’ (l. 444) or ‘bele chose’ (l. 447) in The Wife of Bath’s tale refer to the clitoris, as Karma Lochrie argues: these terms sound more like simply generic female genitals or more specifically the vagina.62 True, Chaucer lists an impressive catalogue of medical authorities in the General Prologue of The Canterbury tales (ll. 429–34), but we know that the views on the clitoris expressed by these authorities were confused and inconsistent at best. Besides, listing does not guarantee that Chaucer actually read them all. I do, however, agree that, despite the emphasis on ‘appetite’ and other medieval dirty talk, it is evident that the primary pleasure the Wife gets from her first three or four husbands is her ‘maysterie’ over them: her relentless nagging and desire for financial gain may be read as a s­ublimation of her unfulfilled sexuality. Indeed, her sexual pleasure, once again, is not there, and she admits she had to ‘make me a feyned appetit’ (l. 417) to get goods or money out of her husbands. Can it be, too, the reason for her barrenness, at least partly? Here one begins to query whether the fabliau cliche of the sexually demanding wife may have some real grounding in the expressions of married women’s sexual frustration, as their husbands proved to be insensitive or disinterested in discovering what it is that pleases their wives in bed. The suggestion of ‘lust abedde’ (l. 927) as something women most desire does not feature more than a dismissible couple of words in a long catalogue of hypotheses assembled by the rapist knight in the Wife’s own tale. Even when the Wife finally gets sexually pleasured by her fifth (younger) husband Jankyn, ‘ironically, her achievement of this mastery in the marriage, according to the logic of her own account, suggests the end of her sexual pleasure’.63 But perhaps because the absence of pleasure was expected by many authors of the ­‘missionary’  – theological, canonical,  pastoral and penitential – literature, it never made it into writing: as David Aers remarks in relation to Margery Kempe, such sexual distress is a ‘common area of traditional female experience habitually blocked from literary record and exploration’.64

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But surely, one would say, there were also private agreements of mutual pleasure or solo practices resulting in the ‘prediscovery’ of the clitoris, which did not make it into writing? Given that basic biology has not changed since the Middle Ages, one would hope so, but there are many accounts of Western women as late as the twentieth century needing to learn about their own anatomy and what to do with it, despite all the efforts of 1970s feminism, the calls for self-examination, and the work of educators such as Betty Dodson.65 Surely, too, there must have been other pleasures in having sex for those women who could not climax through vaginal penetration? Certainly, there is pleasure to be found ‘in submission, in the awareness of one’s conformity to an experience that was not in itself pleasant’, as Sarah Salih argues in her important article on unpleasures of the flesh within medieval marriage.66 As one of her examples, Salih cites Margery Kempe, who, considering her sexual experience after the traumatic birth of her first child, ‘gained the awareness of performing obedience – and the worse the sex, the better the obedience’.67 Salih makes use of such modern critics as William Simon, who observe that part of the complex pleasure derived from sexual acts comes from the narrative framework of sociocultural and personal meanings, of successful performance ‘of the actor’s interpersonal script and its embodiment of elements of the actor’s intrapsychic script’.68 Such an approach is not limited to modern or postmodern societies, but is evident in medieval sexual narratives as well. To start with, medieval Christianity can be viewed as a masochistic religion, with a specific focus on sacrifice, penance, and mortification of flesh, as well as anticipation of the bodily resurrection; a whole industry of scholarly work has arisen to examine the interplay between pain and pleasure in medieval Western religious culture, including the contributions to this volume.69 With the abundance of male theologians, it took a woman, Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), to formulate towards the end of the Middle Ages the paradox of purgatory, where souls enjoy the greatest happiness and endure the greatest pain simultaneously, resulting in ‘unspeakably pleasant torments’.70 In line with the medieval debates on hellish and purgatorial pains, modern theorists such as Baumeister and Weinberg have long warned against seeing physical

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pain as the main guiding principle of S/M: what is crucial is the illusion of pain, which is symbolic of dominance.71 Corinne Saunders has previously examined at length the complicated blend of victimisation and agency present in medieval (mostly fictional) narratives of rape.72 In reality it may have justified, encouraged, or reinforced traits already present in people, especially masochistic inclinations in women. Recent research suggests that while the majority of male sadomasochists (53 per cent) displayed their interest before entering mid-adolescence, the majority of females (78  per  cent) developed their interest afterwards; for women, sadomasochism – and especially masochism – can be a more naturally acquired taste.73 The vector, however, could point in the other direction, to the opposite of the pleasure of complying to the sociocultural norms of the day and to one’s life-script. As J. J. Cohen suggested regarding the example of Chrétien de Troyes’s The knight of the cart, another potential pleasure for the fictional Guinevere could have been her sadistic power over Lancelot and to him his masochistic submission.74 There, one can see at least one example of inequality being erotically celebrated, providing some evidence for Žižek’s reading of medieval courtly culture as essentially masochistic.75 Yet for Lancelot, the pain is often not illusionary and is self-inflicted as he throws himself into every fight to prove his worth; meanwhile, Guinevere’s dominance is not symbolic but a real struggle to regain at least some agency, if only through the giving or withholding of her body for someone else’s sexual pleasure. Given that our every experience is an embodied one, to me one cannot take biology out of the equation altogether in either the premodern or the modern world; this makes the clitoris such a hotbutton test case, as it really was not on people’s body-maps for a long time – even longer than that other elusive element of female anatomy, the hymen.76 The intrapsychic scripts of such complexity as outlined above are often indicative of the convoluted defence mechanisms that allow humans to adapt to adverse biological conditions such as lack of food, safety, or pleasure – so that in a traditional/patriarchal society the lack of pleasure does not even register as something unusual, at least among women. As Karma Lochrie puts it, culturally twisted medieval sexual politics turn out ‘to be a tortuous system of debts and credits logged independently of human

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desires or genital arousals. Sexual acts that mimic financial balance sheets become less natural ones, comparable to urinating, and more obligatory ones, comparable to paying one’s monthly bills’.77 It is true that there is an apparent similarity between a traditional marriage and an S/M relationship, as conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze: he defined the source of the masochist’s pleasure in ‘the contract’, whereas seeing the sadist’s pleasure as coming from ‘the law’, which places the sadist above the other. The aim of the contract, however, is to control the other participant of the relationship and eventually make them cold and callous, infinitely delaying gratification: the masochist ‘therefore postpones pleasure in expectation of the pain which will make gratification possible. The anxiety of the masochist divides therefore into an indefinite awaiting of pleasure and an intense expectation of pain’.78 This latter part, at least in my view, does not explicitly correspond with the medieval idea of marriage, even though it was more often than not a contractual relationship, but with a medieval view of doomsday and the eternal kingdom of God. Pastoral literature instructed husbands that they would be responsible should a sexually unsatisfied wife resort to adultery (there is a deliciously humorous story, told by Orderic Vitalis in his Ecclesiastical history, of how William’s conquest of England was nearly derailed by Norman women who, having grown frustrated by the long absence of their husbands, threatened that ‘ipsae sibi alios conjuges procurarent’, ‘they would take other husbands for themselves’), but there the text is ostensibly talking about the payment of the marital debt of vaginal intercourse in a missionary position.79 As Ruth Mazo Karras observes, medieval ideas of sexuality had a very strong active (masculine)/passive (feminine) divide; it was not so much about mutuality but about the sexual act being done by somebody to somebody else.80 Besides, as Dyan Elliott argues, debt alone is not likely to be ‘free from all inequities built into the gender system’.81 Therefore, the Wife of Bath’s initial reading of the conjugal debt solely in her favour, while talking about the first three husbands, begins to unravel as she moves on to numbers four and five, suggesting that her rhetorical and sexual bravado is nothing but wishful thinking, unsustainable in the legal and social environment of her day; consequently, she has to

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eroticise Jankyn’s violence against her to explain away her pain and injuries.82 Some medical texts, including the Middle English version of the popular Trotula, acknowledge that for some women penetration is painful but that they just have to bite the bullet. The medical advice given, however, is aimed at treating the post-coital pain or administering pre-coital pain-killers by prescribing ointments, or by sneaking anti-aphrodisiacs into men’s menu.83 The question of how to make sex more pleasurable for a woman is not raised there, not even in the Avicennian way of ‘rubbing her genitals’. Lochrie almost suggests that medieval people knew about the functions of the clitoris but would silence or discard this knowledge due to their ‘anxieties about female masculinity and desire’, especially since some authors directly compared the clitoris to an underdeveloped penis (which in some pathological cases tries to develop itself into one).84 It is true that there was a great deal of male anxiety about the mysterious female genitalia in general, expressed in medical narratives of stored poisonous seed or more popular stories in which some virgins possess an ability to harm men trying to have intercourse with them, told in a number of narratives across cultures, from The Book of Tobit to John de Mandeville’s defloration squad.85 Yet the detached wound of Christ, bloodied and pierced with Longinus’s spear (and a cosy place for all humankind in Jesus-as-Mother’s side, according to Julian of Norwich), which in the later Middle Ages becomes a popular meditation aid, is uncannily and perhaps deliberately similar to the contemporary vulvaon-pilgrimage badges.86 The confused and paradoxical attitude towards the female genitalia is beautifully illustrated in a vision of Hildegard of Bingen, herself an author of gynaecological texts. In her Apocalyptic vision, the Ecclesia suddenly displays in place of her privy parts ‘a monstrous and very black head’ with fiery eyes, ass’s ears, and the nose and mouth of a lion, gnashing ‘its ironlike and horrible teeth’.87 Yet neither the vision nor the accompanying image of the vagina dentata (which subsequently turns out to be the head of the Antichrist) in all its threatening agency contains even a hint of a metaphorical clitoris. From reading premodern authorities, medical or otherwise, one rather gains the impression that they had very little clue about clitoris as the actual organ, and more often than not did not want to see its most obvious function, while

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love for the ancient symmetrical theories at the expense of empirical knowledge plagued medicine well into the nineteenth century, if not beyond.88 Sarah Salih, talking about medieval unpleasures of the flesh, reminds us that medieval marriage was not a private affair, but a theatre with a substantial audience, observing and passing comment on one another’s success in maintaining proper marital relationships.89 This in many ways remains true of modern sexual life, especially for women: relatives, colleagues, and neighbours aside, their partners’ expectations and their own self-image must often be privately propped up by a faked physical pleasure in order to get satisfaction from one’s social ‘normalcy’. Luckily, we are finding new reasons for and new ways of talking about various pleasures, including physical ones. So even if it may not have been important for the medieval audience whether or not Guinevere would climax by putting the sword in the stone, it should matter to us today.

Notes   1 Lili Loofbourow, ‘The female price of male pleasure’, The week, 25  January 2018, https://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-pricemale-pleasure (accessed 20 May 2019); ‘Measuring the #MeToo backlash: survey respondents have become more sceptical about claims of sexual harassment’, The economist, 20 October 2018, www.econo​ mist.com/united-states/2018/10/20/measuring-the-metoo-backlash (accessed 20 May 2019).   2 Peter Cryle and Alison Moore, Frigidity: an intellectual history (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2.   3 Alison Gulley, ‘Introduction: teaching rape and meeting the challenges of the twenty-first-century classroom’, in Teaching rape in the medieval literature classroom: approaches in difficult texts, ed. Alison Gulley (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2018), pp. 1–11 (p. 1).   4 Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s sexual poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 11; see Gulley, ‘Introduction’, p. 2, for more references.   5 D. A. Frederick et al., ‘Differences in orgasm frequency among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual men and women in a U.S. national

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sample’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47.1 (2018): 273–88; Karen L. Blair, Jaclyn Cappell, and Caroline F. Pukall, ‘Not all orgasms were created equal: differences in frequency and satisfaction of orgasm experiences by sexual activity in same-sex versus mixed-sex relationships’, Journal of sex research, 55.6 (2018): 719–33.   6 Searching for ‘vaginal orgasm’ on academia.edu alone fetches several thousand items. Some published sample studies include: Rui Miguel Costa, Geoffrey F. Miller, and Stuart Brody, ‘Women who prefer longer penises are more likely to have vaginal orgasms (but not clitoral orgasms): implications for an evolutionary theory of vaginal orgasm’, Journal of sexual medicine, 9 (2012): 3079–88; Stuart Brody and Petr Weiss, ‘Simultaneous penile-vaginal intercourse orgasm is associated with satisfaction (sexual, life, partnership, and mental health)’, Journal of sexual medicine, 8 (2011): 734–41; Giovanni Luca Gravina et al., ‘Measurement of the thickness of the urethrovaginal space in women with or without vaginal orgasm’, Journal of sexual medicine, 5 (2008): 610–18.   7 Kim Anami (https://kimanami.com) is a wonderful and hugely popular example.   8 See, e.g., Holly Brockwell, ‘Shocking that high-profile tech organisations are still making gendered blunders’, dezeen, 10 January 2019, www.dezeen.com/2019/01/10/ces-ose-sex-toy-opinion/; Vivian Ho, ‘Robotic dildo barred from top tech showcase, prompting sexism claims’, Guardian, 8 January 2019, www.theguardian.com/technol​ ogy/2019/jan/08/ces-dildo-gender-sex-toy-ose-personal-massager; Sara Jones, ‘CES’ Osé massager ban speaks volumes about society’s archaic attitudes towards female sexual pleasure’, HuffPost, 11 January 2019, https://bit.ly/3EkhyYi (all accessed 20 May 2019).   9 Thomas Laqueur, Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), viii; pp. 28–9 (on Aristotle), p. 240 (on Freud and penis envy). 10 Doris Lessing, The golden notebook (London: Michael Joseph, 1962), p. 200. 11 The essay is readily available in various places on the Internet, e.g. Anne Koedt, ‘Myth of the vaginal orgasm’, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union: Herstory project, www.cwluherstory.org/classic-feminist-writ​ ings-articles/myth-of-the-vaginal-orgasm (accessed 20 May 2019). 12 Isabel Davis, ‘Men and Margery: negotiating medieval patriarchy’, in A companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 35–54; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s sexual politics, pp. 113–31.

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13 ‘Sir Gawain and Green Knight’, in The poems of the Pearl manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), lines 1230–40. 14 See Keith Busby and Raymond H. Thompson (eds), Gawain: a casebook (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), particularly the reprint of B. J. Whiting’s essay ‘Gawain: his reputation, his courtesy, and his appearance in Chaucer’s squire’s tale’, pp. 45–94; G. M. Shedd, ‘Knight in tarnished armour: the meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Modern languages review, 62 (1967), 1–13; Juliana Dresvina, ‘The shadow of Dido: an interpretation of the Trojan episodes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Authority and gender in medieval and renaissance chronicles, ed. Juliana Dresvina and Nicholas Sparks (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), pp. 259–89. 15 ‘Sir Gawain and Green Knight’, ll. 1498–1500. See also Lawrence Warner, ‘Mary, unmindful of her knight: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the traditions of sexual hospitality’, Studies in the age of Chaucer, 35 (2013): 263–87 (285). 16 Monica Green, Making women’s medicine masculine: the rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 17 See, e.g., Helen King, Hippocrates’ woman: reading the female body in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), esp. 240. 18 Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 399, fol. 13v. The digitalised manuscript can be viewed at https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/ manuscript_343. Another example of the same is found is an early fifteenth-century German manuscript, now Wellcome Collection MS 49, fol. 38r, https://bit.ly/3qEd6oO (both accessed on 20 May 2019). 19 Monica Green, ‘Gynecology’, in Women and gender in medieval Europe: an encyclopedia, ed. Margaret C. Shaus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 339–43 (p. 340). 20 Claude Thomasset, ‘The nature of woman’, in A history of women in the West: silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 43–69 (p. 43). 21 See Hiram Kuemper, ‘Learned men and skilful matrons: medical expertise and the forensics of rape in the Middle Ages’, in Medicine and the law in the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 88–108 (esp. pp. 101–3).

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22 Italo Ronca and Matthew Curr (eds), William of Conches, a dialogue of natural philosophy (Dragmaticon philosophiae) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 136. 23 Soranus of Ephesus, Soranus’ gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 36. 24 Thomasset, ‘The nature of woman’, pp. 54–8. 25 Henrietta Leyser, Medieval women: a social history of women in England 450–1500 (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 97. 26 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The malleus maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), p. 47. 27 Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, City of Canterbury Quarter Sessions Papers, CC-J/Q/371; transcription by Sheila Sweetinburgh; additional punctuation is mine. 28 Kuemper, ‘Learned men and skilful matrons’, pp. 91–2. 29 See, e.g., Wendy Perkins and Christina de Gangi, ‘Teaching medieval rape culture across genre: Insights from victimology’, in Gulley, Teaching rape, pp. 29–46. For further discussion of medieval rape, see Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing maidens: writing rape in medieval French literature and law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Corinne Saunders, Rape and ravishment in the literature of medieval England (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001); Suzanne M. Edwards, The afterlives of rape in medieval English literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 30 Thomasset, ‘The nature of woman’, pp. 46, 53; the Latin translation of Soranus explicitly uses testiculi for ovaries: Sorani gynaeciorum vetus translatio Latina, ed. F. R. Dietz and V. Rose (Lipsiae: in aedibus B.G. Teubneri, 1882), p. 10. 31 Thomasset, ‘The nature of woman’, p. 47. 32 Soranus’ gynecology, p. 16. 33 Sorani gynaeciorum vetus translation, pp. 9, 183. 34 Sorani gynaeciorum vetus translation, pp. 8–9: ‘12a Quid ipse sinus muliebris? membranum nervosum maioris intestini simile. intus autem est spatiosissimus, foris vero angustus, in quo coitus virorum et usus venerius efficitur. quem vulgo cunnum appellant. cuius foris labra graece pterigomata dicuntur, latine pinnacula dicta sunt, et a superiore parte descendens in medio dicta est landica’. Here my translation of the passage differs slightly from that of Karma Lochrie’s rendition from ‘Before the tribade: medieval anatomies of female masculinity and pleasure’, in Heterosyncrasies: female sexuality when normal wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 77.

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35 Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and medicine in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 45. 36 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and medicine in the Middle Ages, pp. 45–6; Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, pp. 79, 82. 37 Thomasset, ‘The nature of woman’, p. 47. 38 Monica Green (ed.), The trotula: a medieval compendium of women’s medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 39 Avicenna’s Canon, trans. Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century, cited in several works, including Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 131; April Harper and Caroline Proctor (eds), Medieval sexuality: a casebook (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), p. 117; Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, p. 81. 40 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 124. 41 Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, p. 85. 42 Cited in Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 176. 43 See Margaret Sinclair Ogden (ed.), The cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac (London: published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1971); Lochrie, ‘Before the Tribade’, pp. 87–8. 44 See, e.g., John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (eds), Medieval handbooks of penance: a translation of the principal ‘Libri poenitentiales’ and selections from related documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); also Erin Abraham’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 6). 45 Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the penitentials: the development of a sexual code, 550–1150 (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 29, 46, 43, 172. 46 Payer, Sex and the penitentials, pp. 43, 172. For the most recent review of literature on invisibility of medieval same-sex female desire, see Victoria Blud, The unspeakable, gender and sexuality in medieval literature 1000–1400 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 85–8. 47 ‘The questioning of John Rykener, a male cross-dressing prostitute, 1395’, Internet medieval sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall (New York: Fordham University, 1998), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ source/1395rykener.asp (accessed 20 May 2019). 48 Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the new medieval literature of confession ­1150–1300 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), p. 127. 49 Payer, Sex and the new medieval literature of confession, pp. 126–47. 50 Payer, Sex and the new medieval literature of confession, p. 147.

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51 See, e.g., Nicola McDonald (ed.), Medieval obscenities (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2006). 52 Mary Harrsch, ‘Bronze lamp in the shape of a Nubian head Pompeii Roman 1st century CE, photographed at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry as part of Pompeii: the exhibition in Portland, Oregon’, www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/26673554498 (accessed 20 May 2019). 53 Jørgen Andersen, The witch on the wall: medieval erotic sculpture in the British Isles (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1977); A. M.  Koldeweij, ‘Lifting the veil on pilgrim badges’, in Pilgrimage explored, ed. Jennie Stopford (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1999), pp. 161–88 (pp. 185–8). 54 For the verse translation see Katie Gramich, Orality and morality: early Welsh women’s poetry (Cardiff: Cardiff University, 2005), pp. 8–9. 55 Katharine Park, ‘The rediscovery of the clitoris: French medicine and the tribade, 1570–1620’, in The body in parts: fantasies of corporality in early modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 171–93. 56 Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, p. 85. 57 Vincent Di Marino and Hubert Lepidi, Anatomic study of the clitoris and the bulbo-clitoral organ (New York: Springer, 2014), p. 6. 58 Kramer and Sprenger, The malleus maleficarum, p. 161. 59 Honore de Balzac, The physiology of marriage and Pierre Grassou (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), p. 57. 60 G. L. Simonds, The illustrated book of sexual records (London: Virgin, 1984), p. 168. 61 Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, A new view of a woman’s body: a fully illustrated guide (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981); P. Foldes and O. Buisson, ‘The clitoral complex: a dynamic sonographic study’, Journal of sexual medicine, 6.5 (2009): 1223–31. 62 See ‘chose, n.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2021), www.oed.com/view/Entry/32367, and ‘quaint, n.1’, OED Online, www.oed.com/view/Entry/155828; for these terms as clitoris, see Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, pp. 94–6. 63 Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, p. 92; Carolyne Dinshaw, however, holds a different view that the Wife does not in fact want mastery but mutual recognition and satisfaction of desires (Dinshaw, Chaucer’s sexual poetics, p. 125). 64 David Aers, Community, gender, and individual identity: English writing, 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 90.

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65 Steven Seidman, Nancy Fischer, and Chet Meeks (eds), Handbook of the new sexuality studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 112. 66 Sarah Salih, ‘Unpleasures of the flesh: medieval marriage, masochism, and the history of heterosexuality’, Studies in the age of Chaucer, 33 (2011): 125–47 (132). 67 Salih, ‘Unpleasures of the flesh’, 144. 68 Salih, ‘Unpleasures of the flesh’, 132. 69 The most famous and influential example is Robert Mills, Suspended animation: pain, pleasure and punishment in medieval culture (London: Reaktion, 2005). 70 John Casey, After lives: a guide to heaven, hell, and purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 231–4. 71 Erich Goode and D. Angus Vaile (eds), Extreme deviance (Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press, 2008), p. 202. 72 Saunders, Rape and ravishment. 73 Norman Breslow, Linda Evans, and Jill Langley, ‘On the prevalence and roles of females in the sadomasochistic substructure: report of an empirical study’, Archives of sexual behavior, 14.4 (1985): 303–17. To a certain extent these findings were confirmed nine years later, see Eugene Levitt, Charles Moser, and Karen Jamison, ‘The prevalence of some attributes of females in the sadomasochistic subculture: a second report’, Archives of sexual behavior, 23.4 (1994): 456–73. 74 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Masoch/Lancelotism’, New literary history, 28.2 (1997): 231–60. 75 Slavoj Žižek, The metastases of enjoyment: six essays on woman and causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 89. 76 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Virginity now and then’, in Medieval virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 234–53 (pp. 242–8). 77 Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, p. 93. 78 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 9–138 (p. 20). 79 Payer, Sex and the new medieval literature of confession, pp. 174–82; Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical history, vol. II, book 3, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–80), pp. 218–20. 80 Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe: doing unto others (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 27. 81 Dyan Elliott, Spiritual marriage: sexual abstinence in medieval wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 148.

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82 For similar argument, see also Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s art and the Wife of Bath: the ethics of erotic violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 125–41. 83 Middle English: ‘be constreyned to suffer wyl they nyl they’, see Beryl Rowland (ed.), Medieval woman’s guide to health: the first English gynecological handbook (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 46, 166. Interestingly, the standard Latin version of the Trotula says nothing about how to deal with painful intercourse; see Green, The trotula. 84 Lochrie, ‘Before the tribade’, p. 102. 85 See, e.g., David Williams, Deformed discourse: the function of the monster in mediaeval thought and literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), pp. 164–6. 86 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of divine love, long text, Chapter 24 in Showing of Love, ed. Anna Maria Reynolds and Julia Bolton Holloway (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001), pp. 235–6, 546; Koldeweij, ‘Lifting the veil on pilgrim badges’. For a discussion of the genitalisation of Christ’s wound, see chapters 5 and 7 in Amy Hollywood, Acute melancholia and other essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). See also ‘The vagina as the wound’ section in Anita Phillips, A defence of masochism (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), pp. 55–6, on Freud and his female followers’ views. 87 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Bruce Hozaski (Santa Fe: Bear & Company, 1986), p. 345, illustrated in the now-lost Rupertsberg Codex, c.1165–80 (codex plate 32), https://bit.ly/3zbBl1G (accessed 20 May 2019). 88 See David Wooton, Bad medicine: doctors doing harm since Hippocrates (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 89 Salih, ‘Unpleasures of the flesh’, p. 142.

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8 Queer consolation: BDSM in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s tale, sadistic epistemology, and the ends of suffering Masha Raskolnikov Contemporary BDSM practice looks longingly back at the Middle Ages in its enjoyment of shackles and dungeons, floggings, and St Andrew’s crosses.1 This is the essence of medievalism: to take up some aspect of medieval life (correctly or erroneously understood) and turn it into fodder for fantasy. It seems safe to say that contemporary BDSM practitioners understand the difference between modern and medieval instances of induced physical suffering to be the difference between consent and its lack. Consent is not a relevant category to someone being tortured in the medieval public square.2 Things were more complex where the re-enactment of biblical history was concerned, as in representations of Christ’s buffeting, scourging, and crucifixion in the Corpus Christi Day pageants.3 However strongly an audience might be titillated or aroused by the performance of public violence, whether juridical or religious in nature, however strongly such scenes might be available to contemporary imaginations as instances of sexual perversity, they were not necessarily ever understood by medieval subjects who took willing or unwilling part in them in the same way that contemporary sexual communities understand BDSM. The difference lies, over and over again, in the nature of consent as the basis of contemporary BDSM practice.4 And yet, much as one might want to draw border lines and acknowledge anachronisms and to bear in mind the differences between desired, eroticised, and punitive, non-eroticised physical suffering, those lines also turn out to blur in ways that might be understood as queer and through queer theory’s theorisation of desire. To ground a given sexual minority group’s difference in history is to insist that its manifestation of desire is not merely contemporary

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innovation but rather a storied, established aspect of human sexual variation. I was drawn to medieval studies in part by promises of the absolute alterity of medieval minds, mores, and writings, but my research continually returns me to the importance of acknowledging continuities between what desire is and what it has been. It is not that the queer work that has been done about the Middle Ages posits identities that are identical to or, in some form of genealogical thinking, ancestral to modern queer and trans lives.5 It is that, as Carolyn Dinshaw has theorised, there are queer proximities and contingencies that permit us to touch the medieval past in particular ways.6 Specifically, it has been important, both from a scholarly and a political perspective, to note continuities between the making of same-sex pair bonds in the Middle Ages and today, as well as between the reality of gender and sex variation beyond the male/ female binary in the Middle Ages and today.7 We know much less about intention and consent when reading accounts of the distant past, of course, which makes BDSM somewhat different from some other practices, practices that are more knowable because they either did or did not leave behind artefacts. The artefacts of BDSM from the distant past are more likely to be stories than instruments, since instruments could have been used solely for juridical purposes. When searching for evidence of BDSM practices in distant historical texts like these, we need to know the intentions of the actors, insofar as these can be known, and we need some sense that consent was granted. When Peter Abelard writes in his Historia calamitatum that among the sexual pleasures that he had experienced with Heloise were ‘sometimes blows, but love gave them, not anger; they were the marks not of wrath but of a tenderness surpassing the most fragrant balm in sweetness’, it is not entirely clear that he is conveying Heloise’s pleasure or even her consent so much as his own.8 However, the reality that this twelfth-century philosopher was able to experience sadism as a part of sexual play – and was able to articulate that this was the case – speaks to the possibility that such practices were understood to be part of human sexual variability (coded, of course, as ‘sinful’ and ‘forbidden’, as all non-marital, non-reproductive sex was).9 So the question becomes, is contemporary use of medieval motifs in BDSM imagery merely an appropriation of the suffering

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of historically distant others? What would it mean to think seriously about how medieval authors use narratives that deal with the nature of power exchange, of voluntary submission to pain or humiliation? To do so with the work of Geoffrey Chaucer is to understand the ‘Father of English Poetry’ to have engaged with the whole range of human affective and erotic potential. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales, the modest Clerk tells the story of Walter, an Italian marquis who, having long refused to marry, was eventually persuaded to take a wife and marries a simple peasant girl named Griselda. Prior to marrying, he requires of her the promise of total obedience, and, in the course of their marriage, he proceeds to test this, first by taking away both her first- and second-born children (causing her to think that he had them killed), and finally by pretending to put her aside as his wife. Walter even makes Griselda organise an elaborate ceremony for his supposedly imminent marriage to a much younger noblewoman. The feudal subjects, who had earlier demanded that Walter marry in order to sire an heir, do not try to stop him, and neither does Griselda, who consents to every one of his edicts and actions with a scandalous lack of protest. In the end, the arriving noblewoman turns out to be Griselda’s daughter, returning from having been fostered abroad along with her brother; all happiness restored, Griselda and Walter live happily ever after. I am one of the many who find The Clerk’s tale difficult, indeed, nearly unbearable to read, although I have, to my own surprise, also experienced it as a work of consolation in hard times, and it is that experience – that The Clerk’s tale can actually be a perverse source of comfort – that lies at the root of this article’s thinking. Unlike other Canterbury tales, unlike ‘real life’, the suffering depicted in The Clerk’s tale has an endpoint and much of what is lost in the course of the narrative is restored in time. The Clerk’s tale almost hyperbolically privileges the discourse of consent in the context of a relationship that includes the infliction of pain by one party on another. Chaucer uses the Middle English verb for consent – ‘assente’ – no fewer than seven times in the course of the relatively brief tale, often rhyming it with ‘entente’ (intention), a word that appears even more often. To recognise that the exchange depicted in The Clerk’s tale is premised on knowable intent and consent is

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to understand the tale to be working out what the limits of what can be consented to might be. The narrative’s details, read this way, turn actions that might have been understood as abusive into actions taken in the context of consensual submission. Walter’s overwhelming, risky desire to know, his ‘sadistic epistemology’, poses the question – how is his desire to ‘assay’ Griselda’s virtue different from simple cruelty?10 The word for test, ‘assaye’, appears in the text nine times, even more often than does the word ‘assente’ (consent).11 I use the term ‘sadistic epistemology’ to describe a sort of knowledge (and a desire for knowledge) that is not constrained by a fear of hurting its object, indeed considering the object’s pain as part of the information that it covets. Sadistic epistemology can take the form of causing suffering in order to extract information or simply to see how much a given person can endure. While there is much play and fantasy using what this chapter terms sadistic epistemology in contemporary BDSM practice, this practice or desire can also just as easily manifest as mere non-consensual cruelty. While it is impossible to guess at or posit Chaucer’s intention, the sheer pressure put upon consent in the text shows that Chaucer is using this tale to work through something about human relationships that strongly resembles contemporary thinking about the limits of what it is that can be consented to.12 Moreover, The Clerk’s tale is a work that depicts sadomasochism in a queer mode, as it takes up the performance of power inequality that constitutes heterosexuality under patriarchy and exaggerates it into a hyperbolic perversion of itself, something like what drag might be said to do with the performance of gender.13 In this last sense, as a critique of normativity that delves into that normativity’s implications, The Clerk’s tale, while depicting heterosexual marriage, should be understood as a fundamentally queer work. What follows looks at the text’s evocation of sadomasochism through the discourse of consent and the problem of free will in its relationship to a possible critique of heteronormativity. Subsequently, the chapter turns to how the critique of Walter and Griselda’s behaviour embedded in the text forbids audience members from venturing into the couple’s perverse territory. Lastly, this chapter concludes with a consideration of how the tension between ‘earnest’ and ‘game’ as delineated in The Clerk’s tale lets this text perform a surprising work of consolation.

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To read The Clerk’s tale as a queer text helps us avoid the error of eliding the actual story in favour of its allegorical power – the error of reading fiction in a purely exegetical mode, which, arguably, Chaucer himself is always both inviting from and denying to readers.14 While references to the biblical story of Job are twice repeated in the tale itself and are a necessary aspect of critical work on it, reading The Clerk’s tale in a typological manner alone is just not enough to make sense of it, in part because, for both modern and medieval readers, Griselda’s gender and class status vis-à-vis Walter’s stands out as an important difference between her and the Bible’s patriarchal Job. A reading of this text based in queer theory can show that, with this tale, Chaucer is grappling with the nature of ‘normal’ or ‘normative’ marriage, because queer theory is the area of academia where the very idea of ‘normal’ sexuality or gender has been most put to the question. The phrase ‘hyper-­ heterosexuality’ might be helpful here – Walter and Griselda’s marriage is so p ­ atriarchally structured, so surfeited with power imbalance, that it takes up the ‘normal’ workings of medieval marriage and magnifies them, rendering the institution suddenly uncanny and dangerous. With The Clerk’s tale, Chaucer unmakes common sense about how heterosexuality ‘works’ and readers have to grapple with the results. Reading The Clerk’s tale with queer theory means understanding the hyper-heterosexuality of Walter and Griselda’s patriarchally structured marriage in relation to the queerly non-normative ­practice of BDSM (which means that this chapter reads The Clerk’s tale as both queer and hyper-normative). Even though there seems to be general agreement that stigmatised sexual practices like BDSM belong ‘inside’ queer discourse, the hyper-heterosexuality on display in The Clerk’s tale has to be read against the grain (as parodic or even frightening rather than as earnest) in order to be understood in this framework.15 Among other things, this chapter will show how necessary such a reading against the grain is for understanding the sheer strangeness of The Clerk’s tale. ‘Queer’ as non-normative, however, is not the same as ‘queer’ functioning with absolute consistency as something that is revolutionary or progressive. This queer text concerns a heterosexual married couple and that couple’s very heterosexual power

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imbalance, and it is not the case that this imbalance is ever redressed or abolished. The man in this marriage is patriarchally powerful in at least two ways, by reason of his maleness and by reason of his membership in the ruling class. He can demand absolute obedience of his wife; he treats his children like possessions. In some ways, I have just described medieval marriage as such. But few if any depictions of medieval marriage are this direct about the absolute control wielded by the patriarchy (indeed, the literature of courtliness expends great energies in order to conceal it). This marriage, then, is both hyper-heterosexual (in the sense that the power imbalance that characterises it is also a characteristic of what we would call heteropatriarchy) and marked by what BDSM practitioners have named ‘power exchange’ and have understood as a stigmatised, queerly non-normative practice. This exchange of power inside Walter and Griselda’s marriage is constitutive of rather than external to its nature. ‘Power exchange’ is a term for a set of erotic acts where power imbalance is heightened and the ‘bottom’ experiences either discomfort/pain (S/M) at the demand or by the hand of the ‘Top’ or performs service (B/D) for the ‘Top’; it is called ‘power exchange’ not because it is a back-and-forth trade but because it is an apparent surrender of power (practitioners do insist that, since the one surrendering power also gets to determine the limits and form of that surrender, it is that person who ultimately has the power). So, is The Clerk’s tale merely depicting the harsh patriarchal face of medieval marriage, or is it depicting queer, perverse BDSM practices? And must we choose? The one reason we might want to do so is that consent is so necessary to specific forms of domination as a component of BDSM practice (women consent to marriage, of course, but that is more like entering a system). So we are in some ways back to the question that all critics ask about The Clerk’s tale: does Griselda have any choice? Does she have any agency? Is this a consensual scenario?16 We might want BDSM to be queer in the sense of resistant to normativity; in this tale, however, power exchange speaks the language of consent and engages other aspects of BDSM, but the characters are immersing themselves in normativity, not resisting it. While some of BDSM practice involves the erotic charge inherent in very temporarily reversing heteropatriarchal power relations (the female

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protagonist of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in furs, who helped bring the term ‘masochism’ into existence, could hardly have lived out her life as a Mistress in a more sexist environment than Vienna in the late 1800s), this reversal is not actually a necessary precondition for power exchange.17 Heterosexual kink with a male Top risks capitulation to normativity, and yet, by partaking in a stigmatised practice (an excess of sadism and masochism), queers that normativity instead of embodying it. Hyper-heterosexuality reaches a boiling point and spills over into something odd and strange, something no longer normative. This tension between the normative and the queer is heightened by Walter’s compulsive behaviour. His sadistic epistemology sometimes feels like it is not entirely in control: This markys in his herte longeth so To tempte his wyf, hir sadnesse for to knowe, That he ne myghte out of his herte throwe This merveillous desir his wyf t’ assaye (IV, 451–4)18

The narratorial voice of the Clerk repeatedly remarks how wrong it is to test Griselda ‘whan that it is no need’ (IV, 461), marking the excessiveness of Walter’s behaviour. Griselda’s submission and consent spectacularly exceeds and even affirms the quotidian power imbalance of heterosexuality and ultimately disrupts rather than capitulating to normativity – Chaucer’s Envoy testifies to this, as this chapter discusses later. Indeed, naming the queerness of The Clerk’s tale as queerness helps clarify what queer does when it encounters certain kinds of normativity: it does not cease to be transgressive, but queerness alone cannot unmake inequality. The Clerk is set up to evoke gender trouble from the outset: when asking him to tell a tale, the Host describes him to the company as one who rides ‘as coy and stille’ as a maid who ‘were new espoused’ (IV, 2–3). The newlywed’s virginal silence, which the Host is forcing the Clerk to break, foreshadows the tale’s violence. And, indeed, the Clerk responds to the Host’s demand for a tale with the words ‘I am under youre yerde’ (IV, 10), already evoking both the possibility of a beating and the awfulness of the authority that threatens it, and already doing what is called ‘topping from below’.19 Since ‘yerde’ also means ‘phallus’ or ‘penis’, the Clerk is also messing around with same-sex power relations even as he

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begins his hyper-heterosexual tale. Indeed, he is offering his own submission with a little bit of a twist, the twist being both his defiance (he is practically calling the Host, Harry Bailly, a bully) and his control of the narrative that follows. Of course, Chaucer’s Clerk, in his capacity as narrator, does not truly control the story that he tells: while he is getting to script his own scene, so to speak, in telling the story of Walter and Griselda, he is using a story made famous by others, and Chaucer is following some of his most famous predecessors’ lead. It is not only the Host’s, it is Boccaccio and Petrarch’s authorial ‘yerde’ that Chaucer and the Clerk operate beneath.20 Is this what Griselda does, is the Clerk modelling her subtle resistance before even beginning to tell his tale about her? It seems more likely, given what follows, that Chaucer is showing how this sort of resistance is available to the Clerk precisely because he is about to show how resistance is not available, and perhaps not even desired, by Griselda. Within the tale that the Clerk proceeds to tell, the first protagonist we meet is Walter, the cruel husband. He is introduced as a marriage resister, which, notably, has historically functioned as a type of the ‘homosexual’ – the man who prefers his horses to his ladies, whose masculinity is never in doubt but who does not quite enter into heterosexuality. Walter’s resistance works in a fundamentally different register than the Clerk’s or Griselda’s capitulation-with-a-twist: his is a refusal and an eventual capitulation, something organised far more as a simple binary of declaring ‘no’ and then yielding and saying ‘yes’. Given the intensely heteronormative demands placed upon the nobility to produce a male heir, the fact that Walter has refused to marry for as long as he seems to have done is surprising (should he not have been betrothed to some noblewoman by his parents while still a child?). To consider the sheer scope of Walter’s resistance to marriage invites the reader to understand that something about this character is queer.21 This queerness is not the same as that of the Canterbury tales’ undecidably gendered Pardoner. The Pardoner’s resemblance to ‘a geldyng or a mare’ (I, 691) is about a body that seems gender-crossed, and the ‘come hither, love, to me’ (I, 672) that he sings in a high goat-like voice, suggests something (but it is far from certain what) about his (sexual or romantic) object

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choice.22 By contrast, Walter’s body is not transgressing gender binaries, indeed it is not even described, in the unmarked way of white masculinity: he simply is, as the reigning male of the narrative. His masculinity is, indeed, so absolute that it demands to be left in the homosocial world of men, and he marries a woman only for dynastic reasons, when urged on by his subjects.23 Walter’s form of queerness is specifically not located in his gendered display, which is not characterised by gender inversion. In fact, it reminds us of queer theory’s radical yet utterly common-sense contribution to the understanding of human sexuality: that gender and sexual object choice can be and often are at odds with one another, and are not, in fact, mutually dependent.24 Walter’s queerness is located in object choice, or rather, in his refusal of an external object choice, rooted in a general rejection of normative reproductive futurity. Troublingly for his subjects, Walter does not want to perpetuate his dynasty. At first, his refusal is a refusal of marriage as such; later, that refusal takes the form of hiding his children from Griselda and from his subjects. Near the end of The Clerk’s tale, there is a moment when it looks as though Walter seems to be on the verge of transgressing the incest taboo (he has sent to Bologna for his twelveyear-old daughter and counterfeited the documents that he would have needed from the Pope to annul his marriage to Griselda) which, if he had gone through with it, may have tainted his dynasty beyond repair.25 Although this final transgression is averted, the threat of incest that hovers over The Clerk’s tale, as well as its threats against the bodies of very young children speaks to the most violent possible reading of the anti-relational branch of queer theory.26 In short, Walter is some sort of a queer being. His initial desires, as The Clerk’s tale begins, are queer, and only grow more so as the tale continues. Walter’s ability to experience anything like desire insists on structural inequality. We could call this tyranny, and we would not be wrong; but we can, in addition, also call this non-­normative and queer, a preference for roles, for positions, for hierarchy as a prerequisite for his own complex pleasures. The only way that Walter might be willing to continue his dynasty is through siring children with Griselda, a woman of far lower social rank but well-established inner nobility, whom he causes to be stripped naked (‘dispoillen hire right there’, IV, 374) and (as Chaucer’s

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wording famously goes) ‘translated’ (IV, 385) into fine clothes at the moment immediately preceding their surprise Cinderella marriage.27 This is very much the Cinderella story gone wrong, where the princess plucked from among the commoners is, as a consequence of this dubious honour, thereby denied dignity, choice, even the privacy of her own flesh, and subjugated in a way that makes ‘regular’ heteronormativity look like equality. Despite her narratorially reported excellence in the role of Duke’s Lady, and what the Clerk makes sure to emphasise is the people’s love for her (‘ech hire lovede that looked on hir face’, IV, 413), Walter feels the need to periodically test Griselda’s total obedience to his will through what can only be described as extraordinarily cruel means. He removes Griselda’s infant daughter and claims to have had her killed; he waits two years after the birth of their son and then does the same. This is not physical punishment of the sort most frequently associated with stereotypes of BDSM: neither floggers nor shackles seem to be involved in any way, and what sex there is seems to be marital, reproductive sex, although a great deal of control by one person of another does take place, and, as with a desired and consented-to flogging, this Top is watching carefully to gauge the reaction of their bottom, waiting for them to cry out in order to have satisfaction. Critics regularly understand Griselda as a saintly or martyr-like figure.28 Medieval narratives of martyrdom have had a significant and long-lasting effect on the nature of BDSM fantasy. While the condition of being-martyred must be that acts of violence are perpetrated against a body that most emphatically does not enjoy the pain it suffers, it is also clear to even the most superficial reader of hagiography that many martyrs dream of martyrdom. For martyrs, for saints, even for everyday religious, the body’s suffering is a vehicle for the soul’s redemption. That mode of martyrdom is the one taken on by St Cecilia in The Second Nun’s tale, Virginia in The Physician’s tale, and to some extent the little clergeon of The Prioress’s tale. By contrast, Griselda’s suffering is almost entirely spiritual rather than physical in nature. It is also inward and, to Walter’s apparently great frustration, it is not externalised through words or behaviour. She does not cry out, much as he sets up conditions in which crying out would be the normal response.

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Walter needs to witness the external effects of the events he puts in motion. This desire is a crucial if frustrated aspect of his sadistic epistemology. Chaucer’s reader is drawn into reluctant complicity with Walter on this point, since the reader, too, does not truly know how Griselda feels and is induced, by the text, to desire to know this. Even before they are married, Walter had been carefully observing Griselda’s countenance, watching her outsides in order to know something about her insides.29 Once married, Walter acts out of a kind of boundless curiosity (a desire that the Clerk, with his well-established love of learning, must sympathise with and yet here pointedly repudiates): Walter longs ‘to tempte his wyf, hir sadnesse for to knowe’ (IV, 452), which the Clerk has already described, above, as ‘this merveillous desir his wyf t’assaye’ (IV, 454) and I have termed sadistic epistemology. What to make of Walter’s ‘marvellous’ desire? Marvels are extraordinary, sometimes miraculous events, but Walter’s sadistic desire to know simply takes up what seems most normative in medieval marriage and pushes it to an extreme: neither extraordinary nor miraculous, his sadistic epistemology is hyper-normative in a way that strains the normative to its breaking point. What he seeks to know makes use of the somewhat complicated word ‘sadness’: to know Griselda’s sadness does not yet mean to make her feel miserable, since the first attestations of ‘sad’ as ‘unhappy’ are from 1400 and 1500, without a lot in between. ‘Sadness’ means something more like steadiness, permanence, constancy, but perhaps it is, in Chaucer’s time, coming to mean those states as they might be experienced in a disconsolate sort of way.30 Wives are not knights to be tested, and yet the Clerk uses the language used of knights proving their worth; wives are not figures for Christ, yet Griselda has to suffer through three temptations. When asking Griselda to marry him, Walter had set the condition that Griselda: be ye redy with good herte To al my lust, and that I frely may, As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte, And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? And eek whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay,’ Neither by word ne frownyng contenance? Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance. (IV, 351–7)

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Consenting to Walter’s demands, Griselda consents to controlling her language (‘ne say nat ney’), her face (‘frowning contenance’), and even to controlling her own potential desire to ‘grucce’. This last, a word that encompasses both ‘complain’ and ‘moan’ as well as ‘to refuse’, seems to capture both verbal and non-verbal expressions of anguish, and, indeed, we later witness that Griselda offers none. Another of those words, like ‘sadnesse’, that is in the process of moving between two very different meanings, is a key to what Griselda must consent to in her marriage: the word is ‘lust’. That word, whatever it might mean here (food preference? sexual desire? random whim? all of the above?) is brought by both Walter and Griselda into this marriage negotiation. Walter tells her that she ought to be ‘redy … to al my lust’ (IV, 352). Meanwhile, just a little earlier, Griselda had been described as one who ‘no likerous lust was thurgh hire herte yronne’ (IV, 214). She has no ‘lust’ and must offer herself to his. What of this adjective that modifies the lust that Griselda does not have (the word still meant generalised desire rather than its current strong association with, specifically, sexual desire)? The Oxford English dictionary gives the meaning of ‘likerous’ as ‘pleasing or tempting to the palate’.31 However, in Chaucer’s time, the deadly sins of lust and gluttony seem to have converged in this word, as, elsewhere in The Canterbury tales, as part of a sermon against gluttony, the Pardoner can use ‘likerous’ to say ‘thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde,/ And turnen substance into accident/ to fulfille al thy likerous talent!’ (Pardoner, VI, 538–40), while the Miller proclaims of Alisoun that ‘she hadde a likerous eye’ (Miller, I, 3244). Meanwhile, the Wife of Bath puts it all together, as she so often does, when she declares, almost proverbially, that ‘a likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl’ (Wife of Bath, III, 466), suggesting a necessary connection between types of ‘likerousness’. ‘Sadnesse’, ‘lust’, and ‘likerousness’ are all words whose meanings are shifting in the fourteenth century. The marriage negotiation, and what follows, is no regular medieval marriage. The Clerk’s tale depicts extreme submission to extreme domination, and as such, it partakes of a terrible excess. This excessiveness (of domination and demand, of submission and endurance) reads as non-normative and at the same time as hypernormative. It is as if the structural inequalities of both gender and

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social class as they functioned in the European Middle Ages have been literalised.32 When Walter offers her his hand in marriage, Griselda responds to this in the affirmative, ‘as ye wole yourself, right so wol I/ And here I swere that nevere willingly/ In werk ne thought, I nyl yow disobeye,/ For to be deed, though me were looth to deye’ (IV, 361–4). Is it possible, however, to consent to die at the behest of one’s lover or Top? This is the sort of thought-experiment that gets trotted out to show the limits of contemporary consent discourse.33 And yet, The Clerk’s tale goes through a pretty impossible set of consent scenarios: is it possible to consent to one’s children’s deaths? Although such thought-experiments tend to conclude, in modern times, by deciding that such forms of consent are not possible, such a conclusion would be hard in a medieval Christian context. Christ’s suffering and death practically define medieval Christian culture; there is no question that he consents to suffer, as do the saints and the martyrs. In Chaucer’s own Canterbury tales, St Cecilia suffers and dies (The Second Nun’s tale), and in the Man of Law’s tale, Constance, who is not quite a saint, nevertheless suffers a series of wanderings in the name of converting outlying geographical areas. In Chaucer’s Legend of good women, women are martyred for romantic love. The suffering of women allows their female bodies to lead them towards redemption; Chaucer uses this for all kinds of different ends in his writing. To claim that it is impossible for Griselda to consent to her own and (possibly even) her children’s deaths would be to undo something that has been central to an entire society’s way of making meaning. Griselda’s surrender despite her own desire to live (and to raise her own children) is presented by The Clerk’s tale as terrible suffering, emphasised as it is by a pattern of litotes that work the way ‘though me were looth to deye’ had worked. For instance, there is the marked refusal of certain reactions that might seem ‘natural’ – ‘wel myghte a mooder thane han cryd “allas!”’ (IV, 563) exclaims the narrator, but she does not. In a way, the pre-Christian king who was whipping St Margaret in her famous Early Middle English saint’s life, does not have to experience the insecurity that Walter clearly does: Olibrius sees the blood he has drawn.34 Or does he see the blood? ‘God’ regularly takes away the pain of martyrs, and they regularly beg for that pain, so the evidence of visual experience

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might precisely be deceptive here. Walter, however, most definitely does not get to see the blood, and so has to suffer in his own way. He ends up having to worry about precisely this question: is he truly hurting her (and, therefore, is she letting him hurt her, as is their agreement), or is her pain being taken away? After putting Griselda through the first of her trials, Walter’s desire to know her fully, his sadistic epistemology, is left profoundly unsatisfied. He wants to know something of what is inside her, but has no access, no matter how total his access is to everything about her external being (no text of Chaucer’s is as interested in the tension between human internality and human behaviour): For now gooth he ful faste ymaginyng If by his wyves cheere he myghte se, Or by hire word aperceyve, that she Were chaunged; but he nevere hire koude fynde But evere in oon ylike sad and kynde. As glad, as humble, as bisy in servyse, And eek in love, as she was wont to be, Was she to hym in every maner wyse; Ne of hir doghter noght a word spak she. Noon accident, for noon adversitee, Was seyn in hire, ne nevere hir doghter name Ne nempned she, in ernest nor in game. (IV, 598–609)

Here, again, the list of what Griselda must control (because Walter seeks to control these things) is the same: her ‘cheere’ (see ‘ne frowning contenance’, IV, 356), her ‘word’ (see ‘never ye to grucce it …whan I sey “ye” ne say nat “nay”’, IV, 354–6) and her actions. Walter’s frustration is expressed as an inability to find Griselda (‘he nevere hire koude fynde’, IV, 601), as if her horror, sadness, and despair about what has transpired is hers alone, and hidden. Griselda does not change; in the line where ‘change’ is mentioned, Walter seeks a change in Griselda’s expression or her speech, but finds none, and this disappointing situation is described as ‘he nevere hire koude fynde’ (IV, 601), as if her self (‘hire’, or her) was going to be found only through a change in her demeanour. If she had changed, she would have failed his test but given him what he wanted – knowledge of her inner self. The fact that she

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does not change, however, denies him the satisfaction his curiosity craves, and sets him up to test her once again, keeping their ongoing BDSM scene from growing stale or ending. Griselda’s refusal to give Walter what he actually wants (her suffering) is hidden inside her achievement, giving him what he says he wants (her total and unprotesting obedience). She is, in fact, obeying the rules set out during the marriage negotiation between them. So far, this chapter has read The Clerk’s tale as a performance of sadomasochism accomplished through a hyperbolic, excessive, and spectacularised engagement with patriarchal heterosexuality. But it is also true that this spectacular sadomasochistic heterosexuality is something of a scandal. The narrative clearly acknowledges the fact that Walter’s sadism goes beyond the norm, beyond what husbands are actually allowed to do with their wives. Walter’s subjects, whom he blames (to Griselda) for disapproving of her lowly stature, disapprove of his treatment of her instead: The sclaundre of Walter ofte and wyde spradde, That of a crueel herte he wikkedly, For he a povre womman wedded hadde, Hath mordred bothe his children prively. Swich murmur was among hem comunly . No wonder is, for to the peples ere Ther cam no word but that they mordred were. For which, where as his peple therbifore Hadde loved hym wel, the sclaundre of his diffame Made hem that they hym hatede therfore. To been a mordrere is an hateful name. (IV, 722–32; italics mine)

The repetition of ‘murder’ and ‘slander’ is glaringly obvious in this passage, even without my italics. Indeed, for a moment it seems that the scene that Walter is playing is being played with the entirety of the lands over which he has dominion; onlookers who had not consented to participate are drawn in, and, not knowing that the scene is merely a scene and not actual murder, respond to the tragedy of Walter and Griselda’s family in appropriate, if deeply mistaken, ways. The Clerk as narrator repeatedly marks his disagreement with and horror about Walter’s behaviour; so do his subjects, even as Walter had blamed their opinions of Griselda’s lowly social status

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for his choice to kill their children. But, as I will discuss shortly, it is Griselda, the consenting ‘bottom’ in this decade-long BDSM scene, that audience members are explicitly warned away from. In the Envoy to The Clerk’s tale, Griselda is described as an antiideal: men ought not test their wives in the fashion depicted in the tale. Chaucer issues a prohibition at the end of his narrative, and that prohibition is not about Walter, it is about Griselda: women ought not be bottomless wells of masochism, not even in fantasy, and men should not imagine them as such. At one point, the Clerk says disapprovingly of Griselda, ‘[she] moot al suffer and al consente’ (IV, 537). Women ought not do or be the things that Griselda was, and, more than anything else, women ought to refuse to be written of in the way that Griselda is written of: O noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence, Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille, Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille As of Grisildis pacient and kynde. (IV, 1183–7)

This should, in other words, be the story that ‘tops’ all the other stories; this should be the best and last rendition of the tale of patient Griselda (pace, Boccaccio; pace, Petrarch, pace any other imitators, redactors, competitors). Like Criseyde, who dreads that, after her betrayal, ‘rolled shal I ben on many a tonge’ (Troilus and Criseyde, V, 1061), this is fundamentally a claim about reputation, about stories – a warning to stay out of the wrong story, a warning not to play out any scene like the very long one between Walter and Griselda. Do not become a ‘merveille’, the Envoy tells women, because to be a ‘merveille’ is dangerous – it is to become a queer event in the world. The Envoy argues that women are simply no longer so patient as Griselda, nor ought they be. It repurposes the word ‘merveille’, which had been used earlier in The Clerk’s tale to name Walter’s marvellous and terrible desire for access to Griselda’s inner life, ‘this merveillous desir his wyf t’assaye’ (IV, 454). Indeed, the Envoy argues, a refusal to be silent serves that highest of late-fourteenthcentury causes, ‘commune profit’ (IV, 1194). It advises women against silence, against the tyrant, but also perhaps against playing

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with the heterosexual power dynamic to the point of engaging in the perversity of extreme masochism. Allan Mitchell wrote about how the tale’s rhetorical excesses make extraordinary demands on readers. I want to add that female readers, specifically, are told to admire Griselda, sure, and yet to keep away from her (and, as far as I am concerned, I am curious about anything that I am told to stay away from by medieval authors). Why is the warning so strongly directed towards women, given that it is Walter’s behaviour that is being discussed far and wide? Somewhere along the way, being like Griselda comes to mean being drawn into a non-normative sexuality, even while remaining heterosexual. One way of understanding Walter and Griselda is to think of the tale as a narrative of female masochism, and to see the Envoy as that masochism’s foreclosure or prohibition. Indeed, in such a reading, the accomplishment of The Clerk’s tale is precisely to put Griselda, and her powerful masochism, beyond the pale, to say that what she is ought to be understood as too queer. Griselda exercises no positive will in The Clerk’s tale. She does not tell Walter where to stuff his crazy ideas, and she does not incite a peasant rebellion against him, much as some readers might want her to do both of those things. For some critics, this has meant that she has no will at all, and no power, but those critics are, in a word, wrong. They are wrong, specifically, because to claim that all power is positive, action-based power is to miss an enormous part of how those who are oppressed act in the world. To take up just the case of women and femmes (in the sense of persons of either sex whose gender is performed in a feminine mode, however they themselves understand it) as well as BDSM bottoms, it is important to consider the feminist and queer interventions that have insisted upon the power of silence and passivity as forms of resistance.35 Griselda’s masochism troubles readers. If BDSM is queer, ought it not also be resistant, subcultural, feminist? That is simply not the case in practice (as studies like Margot Weiss’s Techniques of pleasure have shown). Griselda is not actually enacting resistance to Walter, to the injustice of her position, to heteronormativity and class politics. Rather, by looking at some theorisations of female masochism, it becomes possible to see the ways in which Chaucer’s narrative, the Envoy in particular, repudiates Griselda as too queer

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and how this repudiation functions as part of Chaucer’s ongoing enquiry into the meaning of marriage. In this final section, this chapter will turn towards how The Clerk’s tale can, somewhat surprisingly, become a work of consolation. Having understood how The Clerk’s tale can be read as a sadomasochistic fable among the many tales of marital power struggle included in The Canterbury tales, it is also crucial to see how another element of sadomasochistic play becomes central to its workings. This is the fact that sadomasochistic play is premised on a beginning and an ending. In The Clerk’s tale, the beginning and the ending are clearly marked by Walter’s twice-repeated utterance, ‘that is enough, Griselda myn’. The first utterance occurs in the context of the marriage’s beginning, immediately following Griselda’s words, quoted earlier, ‘I nil yow disobeye/ for to be deed, though me were looth to deye’ (IV, 363–4), to which Walter replies, ‘this is ynogh, Griselde myn!’ (IV, 365), expressing his satisfaction with her answer. At that point, it might be said, the BDSM scene begins. Chaucer seldom (perhaps never) repeats himself without reason. The second occurrence of that same phrase occurs near the end of The Clerk’s tale, after Griselda has seen her own daughter arrayed as her husband’s new bride, when Griselda makes one of her two small requests. The first, earlier, had been a request that she be allowed to keep a sack with which to cover the body that had birthed Walter’s children. The second is Griselda’s request that Walter ‘ne prikke with no tormenting/ this tendre mayden, as ye han don mo’ (IV, 1038–9): And whan this Walter saugh hire pacience, Hir glade chere and no malice at al, And he so ofte had doon to hire offence, And she ay sad and constant as a wal, Continuinge evere hire innocence overall – This sturdy markys gan his herte dresse To rewen upon hire wyfly stedfastnesse. ‘This is ynogh, Griselde myn’, quod he. (IV, 1044–51, italics mine)

The twice-repeated phrase, ‘this is ynogh, Griselda myn’, functions as a Top’s safeword.36 Taken to the edge of his own sadism, Walter yields to Griselda and ends their dangerous play.

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God’s omniscience about how our stories end, even while we possess the free will to live them out by ourselves, is something that Chaucer returns to repeatedly in his work, including but not limited to Troilus and Criseyde and his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of philosophy. If God already knows what I will choose, how am I freely choosing it? The total nature of Griselda’s surrender speaks to some of the very ideas that Chaucer continually returns to in his other works, except that, here, the problem for readers is whether or not her will is free in the context of a family ruled by Walter – the same thing as the problem of God, but in miniature. Just like the Boethian God, Walter knows what is going to happen next (in the sense that he is going to cause it and has a plan that he is following). Unlike the sort of human being that Boethius discusses, however, Griselda can and does consent away her free will. Chaucer’s interest in divine omniscience is often part of a metareflection on what it means to be an author, even a vernacular author in the Middle Ages: Chaucer functions as if he were God in his own narratives, controlling what happens, knowing the end before the beginning, living in the simultaneous or meta-time of divinity. According to Boethius’s solution of the problem of free will, humans move through time differently from how God does. So, we do choose, but God always-already knows what we are going to choose. Often, when a text pointedly references temporality, in the sense of a desire to be outside of or beyond time, this can be a clue that Chaucer is pulling in Boethian philosophy to think about something that seems, at first, surprisingly un-Boethian. Such a moment of pointed temporal marking occurs around the supposed death of one of Griselda’s children: ‘wol no thing, ne nyl no thing certain./ But as yow list’, Griselda says in response to Walter’s whim to kill her two-year-old son (IV, 646–7). She is excessive in her surrender, and this is not surrender to, say, a beating (which may well have been unexceptional in the experience of a medieval woman) or to pain inflicted on herself – it is a surrender of her very maternal self, of her identity and role as a mother. Terribly, terrifyingly, when Walter comes to take away her second child, pretending to have him killed, Griselda affirms that if she had ‘prescience/ Your wyl to knowe, er ye youre lust me tolde/ I wolde it

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doon’ (IV, 659–61). If Griselda had possessed the omniscience that theologians attribute to God, the object of her knowledge would have been (had she only been able to know it) Walter’s largely incomprehensible will. If she had known that this will was the death of her two-year-old, she would have killed her child with her own hands. This in itself is a horror, but to contemplate this horror philosophically is to see that what Griselda is literally saying is that she wishes to have known Walter’s will before he told her, which would mean she wishes to exist outside the linear temporality of one event following the other.37 In that sense, what Griselda says at that moment is that she wishes she had the perspective of Boethius’s God, who manages to be omniscient while granting human freedom because he exists beyond human time. Except that, within the tight confines of her marriage, what she wishes is that she had been able to exit from human time in order to know what it is that Walter was going to ask her to do to herself and their family. This desire for knowledge parallels and matches Walter’s, but instead of desiring to squeeze out what was inside her partner, Griselda wants to have anticipated her partner’s desires: a masochist’s epistemology, indeed something that can be understood as an epistemology of service. In reflecting on the nature of divine omniscience, Chaucer is also highlighting his own status as the knowing subject, as well as his audience’s complicity in that knowledge. Chaucer, living in history rather than in fiction, knows how both the pilgrimage and The Clerk’s tale are going to end, even though the pilgrims experience themselves as free. Inside the frame of The Canterbury tales, the Clerk knows how The Clerk’s tale is going to end, because he has read Petrarch and functions on a different temporal plane to Walter and Griselda. Walter, too, knows how it is going to end, to a degree, because he has the power to choose what happens next: as the text says, while Griselda waits for Walter’s ‘new wife’ to arrive, he is described in a manner that hearkens back to what we understand as the privilege of authorship – he is called ‘the markys, which that shoop and knew al this’ (IV, 946). And we, readers/listeners, essentially, know the outlines of the story that Walter has shaped before we start to read it, which is the condition of so many readers in so many situations – readers of the Bible, readers of the Matter of Troy, of France, or of England always know how the story will

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end, and yet are provoked in some way to care anyway. Griselda, alone, does not know what Walter wants or what will happen next, she knows only that she has consented to give him all that he can ask of her. Even though he knows what is going to happen next because he (mostly) causes it to happen, Walter really cannot wait to see what happens next, and neither can we readers, really. Only, perhaps, Griselda and the children, at the centre of all these concentric circles of time and of knowledge, are moving through the decade-plus of their separation in a straight line, not knowing anything beyond their own moment, and suffering the way sublunary people suffer, without knowing how and when their suffering will end. The Clerk’s tale is not a tale of abuse in the name of boundless, cruel curiosity because, unlike many of Chaucer’s other works, it is not a narrative of actual physical harm. One might issue a disclaimer at its outset: ‘no children were killed in the making of this tale’.38 Walter’s sadism is not physical in nature; correspondingly, Griselda’s masochism is a silent, utterly inward one. Her patience provokes him to greater and greater heights of cruelty. They are locked in a cycle, an abusive relationship, in some ways the classic abusive relationship. And yet, and this is part of why this tale is a work of consolation, it is all simply a test. Which means that for those who live through actual suffering, whatever form that takes, Walter and Griselda’s lives are actually, shockingly, something to wish for, to hope against hope for: that the loss of those children, that the terrible injustice of that tyrant is a game rather than the real, raw, awful truth of power cut loose from any moorings. In the face of Syria, Afghanistan, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and other such atrocities, these particular children are not dead. BDSM is ‘play’. In the case of the terrible game played by Griselda and Walter, it is play without any of the delights of inversion or reversal or sexual pleasure, it is play with no discernible pleasure in it at all, but still play in the sense that it is, to use the medieval word we have inherited, ‘game’. It is adamantly not ‘earnest’, the traditional opposite of ‘game’. This pairing appears twice in the text: once, as cited earlier, when the Clerk is describing Walter’s state of frustration because, after he had supposedly had her killed, Griselda does not say their daughter’s name ‘in earnest

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or in game’ (IV, 609); the other instance of this phrase is part of the narrative, near the tale’s end, of how Walter’s countrymen understand his behaviour towards Griselda as wrong, but how he is incapable of stopping. There, ‘for earnest ne for game’ functions as a description of a binary that has ceased having clear and definite divisions or borders: But nathelees, for ernest ne for game, He of his crueel purpos nolde stente. To tempte his wyf was set al his entente (IV, 733–5)

One can easily imagine the world where Walter’s subjects really did rebel against being ruled by the child of a commoner who has married their marquis. We could imagine, easily, a world where the marquis’s low-born Mistress is put aside for a noble-born twelveyear-old girl after having borne him two children. In other words, the cruelties that Walter inflicts upon Griselda could well have been inflicted on her anyway, in real life. But that might not have made for a good story: to make the story story-worthy, it needs to be a game, a series of terrible, cruel tests, a BDSM scene instead of a lived reality where children die and wives are put aside. Here is the tricky thing with thinking about BDSM in early periods: the whole point of modern BDSM is that the pain inflicted is desired, is consensual, negotiated, and, to some extent, p ­ redictable – although being absolutely predictable makes for a poor Top. We can imagine that a desire to receive pain as part of sexuality, a desire for restraint, a fetish for certain material objects or behaviours or forms of speech, was possible for those who lived long ago. But because what we know of medieval people is largely textual, the written record, and largely the highly shaped and censored literary record, we do not reckon, actually, with what Foucault would call ‘acts’ when we think about medieval ­sexualities – at least, not most of the time. Griselda and Walter play their impossibly violent game, and then are given a happy ending by the narrator, although the Clerk warns others against forming this kind of unequal, Dominant/­ submissive relationship. In telling us not to try these tricks at home, he is both bringing out and foreclosing a way of staging the fundamental inequality of heterosexual r­ elationships as if that inequality were play rather than earnest.

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Our reckoning with the sexual practices of the past is very much, whether we want to admit it or not, a reckoning with the history of sexual fantasy. And a highly censored, crafted, selective, and careful history it is. The records we have are records of what people imagined doing. There is a difference between the inequalities of everyday life, the daily workings of patriarchy and of feudalism, and the fantasy of suffering portrayed in this tale. The Clerk’s tale is almost unbearable, but by setting up its terms to be so near the unbearable, it also offers a weird, surprising sliver of hope: that Walter is merely perverse, rather than simply a ruler doing what rulers do, that he is exceptional in his tyranny. That what he does to his children is merely to foster them, as most noble children are fostered, which is away from home. That there is an end. This chapter equates the queer sadomasochism at the heart of Walter and Griselda’s marriage with a fantasy for its author and its audience: the fantasy being that ‘the assay’ is mere play, game not earnest, and that, as a BDSM scene, it has a beginning, middle, and end, moving through time, while the storyteller and us, the readers, get to live outside that time, not worrying that the children are dead. It is a story, composed in part by Walter as its enactor, and then by the Clerk, by the Host who demands to be told a story, by Chaucer, by Petrarch, by Boccaccio. It is not ‘real life’ and it highlights the ways in which it is not. The day comes when this story ends, which is more than we can say for what God does with the world. In all its misery, I find a sort of hope in the world created by the Clerk. In it, suffering has an end. Dedication For Margaret.

Notes  1 ‘The terms SM and BDSM are used interchangeably to denote a diverse community that includes aficionados of bondage, domination/­submission, pain or sensation play, power exchange, leathersex, role-playing, and fetishes’ (Margot Weiss, ‘A note on terminology’, in Techniques of pleasure: BDSM and the circuits of sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University

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Press, 2011), pp. vii–xii (p. vii)). Weiss also emphasises that a large part of BDSM activity does not actually involve physical pain.  2 Michel Foucault’s Discipline and punish opens on a scene of an ­eighteenth-century public execution, which he contrasts with an early nineteenth-century timetable for the conduct of young male prison inmates. It is Foucault’s point that the temporal gap between the execution and the manual is only eighty years. However, somehow the public execution is understood as ‘medieval’ and indeed has perpetrated this understanding of the Middle Ages, for good and ill, into the twenty-first century. Thus, with Foucault and of course others (Monty Python?), the fantasy of public punishment has come to be associated with ‘the medieval’ in perpetuity. For a thoughtful reflection on how pain is spectacularised in both modern discourse about the Middle Ages and in medieval textual and visual productions, see Robert Mills, Suspended animation: pain, pleasure and punishment in medieval culture (London: Reaktion, 2005), especially the introduction, ‘Speculum of the other Middle Ages’, which takes up the question of historical voyeurism visà-vis medieval or ‘medieval’ modes of punishment.  3 Jody Enders, in The medieval theater of cruelty: rhetoric, memory, violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) deals directly and incisively with what it meant for theatricality and for performance studies that people were and are occasionally hurt on stage, and that medieval drama so frequently represents torture and physical suffering for the delectation of its audience.  4 The provocatively-titled Screw consent: a better politics of sexual justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019) by Joseph J. Fischel offers a summary of sociological research on BDSM as part of an argument that consent is an insufficient standard for sexual behaviour. Along the way, particularly in his first chapter, titled ‘Kink and cannibals’, Fischel does a good job of delineating what he calls the ‘fetish’ of consent among contemporary Anglo-American BDSM practitioners. But see also Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational flesh: race, power and masochism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014) for a much more nuanced argument about the role of consent in the sexual expression of Black women.  5 See, for instance, the work of Carolyn Dinshaw, Glenn Burger, Steven Kruger, Karma Lochrie, Diane Watt, and Robert Mills.  6 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting medieval: sexualities and communities, preand postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).  7 See ‘Introduction’ in Greta LaFleur, Anna Klosowska, and Masha Raskolnikov (eds), Trans historical: gender plurality before the modern

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(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), and Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortoricci, Trans*historicities, special issue of Transgender studies quarterly, 5.4 (2018),especially ‘Trans*historicities: a roundtable discussion’, 658–85.  8 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. and trans. Betty Radice (New York and London: Penguin, 1974), p. 67.  9 James A. Brundage in Law, sex and Christian society in medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), which continues to be one of the most respected texts on the history of medieval sexual law, does not have an entry for any synonym for BDSM in his index and does not address it directly in the substance of his book. However, it is quite clear from his study that sex that could not lead to reproduction (like anal and oral sex) was doctrinally and legally condemned, which would include sadomasochism by implication, if not by direct mention. 10 In relation to the term ‘sadistic epistemology’ and how it was thought about by specifically medieval authors, consider the apocryphal tale attributed to Jacobus de Varagine, The golden legend, and reiterated by the figure of Reason in the Roman de la rose, of how the Emperor Nero had demanded that his own mother be cut open, apparently in order that he could see where he had come from. See Katherine Park’s analysis and much fuller discussion of this tale in ‘Dissecting the female body: from women’s secrets to the secrets of nature’, in Crossing boundaries: attending to early modern women, ed. Jane Donawerth and Adele F. Seeff (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), pp. 29–47. Samantha Seal has usefully written the following on the topic of what I am calling sadistic epistemology: ‘Walter’s lust to know Griselda is an explicitly negative example of what happens to men who proudly overvalue their own intellect. The lust to know is as virulent a disease as any other form of lust, an act of defiance against the natural order of a postEdenic world. After humanity’s fall, language and cognition were reconstructed around principles of doubt and inevitable gaps between sign and meaning, while the bodies of Eve’s daughters became the universalized symbols of that degradation. Even the most virtuous of women, like Griselda, cannot force their bodies to signify with certainty, any more than the most intelligent and perceptive of men, like Walter believes himself to be, can trust what they read on their wives’ flesh’ (Samantha Katz Seal, Father Chaucer: generating authority in The Canterbury tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 44). 11 I am not the first to suggest understanding this tale as sadomasochistic; others have observed, in passing or at length, that The Clerk’s tale invites

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this reading. See Patricia Cramer, ‘Lordship, bondage, and the erotic: the psychological bases of Chaucer’s Clerk’s tale’, Journal of English and Germanic philology, 89.4 (October 1990): 491–511, as well as Mark Miller’s chapter on The Clerk’s tale in his book, Philosophical Chaucer: love, sex and agency in the Canterbury tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The former uses a psychoanalytic model to discuss sadomasochism in the tale, while the latter is a brilliant consideration of what The Clerk’s tale says about the ‘scandal’ and ‘obscenity’ of the unconditional love that Walter demands of Griselda, deriving a sort of philosophy of love from the tale. 12 Fischel uses the example of a case of consensual cannibalism as part of a BDSM scene as the story that inaugurates his discussion of the limits of consent in BDSM. The story, which appears under the deliberately provocative subheading ‘Chewing penis’ (Fischel, Screw consent, pp. 32–8), is in its own way a kind of modern echo of The Clerk’s tale in that it provokes the scandalised question of how far a scene can go before it becomes impossible to legitimate. The crucial difference, for Fischel, is that murder inside a BDSM scene voids the bottom’s ability to continue to act in the world (while Griselda’s suffering has an end). 13 For the original and most influential formulation of this line of argument, see Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and gender insubordination’, in Inside/Out: lesbian theories, gay theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13–31. See also José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Introduction: performing disidentifications’, in Disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1999), pp. 1–36. 14 Exegetical reading of this sort, which views Chaucer’s (and other medieval authors’) literary productions as always deliberately engaging with biblical or patristic material, is a straw man standing in for the work of some late twentieth-century medievalists usually associated with D. W. Robertson. While Robertson did not actually discuss The Clerk’s tale at any length, it was clear that he considered it an allegory of the soul in relation to God (along with most of The Canterbury tales): see D. W. Robertson Jr, A preface to Chaucer: studies in medieval perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 288, 366, 376. 15 The debate about whether or not ‘queer’ as ‘non-normative’ retains enough same-sex sexuality or just enough sexuality as such, or if it becomes overly diluted by being used quite widely is almost as old as queer theory itself. See, for instance, Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). But see also the discussion between Amy Hollywood and Carolyn Dinshaw about

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whether or not ‘queer’ has to be limited to ‘same-sex’ in the ‘Forum’ on Dinshaw’s Getting medieval, published in the Journal of the history of sexuality. To cite Dinshaw’s elegant summary: ‘“Who is a queer?” Hollywood asks in a parenthesis. “Are gayness, homosexuality, and same-sex desires subsets of the queer? And if this is so, are they in danger, as Leo Bersani argues, of disappearing within the larger category?” Yes, I’d say they are subsets of the queer, and I am less and less worried these days about the disappearance of same-sex phenomena. If we are careful to specify the singularities of our lives, we same-sexers have much to gain by linking ourselves into broader social and political categories. That is, we have more to gain than we might lose by making coalitions (with activists for labour, reproductive rights, or educational freedom, for example), and the more open and flexible classifications are, the more easily we all can form and participate in potentially very powerful communities made by partial connections. The way I’ve formulated it for the most part in Getting medieval, “queer” marks a relation to a norm’ (Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Got medieval?’, Journal of the history of sexuality, 10.2 (April 2001): 202–12). 16 Weiss does observe that, in the heterosexual BDSM community where she did her research, there existed a blanket assumption that Tops were men or butches, and men and butches were Tops, that bottoms were women and femmes, and women and femmes were bottoms. Weiss did her anthropological observation work in 2000; this phenomenon may have become even more insidious in the aftermath of Fifty shades of Grey (2011) and its fusion of capitalist Cinderella fantasy and BDSM play. 17 For a discussion of BDSM and its relationship to the (possibly false) binary of subversiveness or resistance, Margot Weiss cites Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of the questions being asked by queer theory in the early 1990s: ‘I seem to see this happening now in some of the uses scholars are trying to make of performativity as they think they are understanding it from Judith Butler’s and other related recent work: straining eyes to ascertain whether particular performances (e.g. of drag) are really parodic and subversive (e.g. of gender essentialism) or just uphold the status quo. The bottom line is generally the same: kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. I see this as a sadly premature domestication of a conceptual tool whose powers we really have barely yet begun to explore’ (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer performativity: Henry James’s The art of the novel’, GLQ, 3.1 (1993): 1–16 (15), as cited in Weiss, Techniques of pleasure, p. 23). See also the brief but powerful history of academic feminist writings that do not condemn

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BDSM, from Lynda Hart’s Between the body and the flesh: performing sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), which works through the problem of female masochism in psychoanalytic theory, to Musser’s Sensational flesh. 18 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). All subsequent quotations of Chaucer will be from this edition. 19 For a recent discussion of translation, authority, and the question of subversiveness (or lack thereof) in The Clerk’s tale, see Emma Campbell’s excellent article, ‘Sexual poetics and the politics of translation in the tale of Griselda’, Comparative literature, 55.3 (2003): 191–216. 20 Bocaccio’s Italian version appears in the Decameron, Day 10, Tale 10, significantly, the last of the tales in that collection. Petrarch then translates the tale into Latin in his Epistolae seniles XVII.3, which is available to scholars in Sources and analogues of the Canterbury tales, vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 108–239, as does the French Livre Griseldis, which appears in the same useful volume, pp. 140–67. 21 William Burgwinkle has a useful chapter about ‘men who do not marry’ in his volume Sodomy, masculinity and law in medieval literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). There, he offers a reading of the many manly marriage-resisters in Marie de France’s Lais (several centuries earlier than Chaucer’s own writing). Burgwinkle emphasises that punishment for sodomy in the Middle Ages did not tend to fall upon those who merely engaged in same-sex sexuality, but rather on those who failed to heed the social demand to marry and sire children. 22 See Robert S. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and gender theory (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) for a monograph-length discussion of these issues. 23 See, for instance, Marie de France’s ‘Lai de Lanval’, in Judith Shoaf’s translation: ‘The Queen’s heart filled with anger;/ Furious, she spoke a slander:/ “Lanval,” she said, “I think they’re right./ You don’t care much for such delight;/ People have told me again and again/ That women offer you no pleasure –/ With a few well-schooled young men/ You prefer to pass your leisure”’ (Judy Shoaf (trans.), ‘The Lais of Marie de France’, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida (1991, 2005), https://people.clas.ufl.edu/jshoaf/files/lanval.pdf, accessed 19 May 2019). 24 An influential summary of this distinction can be found in the chapter ‘Introduction: axiomatic’ in Eve Sedgwick’s magisterial Epistemology

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of the closet. Axiom 2 reads: ‘the study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, antihomophobic enquiry is not coextensive with feminist enquiry. But we can’t know in advance how they will be different’ (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 27). 25 Discussed at some length, although without special interest in Chaucer’s version of this tale, in Louise O. Vasvári, ‘The story of Griselda as silenced incest narrative’, La corónica: a journal of medieval Hispanic languages, literatures, and cultures, 35.2 (2005): 139–58. See also Tison Pugh, Chaucer’s (anti-)eroticisms and the queer Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), especially pp. 221–2. 26 This strain of queer theory, most frequently associated with Lee Edelman’s No future: queer theory and the death drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), offers a powerful critique of futureoriented, child-centred thinking by queers, who, it imagines, should be warned away from deferring justice for future generations (and, while they are at it, maybe also from reproducing). While I am not endorsing anti-relational queer theory’s ‘fuck the child’ ranting (Edelman, No future, p. 29), it is striking how much Walter’s refusal of futurity is echoed in Edelman’s argument that the queer left ought to refuse what he calls ‘repro-futurity’. 27 David Wallace deftly turns this rather surprising choice of verb into a discussion of Chaucer’s relationship with his Italian predecessors and the work of translation done by the text. See David Wallace, ‘“Whan she translated was”: humanism, tyranny, and the Petrarchan academy’, in Chaucerian polity: absolutist lineages and associational forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 261–98. 28 See, for instance, ‘the religious allusions in the tale suggest that Griselda is a saint and martyr and imitation of Christ’ (Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s women: nuns, wives and Amazons (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 141), or the title of John Pitcher’s chapter on The Clerk’s tale, ‘The martyr’s purpose: the rhetoric of disavowal in The Clerk’s tale’, in Chaucer’s feminine subjects: figures of desire in The Canterbury tales (New York and London: Palgrave, McMillan, 2012), pp. 81–107, or Barbara Newman, who calls Griselda a ‘maternal martyr’ and says that this type had emerged in the fourteenth century (Barbara Newman, From virile woman to womanChrist: studies in medieval religion and literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 77). 29 ‘Throughout The Clerk’s tale, Grisilde’s face is the focal point both of Walter’s attention and of the Clerk’s descriptive imagery’, writes

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Andrew Sprung in an article that offers a Winnicottian reading of the tale as a way of thinking about unchecked tyrannical dominance, ‘“If it youre wille be”: coercion and compliance in Chaucer’s Clerk’s tale’, Exemplaria, 7.2 (1995): 345–69 (350). 30 According to both the Oxford English dictionary and the Middle English dictionary, the primary meanings of ‘sad’ are ‘satisfied’ and ‘constant’; see ‘sad, adj., n., and adv.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2021), www.oed.com/view/Entry/169609; ‘sā̆d adv.’, Middle English dictionary, online edition in Middle English Compendium, ed. Frances McSparran et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–18), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middleenglish-dictionary/dictionary/MED38236 (both accessed 3 January 2022); this remains their principal sense in cognate languages like Old High German, Old Dutch, and Old Icelandic. The meaning of ‘sad’ as ‘unhappy’ seems to be a uniquely English twist, a secondary sense that, in both dictionaries, is attested as early as 1300 but, for several centuries, with less frequency than in its principal meanings of sobriety, unyieldingness, and reliability. 31 ‘lickerous, adj.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2021), www.oed.com/view/Entry/108010 (accessed 3 January 2022). 32 Griselda’s consent more than meets the standard for ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘affirmative’ consent that colleges have put in place as a response to the apparent inevitability of campus rape. See, for instance, California’s Senate Bill no. 967, which requires post-secondary institutions to adopt the standard of affirmative consent in determining whether or not consent had been given by the complainant. This standard and various measures need to be in place in order for the institution to continue its eligibility for state funds. The bill’s chapter 748 helpfully defines ‘affirmative consent’: ‘“Affirmative consent” means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that they have the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent’ (California Legislative Information, Senate Bill No. 967, Chapter 748, http://leginfo.legis​lature.ca.gov/faces/billNavCli​ ent.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB967, accessed 12 August 2019).

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33 See my discussion of Fischel in n. 12. 34 See ‘The liflade ant te passiun of Seinte Margarete’, in The Katherine Group (MS Bodley 34), ed. Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016). Esther Cohen writes, ‘the perception of torture as intended to break the spirit (while leaving the body relatively unharmed) permeated martyrological literature in late antiquity, providing a spiritual answer to the martyrs’ ability to withstand torture’ (Esther Cohen, The modulated scream: pain in late medieval culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 227). 35 While we could go back to the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr for the power of non-violent resistance, this article is specifically concerned with the intersection between gender and sexuality and these issues. For a salient example, see the writings of lesbian AfricanAmerican critic Audre Lorde, particularly her essay ‘The uses of the erotic: the erotic as power’, in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984). See also the writings of queer theorists on bottoming, for instance Leo Bersani’s seminal essay, ‘Is the rectum a grave?’, first published in October, 43 (Winter, 1987): 197–222; or the work of Nguyen Tan Hoang, for instance his A view from the bottom: Asian American masculinity and sexual representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 36 See Michelle E. Danner, ‘“If it be your will”: sadomasochism in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s tale’, Mid atlantic popular/American culture association conference (2009), www.luminarium.org/medlit/chauces​ says.htm (accessed 29 May 2019). 37 Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s famous formulation is that Griselda ‘fuses’ her will to that of Walter, see her chapter on The Clerk’s tale in Chaucer and the fictions of gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): ‘In setting the conditions for their marriage, he asked only that she would do what he wished, and never contradict his will. She promised far more: a perilous merging of wills’ (p. 193). What I find fascinating in this formulation is, in part, the role of desire in such a merging. Such merging as this imagines no need that is not immediately met, but such a state would also be a state without desire (this might be a Lacanian way of thinking about it, but only insofar as Lacan’s own thinking responded to the traditions of how desire is represented in literature, I would contend). In the void of desire created by their merging, Walter’s sadistic epistemology creates a space between Walter and Griselda that permits him to feel desire of a compulsive and ­troubling sort.

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38 Tison Pugh notes this at the beginning of his discussion of fatherhood in The Clerk’s tale: ‘From the outset of this analysis of The Clerk’s tale, it must be acknowledged that no child is physically harmed in the narrative (except perhaps for any psychological scar inflicted on Walter and Griselda’s daughter when she realizes how close she came to copulating with her father). At the same time, few tales – both Chaucer’s Clerk’s tale and its immediate source, Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis – ask readers to visualize so graphically the image of young children’s bodies ravaged by wild animals’ (Pugh, Chaucer’s (anti-)eroticisms, p. 216).

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9 Ideological sadism or cultural enhancement: thirteenth-century Mongols in Kievan Rus and Baghdad Vicky Panossian Introduction Throughout history, different peoples have fought against v­ ariations of ‘cultural sadism’, a collective performative aspect of sadism that is based on the shared values and beliefs of certain hegemonising cultures. In some cases that cultural sadism was transformed into a more deeply rooted and philosophical version known as ‘ideological sadism’.1 Unlike in contemporary BDSM subcultures where members participate in safe and consensual ‘torture’ scenes for the benefit and pleasure of all involved, the power struggles of a prolonged ideological sadism resulted in the inflicting of pain for its own sake and possibly a libidinal sadistic pleasure. Such a type of sadism is manifest in two different discourses of history. In the first, there is the physical brutality that is inflicted on a particular group of people. This is fundamentally animalistic and corporal; it is this type of physical brutality that causes massacres.2 The second historical discourse is the interpersonal and sociocultural one, which eventually grows to become the collective memory of a certain group of people. Collective memory is anthropologically significant because it helps construct identity and a sense of belonging to a group, culture, or society. However, one interesting characteristic of ideological sadism is that it does not necessarily result in the emergence of ‘cultural masochism’.3 In this chapter, I observe the evolving power structure of two very different cultures that had to endure the ideological sadism imposed by a single ruling regime, the Mongols. The thirteenth century was a turning point for the vast Mongol Empire. As the Golden Horde

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began to expand its horizons and reach into new territories, the Mongols managed to find their way into modern-day Russia, Iran, and Iraq.4 The Russian Empire was not yet established, the territories of Moscow not yet under Russian rule. Baghdad, by contrast, had become the centre of the celebrated Abbāsid Caliphate. Thus, Kievan Russia and Baghdad represent either end of a spectrum of cultures that the Mongol Horde of the thirteenth century was trying to conquer.5 This chapter systematically goes over a brief historical overview of the reality of both cultures before the Mongol invasion. It begins by deconstructing the Russian historical narrative, before moving into a theoretical analysis of sadism. The second section looks into the Arab–Mongol engagement and its corresponding manifestation of sadism. The notion of ideological sadism stems from the original discourse on sadistic tendencies. Erich Fromm demonstrates that there are three variations of classical sadism. The first includes the need to attain absolute power over another entity; the second, a struggle for power combined with the impulse to exploit others; the third variation includes the wish to make others suffer and to observe their anguish. As some may observe, such a satisfaction in the suffering of others corresponds to traits found in contemporary Dominants in the world of S/M, though – as I will make clear – the pleasure within cultural sadism was meant to be one-sided. As such, there was for the sadistic culture no interest in a masochistic response; enemies could only be victims or those who would radically adapt their identities to survive. In this chapter I refer to Fromm’s third variation of sadism, which is the tendency to make others suffer for the sadist’s satisfaction and material benefit.6 This includes various types of pain inflicted upon a people, as well as humiliation and devaluation of their societal position. Reiterating the philosophy of de Sade, this would be the form of sadistic tendency that appears as less conscious but more rationalised, meaning ‘I rule over you because I know what is best for you, and in your interest you should follow me without opposition’.7 The power dynamics between two bodies do not necessarily have to be on an individual basis. Sadism may also be implemented on a social, cultural, and ideological level. Thomas Hobbes argues that mankind has



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a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.8

Hence, according to Hobbes, the need for mastery over another person or a group of people is a natural impulse; the sadist strives to become a God and do unto their victim as they please.9 The argument at hand considers the Mongol Horde’s invasions to be sadistic because the khanate’s objectives were not merely to conquer and abolish peoples but also to subject cultures and peoples under its rule for economic and trade benefits. A slave-mentality was imposed upon its subjects, who were told to accept the superiority of Mongol rule. This superiority was not merely social, cultural, or financial, but ideological. Fromm writes: ‘These sado-masochistic strivings are common, we can consider only certain individuals and social groups as typically sado-masochistic. There is, however, a milder form of dependency which is so general in our culture that only in exceptional cases does it seem to be lacking’.10 Fromm goes on to illustrate the stance of S/M on a cultural dimension and the dependency that emerges due to the balance between the perception of danger and the infliction of pain. By relying on de Sade’s model of moral convictions and the social order that emerges, the analysis looks into the savage nature of thirteenth-century Mongol invasions.11 Consequently, the infliction of this ideological sadism results in a number of modes of perception based on a Sadean interpretation of subversion.12 There are two ends of the spectrum: the Russians who utilise the remnants of Mongol ideological sadism in order to enhance their culture, and the people of Baghdad whose culture deteriorated due to the same wave of Mongol ideological sadism.

Explicit ideological sadism: Kievan Russia and the Mongol invasion Before the emergence of the Moscovite Russian Empire, there was Kievan Russia, the origins of which remain contested.13 A variety

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of historical perspectives leave room for an analysis of the implicit and explicit ideological sadism that emerged following the Mongol invasion. As the Mongol invasions began, Kievan Russia entered what some call the period of Appanage Russia, characterised by zero political or economic growth.14 As the Mongols conquered Kiev and went further into its communities, they did not hamper the social hierarchy of what was soon to be the Russian Empire. Thus, the pre-Russian peoples were left at ease sociopolitically. During the thirteenth century, Mongol sadism was fundamentally based on physical infliction of pain and humiliation; however, this evolved into an ideological sadism as Mongol invasions became more frequent. The Mongols replaced the head of the state and appointed a new Kievan Grand Prince, who had autonomy but was expected to pay respect and tribute to the Mongol Khan. This compromised autonomy was purely sadistic because although the princes of Kiev were granted autonomy over their people, they were not the ones in power when it came to the Mongols. That is, even if the Russian princes were granted partial autonomy, they were only considered leaders from the perspective of their people. When it came to the Mongol Horde, the prince was a mere subordinate through which the Mongol leaders could inflict further regulations. This doubleedged element of the autonomy gave way to the imposition of the ultimate extremes of ideological sadism in which the sadist is not even in the picture: the people could not revolt against the Mongols as there was no direct exposure to them. The people did not know of the Mongol Khan. They paid their tribute to their Russian prince, yet the Mongol Khan was the one in charge of their destiny, their security or destruction. In effect, the Mongol Khan ‘dommed’ the Russian people without their even knowing it; this is considered an impressive achievement in contemporary BDSM play where the invisibility of a Dom’s power is eroticised. Similar to the conclusions of Georges Bataille, the ideas of agency and autonomy were promoted as emblems to fuel egoism, yet they were used to gain power over the survival of another.15 ‘These exigencies lie outside the individual, or at least they set a higher value on the process begun by him’, writes Bataille, explaining egoism as  a crime that results in a lust that gratifies the sadist.16 Bataille speaks of the sadism surrounding criminality and the lust that

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emerges from observing the victim committing a crime. He utilises the archetype of Count Zaroff to demonstrate de Sade’s description of the ‘sovereign man’, especially when Count Zaroff says ‘Kill and then love! When you’ve known that, you have known ecstasy’.17 The victim of the sadistic act would be in charge of their life, or the lack thereof; however, the ideological instigator of the sadistic crime would be the invisible master sadist. The Russian submission to the Golden Horde was a lengthy process that may be broken down into two phases. The first was the direct invasion of the Russian land from 1237 to 1240; this was during the Kievans’ very first encounter with the Mongols. The second phase from 1240 to 1260 was concerned with the submission of the Russians to Mongol rule. The Mongol invasion was a fundamental milestone in Russian history.18 Russian towns witnessed mass destruction, politically, ideologically, and physically; various Russian chronicles compare Mongol brutality to an inferno that knew no end. When the direct pillage of the Russians began to decrease, the Mongolian ruler demanded absolute submission and the payment of a tenth-share of all income from every citizen who was left alive. Interestingly enough, some of the chronicle narratives speak of the Mongols as the divine punishment of the Kievans’ collective sins and brutalities against their neighbouring tribes. This misinterpretation plays a pivotal role in the collective perception of the Mongol Horde because it demonstrates the level of submission to an unfortunate notion of reality. Unlike the case of the Abbāsids that follows, the people of Kievan Russia welcomed their victimisation by periodically trying to rationalise it through the use of religion.19 Gilles Deleuze examines this specific disavowal of reality through religion.20 For Deleuze, such a reaction from the victim is based on a series of phases that come together to shape the consequential outcome of the sadistic act. He demonstrates the reference to the religious figure, in this case, that of Christ. Deleuze explains this occurrence by referring to Masoch’s male protagonists – Cain and Christ. By focusing on the necessity of pain without the pleasure dimension, Deleuze sheds light on the notion of punishment ingrained within Christian cultures. Similar to de Sade’s interpretation of religion, Deleuze’s explanation of the suffering of Christ is

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rationalised and replicated through various religious and sociocultural traditions. The phases are characterised by various instances of torture that were endured in order to bring about the eventual resurrection. Thus, the only element of enjoyment is deeply rooted within the other’s pleasure of a sinless existence. Deleuze concludes the portrayal of this dilemma by stating that the inflicting of torture, even if it were previously known, paved the way to the creation of a new form of sufferer: ‘Christ is not the son of God, but the new Man; his likeness to the father is abolished’.21 Therefore, the second phase would not be to call upon this figure, but rather to identify with them. This is the fundamental distinction between the Mongol victimisation of the people of medieval Baghdad as opposed to those of Kievan Russia. The people of Baghdad mourned the extinction of the Islamic Golden Age; they thought of it with hatred and conjured a memory based on lamentation. Meanwhile, the perception of sadism was very paradoxical when it came to the people of Russia who observed it from a collective religious ideology. Hence, when the common people of Kiev identify with Christ and consider themselves to be scapegoats for the sins of their people, there is room for healing and for reconstructing the unsolicited cultural sadism that was imposed on them. This mentality distinguishes them from their Arab counterparts because it enhances a mode of mourning that is socioculturally accepted. When the people collectively construct myths about the tragic events of their past, they not only set the tone for a foundation myth that may unite them under the umbrella of a shared identity, but they also enable their cultural progress and enhancement beyond the sadism that had overpowered them. According to Derrida’s reading of Deleuze, the resultant struggle of the individual who identifies with their saviour and carries the role of the cultural scapegoat does not invite the notion of mortification.22 Unlike the people of Baghdad who consider the fall of the Abbāsids as a humiliating grievance, the sadistic acts of Kievan Rus are recollected differently due to the cultural myths that have emerged from them. Mongol sadism was first manifested by the collective efforts of the Horde to ambush and destroy all military potential of the province of Vladimir, which was the most powerful centre in Eastern Europe.23 The chronicle account the Ravaging

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of Ryazan is the story of the reign of Batu Khan, which began in autumn 1237 with the initial sparks of Mongol sadism.24 At the very least, this phase is characterised by intense surges of violence imposed not only upon the people but also their farms and houses. These invasions were systematic; the Chronicles of Novgorod represent a very similar narrative.25 The Mongols had dedicated their entire army to the destruction of the Russian land. Discrepancies in accounts of the number of casualties leaves room for speculation; it is said that one-third of the Russian state was put to death, particularly in the main cities of Eastern Rus.26 The Chronicles of Ryazan demonstrate Batu Khan’s reaction following the brutalities.27 This stage was the phase that inaugurated the ideological sadism that became a fundamental part of Russian history. When Batu Khan had finished murdering the ruling families of Ryazan, he demanded the people’s unconditional submission to the Golden Horde. This inaugurated the requirement to pay an annual tribute to the Khan. As the remains of the tribes submitted to the rule of the Khan, an ideological crisis emerged. Submission to the Khan not only included economic submission but was also part of a process whereby the representatives of the Russian tribes had to bow down to the rule of the pagan Khan. This was a vast ideological and sociocultural humiliation for a deeply religious people whose value system was based on strictly Orthodox Christian beliefs. Religious integrity was considered more precious than survival; however, throughout all of Russia, there was a constant fear of Mongol supremacy. This humiliation may be observed from a strictly Kantian perspective. Kant argues that there is a valid discrepancy between pathological sentiment and moral law. Slavoj Žižek explains Kant’s notion of ‘law’ by shedding light on its antithesis, ‘freedom’: ‘The status of freedom in Kant is also real: freedom is the causality of the moral law as the paradoxical object (“voice of duty”) which suspends the phenomenal causal chain’.28 Žižek utilises Kant to demonstrate the difference between public/collective law and moral law by personifying them via the image of a married couple, using a classic example of Theodor Adorno’s anecdote from Minima monalia: reflections from damaged life (1951). This anecdote demonstrates the power opposition between the one who

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actually is in a position of power, the public/collective law, and the one who appears to be in power merely during social gatherings: the woman, the representative of the public/power, submits to her husband in public but dominates him in bed. The inherent structure of the moral law and the public/collective law illustrates the categorical gap between what society considers to be their ultimate basis of law and the driving force behind the actuality of their ruling law. This mentality applied to most of the Russian tribes or peoples who were under indirect Mongol rule. While the people did not wish to be humiliated or stripped of their traditional leaders due to their conservative understanding of societal structures, their leaders were in fact submitting to the Mongol Khan. However, this submission was not done at the level of the people, but of their governing body in order to save the people from humiliation. There is one element that is necessary to justify the smooth passage from pathological sentiment to that of the law; it is based on the pain of humiliation. According to Kant, man’s pride is the ultimate evil of human nature. Jacques Lacan’s reading of Kant offers a similar interpretation of the Kantian de Sade and the dimensions of the victim’s humiliation. Lacan argues that the fundamental Sadean fantasy is established in ‘jouissance’, which is the right and property of enjoyment. Although it is linked to sexual pleasure, it can also be understood in terms of gratification. Lacan goes on to explain that the latter is unattainable when it comes to the collective law due to the fluid nature of ideology. Hence, the implications of pleasure and jouissance are a type of humiliation that does not expand to become the source of pleasure for the victim. According to Lacan, the Kantian notion of the ‘sadism of law’ entails a certain degree of humiliation, which has a direct impact on people’s ideology and identity, because it weakens the balanced state of their ego. Applying this logic to the Mongols in Kievan Rus, the amplified constraints of humiliation were met with a radically different resistance to convergence. The people sought extinction rather than submission. This only fuelled the ideological sadism of the Mongols. The Russians were allowed to fight back in order to attain a type of freedom but were no match for the Mongols. However, it was the act of their persistence that was culturally significant for the people

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of Kiev. This resulted in humiliation on a cultural scale; by diminishing the morale of the people, it brought about ideological sadism that had a lasting impact on the people of Kiev for generations after its occurrence. Within the chronicles, whether of Ryazan or the Mongol accounts offering biographies of Batu Khan, there are continuous narratives that speak of the pleasures that the Khan used to gain from inflicting this humiliation upon the less powerful and economically disadvantaged tribes of Russia.29 This humbling submission required not only the promise of large portions of the people’s income and raw materials but also that the people, through their appointed administrators, consider the Khan to be their leader. Tales of martyrdom and national conquests began with this inflicted humiliation, and what was left of the Russian tribes began to go through a fundamentally nationalistic phase. During this period, some of the chosen administrators rejected Mongol rule and preferred open resistance. The latter did not last for long since the Mongols left no room for sympathy. However, others voluntarily underwent what the chronicles entitle ‘the journey of humiliation’. The retention of religious autonomy came with the risk of losing one’s life as well as the life of one’s town or village. It was not merely cultural imperialism or hegemony that was imposed by the Mongol Horde but also a version of ideological sadism that left no room for the victim’s previous identity to prosper. As explained by Deleuze, there is an integral difference between the categorical sadist, whether on the individual or cultural scale, and their victim, the one fighting for survival.30 The sadist reveals the fragility of the victim who must choose either to forgo their own identity and integrity or die. Hence, the ideological dilemma at hand manifested by the continuous Mongol invasions and brutalities encouraged generations of Russians to find a third alternative, a middle ground between adopting ‘ideological sadism’ and identifying as a victim; this third alternative is ‘cultural enhancement’, which is neither sadistic nor masochistic. It is the internalisation of both (sadist and victim) that enabled the Russian people not only to recover from the atrocities of the Mongol Horde but also to use them as examples for future invasion tactics. Thus, this cultural enhancement became a significant characteristic of a unique type of Russian identity.

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Some versions and translations of Russian chronicles shed light on various princes and leaders of tribes who were celebrated because they preferred martyrdom over the acceptance of paganism. One particular example is Prince Michael of Chernigov, who refused to submit to pagan rule according to the Novgorod chronicle. His heroic act turned him into a national legend and Christian saint for refusing to submit to pagan powers in the face of death. However, other chronicles demonstrate the political necessity of submission to the Horde as the only way to maintain and preserve the existence of the Russian tribe. The author(s) of the Hypatian chronicle speak of a young man called Daniel who was chosen by the Mongol Khan to be the administrator of the tribute within the province of Halych.31 He was told that if he were to submit to the Mongol Horde and accept the Khan’s superiority, he and his people would be saved from the brutality of the Mongols. By choosing to give in to Mongol rule, Daniel of Halych saved his entire tribe; he was considered to be the first Russian subordinate to the Mongol Khanate. It did not take long for the rest of the tribes to notice that submission was an advantageous political necessity.32 Not all the chronicles have the same narrative regarding Daniel’s decision, especially those emphasising the ideas of integrity and Christian pride. According to Valentin Riasanovsky, Daniel had temporarily become a symbol of disgust. Riasanovsky goes on to describe the powers of safety, security, and autonomy that were endowed upon the submissive administrator and his people.33 It did not take long for the rest of the tribes to forgo their misapprehension of pride and submit to Mongol supremacy, thus paving the way for the second and more peaceful phase of the Mongol invasion. The act of submission was not one of masochism; the torture, be it physical or ideological, that was inflicted upon the Russian tribes did not become pleasurable for the victimised people. Riasanovsky, referring to the Hypatian chronicle, argues that Daniel’s submission was the ultimate turning point for neighbouring tribes too. As Daniel and his people were left in peace and were only responsible for annual taxes, they had the chance to regain their economic prosperity and re-establish their trade routes. The exclusive nature of the tax collection came with a certain degree of protection as well, since Daniel no longer had to worry about sending his young

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men into the army to protect the borders of their territory. Thus, the king of Hungary, Bela IV, reconsidered his relations with the Rus and offered Daniel his military alliance as a way to regain peaceful commerce connections. According to V. L. Egorov, this step played a fundamental role in the future of Russia, even prior to the establishment of Moscow.34 Through the alliance with the Hungarian king, Russian merchants regained a role in continental trade. Kievan Russia gradually found its way into the fiscal system of the Mongols, at which time Russia received its political autonomy. Influenced by the common understanding of Christian supremacy brought about by the initial rise of the Byzantine Empire, the authors of the Chronicle of Ryazan state that the submission to Mongol rule was equivalent to the rejection of particular Christian ideologies. But it was either submission to the Khan, or submission to death. Žižek describes this phenomenon as the deployment of the Kantian notion of law which has a sadistic nature. According to Žižek, the Kantian sadistic law is a paralleling version of a ‘superego agency’ that manifests itself by imposing ideological deadlock upon its victims.35 One might argue from a Žižekian perspective that the Mongols displayed symptoms not only of ideological sadism but also of a power hierarchy that is based on sadistic law.36 Žižek utilises a Lacanian reading of governance to exemplify the sadistic nature of Kantian ethics. In his book The indivisible remainder, Žižek writes: Lacan’s aim is not to ‘besmirch’ the purity of the Kantian ­imperative – that is, to discern beneath it the ‘pathological’ sadistic enjoyment – but, on the contrary, to demonstrate that the Sadeian Will-to-Enjoy [Volonté de Jouissance] is thoroughly ‘pure’, ethical in the strictest Kantian sense. The imperative which sustains the Sadeian subject’s endless search for enjoyment fulfils all the criteria of the categorical imperative.37

Kantian sadistic law leaves room for autonomy, which is a multifaceted concept. The externalised notion of the law gradually becomes internalised by the victims.38 Yet rather than becoming masochists, the victims (in this case, the Russians) would become post-idealist subjects, the conscience of whom is founded on

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Mongolian ideologies. This goes beyond the mere infiltration of culture and its various elements; some scholars argue that the Mongols were harmless when it came to the sociocultural structure of their conquered people’s reality.39 However, there is the ideological dimension of the victim’s identity that merely comes to light while looking at the consequential collective memory of a particular event. One consequence of the Mongol invasion was a rapid population shift to the north-east. The tradesmen who lived near Kiev did not wish to cut their ties with the local commerce community; however, their lives were threatened by the Mongols. These people gathered together and established themselves towards the northeast of Kiev. The latter grew to become a community of its own under the name of Moscow.40 Thus, the Mongols helped catapult Moscow to prominence as a trade town. It did not take long for the Moscovites to grow in numbers. Since Moscow was considered to be a safe town, it became a harbour for intellectuals and theologians as well as those who were seeking refuge from the borders of Kiev. Due to the peaceful relations between the Mongols and the Kievans, the Mongol Khan considered himself to be responsible for the protection of his new Kievan province. Hence, the manifold attacks by Pechenegs and other barbaric groups were confronted by the Mongol army rather than Kievan forces. Soon enough, as Moscow had a chance to flourish, the Mongol Khan decided to choose a Grand Prince from the Moscovites rather than the Kievans. By 1325 Moscow had already become the official seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church.41 The Mongols also isolated the Kievans from their Christian counterparts. As the Kievans were busy trying to hold the economy together by establishing ties with the newly emerging community of Moscovites, they lost their trade connections with Byzantium and Europe. This gave way to social isolation that later on nourished the identity as well as the ideology of the post-Mongol Russian Empire. It did not take long for Moscow to grow completely independent and politically as well as economically powerful. Meanwhile, the Mongols were gradually losing their power due to their constant battles throughout their empire. As the Mongol Empire had begun to grow, the disparities regarding its government began to evolve

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exponentially; the Mongols had to deal with miniature uprisings in different continents as well as foreign intervention and the constant threats from small yet emerging political rivals. The Mongols were fighting battles on a number of fronts when the Russian Grand Prince, Dimitri Donskoy, decided to wage a battle against his Mongol superiors. After almost a century and a half of Mongol supremacy, the Russian nation was beginning to come together. The Battle of Kulikovo marked a major defeat for the Mongols.42 Donskoy was considered to be the most powerful man in the Balkans, and Moscow was soon considered to be the saviour of the Balkans as well as other parts of Europe. Kulikovo represented a turning point for the establishment of modern-day unified Russia.43 From living in tribes who were merely connected by trade and religion, people gathered together under the direct rule of Donskoy not only to preserve their safety and security but also to become a subset of the empire he was putting together.44 Even though Donskoy did commence breaking ties with the Mongols, he still did not wish to part ways completely. While some historians argue that this was a faulty move and that Donskoy ought to have ended all relations with the Mongols, others demonstrate the threat that the Mongols were still posing to the Russian Empire.45 During the years that followed, the emperor Ivan the Great announced that unified Russia would no longer be held responsible for providing the Mongols with any type of income, whether cash or in kind.46 The tribute that the people of the Balkans had paid for two centuries ended. Ivan used this income to invest in his army, taking over groups of peoples on the borders of Russian territory and unifying them under his rule. For the people of Russia, the Mongol invasions were a manifestation of cultural sadism that brought about a type of cultural enhancement. The Golden Horde had a direct influence upon the unification of Russia because fear created a sense of monoculturalism, which persisted throughout Russian history. Russia put forth its own militarism that initiated an era of imperialism and expansion. Cultural sadism does not necessarily result in cultural enhancement, however. It may lead to cultural masochism, as seen in the fall of Baghdad.

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Baghdad and the Islamic Golden Age The Mongol Empire’s encounters with the Islamic world began at its foundation and were characterised by particular instances of explicit ideological sadism. By the thirteenth century, the Mongol khans reached a point that allowed them to pillage the people of the Balkans and use their subjects’ children to establish an army while utilising taxes to expand the khanate’s borders.47 By 1223 the totality of the Shah’s Islamic territory had been incorporated within the Khan’s Mongol Empire.48 Batu Khan ruled the western wing of the sovereign empire until his death in 1255. Although his reign was relatively short, it was during this period that the physical and sociocultural sadism brought about by the Mongolian Empire grew to become ideological sadism. Batu, who was accustomed to the Muslim way of life, was succeeded by Berke, his brother, who had converted to Islam earlier in life.49 In 1262 Berke decided to expand his state and move beyond the borders of the western realm, waging war against his cousin Hulagu Il-Khan, the ruler of Persia. Berke formulated a defensive alliance with the ruler of the Mamluks in Egypt. This alliance led to the dispersal of the Muslims of the Levant. While their caliphs in Persia were warding off miniature Mongol invasions, the Mamluks were collaborating with the enemy.50 The Mamluks had already taken over the Black Sea slave trade and their economy was thriving. The Mamluks and the Mongols ruled over a sizeable Muslim population.51 However, they had completely different lifestyles, the Mongols practising an Islamic nomadic lifestyle, the Mamluks being settled Muslims whose religion was a combination of various aspects of Shamanism and Eastern Christian beliefs coupled with Islamic traditions. The Mamluks had nurtured an ideological package that was unique in that it brought together oppositions. The Mongols were militarily based and ideologically simplistic; that is to say, they did not shift into a complex mode of culture whereby art and literature would come together with ideology and religion. Hulagu marched into the remaining Middle East in 1256 and conquered the decaying Khwarezmian Empire. This quest was not

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about land or the capital that the Khwarezmian Empire had to offer; it was a quest against the Islamic religion. Hulagu secured the entirety of Iran and approached the borders of the Abbāsid Caliphate, demanding its submission to Mongol rule. The fundamental difference between the submission of Iranians and those of the people of the Balkans is that the people of Iran were seen as the ruling elite of the Islamic states. The caliph was known as the leader of all Muslims. Therefore, demanding the submission of such a culturally significant city meant demanding its ideological compliance. Between 19 January and 10 February 1258, Baghdad lost threequarters of its population. What was left of the city officially surrendered to Mongol rule but the sacking continued for seven more days; the Abbāsid Caliphate was brought to an end,52 and with it (in many accounts) the Islamic Golden Age. The Levant was then under the direct rule of the weak remnants of the Ayyubid sultanate, which offered to surrender to Hulagu and begin paying tribute. This brought about the ideological submission of the Islamic states to the Mongol powers. Although the Mongol Horde did not explicitly hamper the cultural advancement of the Islamic world, since the Arab realms continued to prosper, the Mongols had a direct impact upon the collective narrative pertaining to the people’s memory of the Horde. That is, while the Russians celebrated the Mongol invasions that allowed them to create and strengthen their own identity, the people of the Islamic world lamented the fall of Baghdad, considering it the end of an unparalleled Golden Age that demonstrated not only their victimisation but also their humiliation and embarrassment. It is still lamented in contemporary Islamic literature. Meanwhile, Mamluk soldiers were the only remaining selfproclaimed defenders of Islam. They assembled their armies and marched against the remnants of the Mongol forces. The Mamluks moved towards Palestine while Kitboqa, the new Mongol leader, began to approach them from Damascus. For the first time in the history of Islam, the Mamluks used Mongolian fighting strategies. The Mongols were soon besieged and weakened as the Mamluks won the battle of Ain Jallut in 1260, halting the Mongol advance. Mamluks, who were otherwise shunned for being ideologically and socioculturally inferior, thus became the most powerful Muslims

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in Middle Eastern territory. The ideological sadism had reached its peak in a scene resembling that of Daniel of the Hypatian chronicle, who surrendered and submitted to the Mongols. The culturally ‘inferior’ and ‘savage’ enemy had come to overpower the disempowered Islamic world. The ideological sadism instigated by the Mongols had a ripple effect on various cultural proliferations of Islam, resulting in a direct, explicit impact on the people’s ­historiography and collective memory.

Historiography and collective memory Historiography plays a fundamental role in the formation of the collective memory to which people cling. The act of recording and recalling history creates a perspective for the people of forthcoming generations. Hence, in order to fully comprehend the nature of Mongol sadism and its cultural impact, one ought to look into the historiography and the collective memory of medieval people. While doing so, the reader can observe a variety of narratives, all falling under one culturally charged umbrella of collective identity. For Lacan, this identification process is the act of overpowering sadistic tendencies and inflicting sadism upon oneself – which is then transformed into masochism.53 Lacan uses Sacher-Masoch’s work in order to criticise and emphasise the necessity of the subject’s interpersonal narrative.54 This section looks into the various historiographies produced by the people who were raided by the sadistic Mongol Horde of the thirteenth century. The historiography of pre-Mongol Rus was enhanced and hampered throughout the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that this hampering was due to the implicit ideological sadism that was brought about by the Mongols.55 Simon Franklin speaks of the variations of Balkan Mongol research narratives that came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Accounts from varying Latin and German sources as well those of Arabian scholars demonstrate the evolution of the Russian state under Mongol rule.56 However, these newly emerging foreign sources put forth a vestige of a ­historical narrative that was opposite to the one that was predominant during the era of the Soviet Union. While some Soviet nativists

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argued that there was no need to maintain any medieval historical accounts, particularly those that involved invasions and economic control, there was another attempt to alter the significance of the Mongol invasion in order to advance nationalism. Contemporary anthropological research has concluded that continuous Mongol invasions and the brutalities that they demonstrated severely scarred the Russian state and perhaps even aided in establishing it.57 One example of Soviet historiography was published during the second half of the twentieth century by Igor Froianov.58 It is a four-volume book that speaks of the formation of the state of Russia as the basis of the Soviet Union. Froianov closely examines the Kievan period and disregards the presence of feudalism as well as the intense stratification and social hierarchy. The volume goes on to illustrate a deeply nativist discourse whereby towns such as Moscow are said to have emerged due to local exchange and agricultural surplus. Hence, Froianov maintains the narrative of a foundation myth that is predominantly based on the principles of the Soviet Union. This tale omits the coercion of the Mongol Khanate and its brutalities. It does not shed light on the cruelty that the commoners suffered in order to maintain their role and status as the founders of the natural Soviet State of Russia. In Froianov’s history, there is a direct focus on the tribal order. There is the absence of a catalyst state and the obvious abolition of the Varangians and Scandinavian interference, which resulted in the Horde becoming a direct thread to all Kievans. As argued by Franklin, Russian history is problematic and polyphonic due to its continuously revisionist nature.59 However, while observing Froianov’s history, the absence of Mongol intervention may be read as the direct result of the sadism brought about by the Mongols. Before venturing into an account of the anthropological research and foreign accounts of the Mongol invasion of Kievan Russia, it is useful first to pause and contemplate the state of Froianov’s famous narrative. Deleuze may read Froianov’s discourse as the defence mechanism brought about by the power infringement of the Mongols to which the Soviet Russians did not wish to succumb. The power structure and its perceptions would soon be altered when observing the rule of different Russian rulers. However, having in mind that cultural sadism does not n ­ ecessarily

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have to give way to cultural masochism, the reader notices that Froianov is essentially denying the pleasure that the pain of his people had brought about for the Mongol Khanate. According to Deleuze, the victim’s identification as a masochist comes in the way of the sadistic act, making the latter a mere consensual affair.60 The notion of sadistic pleasure, as per Deleuze, does not include the ideological consent of the hegemonised party. Applying this principle to the broader picture of the state of Russia, Froianov’s may be read as the Soviet account, concealing the segments of the past that might otherwise bring about no pleasure for the masses. Froianov did not wish for the establishment of his people to appear to be based on a foreign dynasty’s taxation system, hence the only other alternative was to replace Mongol power structures with local agricultural ones.61 Therefore, the historiography and the ‘amendments’ done to the history of the Russian people(s) played a fundamental role in shaping the nation’s collective memory of the Mongols. This might have paved the way for a contemporary Russian perception of Muslim powers; however, the common stratum’s recollection of Mongol sadism was abolished, or nullified, by the narrative imposed on the generations that followed the Soviet era. Debates over historiography are also common within the Arab world. Due to the French and British mandates that were imposed upon the Levant region, there are conflicting accounts of history. One particularly interesting discrepancy that is directly linked to the interpretation of the Mongol invasion is the large variance between Syrian and Palestinian accounts of the one battle, that of Ain Jallut. While the Palestinian narrative glorifies the Mamluks due to their lengthy affiliation with the Egyptians, the common narrative within Damascus looks at the plethora of uprisings that the people of Aleppo and Damascus prepared in order to combat the Mongols. Although both narratives demonstrate a single historical event, the ideological variations are directly rooted in the people’s collective perception of their past; while one narrative brought about a sense of cultural sadism that led to enhancement, the other was a relatively masochistic response in interpreting their cultural history.



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Cultural enhancement Observing varying accounts of explicit and implicit ideological sadism as well as the collective memory they have demonstrated, one cannot help but examine the anthropological and sociocultural notions of the nationalist identity that emerged in these regions during the post-Mongol era. For instance, as demonstrated within the historiography, the Arab perception of the Mongols depends on the collective memory of the people of a particular region.62 Maurice Blanchot argues that the taming of a sensitive aspect of a person or a group of people is what allows the moment of suspension in which the instinct is curbed and subordinated to crime: ‘in order for passion to transform into the energy, it should be contained, mediated by a necessary moment of insensibility; only in this way it would reach its greatest intensity’.63 This Deleuzian understanding of ‘energy’ may transgress the borders of a relationship between two people and morph into the denotative nature of the relationship between two peoples – the Russians and the Abbāsids facing the Mongols. Within the medieval period, the sensitive aspect of the people was their emerging notion of identity and individuality. The narratives of Russia and contemporary Arabs thus converge when one looks at their interpretation of the Mongol era. For the Muslim Arabs, the Mongols represent destruction and the end of an age of glory that is as yet unparalleled. For them, it is a cultural tragedy that gave way to the loss of their tie with the Prophet, since the executed caliph of Baghdad was a direct descendant of the Prophet.64 The end of the Islamic Golden Age is lamented in prose and poetry, cursed in prayer and incorporated within the narrative of modern-day Muslims. The fall to foreign powers is said to be the first of many, given that the Mongol invasion was followed by the rise of the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, while observing the Russian perception of the Mongol invasion, there is a completely opposing strand of collective thinking. Although the common history has been revised, as was just discussed, there is a fundamentally paradoxical shift in attitude. The unknown authors of the famous Russian chronicles speak

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of the brutalities of the Mongols. Meanwhile, the contemporary Russian narrative celebrates the establishment of Moscow and the unique identity of the people of the nation. The destruction brought about by the Mongol Horde in Russia had a drastic impact on the development of their cultural perceptions of power. Due to the deportation of the merchants, Moscow began to bloom economically. Later on, because of the Mongol threat to neighbouring cities, Moscow was isolated from Byzantium and Europe, encouraging the people of Moscow to conjure up an identity of their own making. However, this identity was not developed on the basis of Mongol principles and ideologies. For the people of Moscow, the ideological sadism was brought to a halt because of their strong ties with their religion. Meanwhile, the Mongols in Baghdad had already converted to Islam, creating another side of an ideological dilemma. The ideological sadism of the Mongols paved the way for a unique cultural enhancement of the Russian Empire but it led to the crumbling of Baghdad and its legacy in the Arab world. The interwoven nature of the sadism and the enhancement that followed did not result in any consequential ideological masochism on behalf of the Russian state and its collective memory. As Deleuze suggests, the systematic portrayal of the acceptance of submission is not necessarily a marker for ideological masochism: ‘That masochism and sadism are two distinct asymmetric phenomena does not preclude the possibility that a sadistic tendency inheres in masochism.’65 Even if the inherent nature of masochism holds vestiges of sadism, it does not mean that sadism is bound to generate any notion of masochism. The sadism within this piece is the sadism of the Kantian notion of the hegemonising law. It is the power struggle for survival and the clash of the latter with the ideological and sociocultural values of the peoples of particular nations.

Notes  1 The difference between cultural and ideological sadism may be linked to the difference between culture and ideology in general. That is, ideological sadism is the philosophy of sadism that is ingrained within the shared beliefs and values of a people who perform and manifest

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it through their culture. In this chapter I use the term ‘sadism’ in its Kantian sense, which I define in the following pages.   2 Donald G. Dutton, The psychology of genocide, massacres, and extreme violence: why ‘normal’ people come to commit atrocities (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007), p. 116.   3 An example of cultural masochism can be observed in accounts of conservative Western societies during the Middle Ages. These accounts narrate the reality of young people who came from dishonoured families and were given the option of going through ‘cathedral mortification’, which is the act of mortifying the flesh of the individual until it has lost all trace of earthly and inherited sins. See further Thomas Fudgé, ‘Surviving the Middle Ages: the extraordinary pursuit of salvation’, in his Medieval religion and its anxieties (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 229–52.   4 Although Baghdad is located in modern-day Iraq, the agenda of this discourse, which deals with the thirteenth century, goes back to a time when Iran and Iraq were united. Therefore, it is equally significant to include Iran while discussing the modern-day reality of these cultures. See further Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi, Small media, big revolution: communication, culture, and the Iranian revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).   5 For a useful account of the intersections of race and domination, see Geraldine Heng, ‘The Mongol Empire: global race as absolute power’, in The invention of race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 287–416.   6 Erich Fromm, Fascism, power, and individual rights (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).   7 Fromm, Fascism, power, and individual rights, p. 114.   8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 2017), p. 69.   9 Fromm, Fascism, power, and individual rights, p. 123. 10 Fromm, Fascism, power, and individual rights, p. 133. 11 Timo Airaksinen, The philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 139. 12 Airaksinen, The philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, p. 178. 13 While some historians such as Brückner and Streitberg argue that Slavs comprised the original Kievans, others argue that Kievans were primarily Scandinavian. There are a number of conflicting narratives, but one agreed-upon idea is that the economy of medieval Kievan Russia was based on trade. Unlike the rest of the Balkan towns, commerce was not only established on the trade of raw material but also involved arts and local crafts. The people of Kiev were ruled by a Grand Prince

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who was a Byzantine Christian. Before the Mongol incursion Kiev was accustomed to attacks by Huns and Pechenegs. Pre-Mongol Kiev had also established its own sociopolitical system; the hierarchical structure was primarily based on a major stratum of serfs who were mostly land workers that had once been unable to pay their taxes to the landlord. Historians dispute the exact date that marks the fall of the Kievan legal system, while others claim that the system never fell. See Alexander Maiorov, ‘The Mongolian capture of Kiev: the two dates’, Slavonic and East European review, 94.4 (2016): 702–14; also Maiorov, ‘The Mongol invasion of South Rus’ in 1239–1240s: controversial and unresolved questions’, Journal of Slavic military studies, 29.3 (2016): 473–99. For further reading, see A. Brückner and Wilhelm Streitberg, Slavisch-Litauisch, Albanisch (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1917); also Oleg Balanovsky et al., ‘Two sources of the Russian patrilineal heritage in their Eurasian context’, American journal of human genetics, 82.1 (2008): 236–50 (237), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2007.09.019; Paul Dukes, A history of Russia: medieval, modern, contemporary, c. 882–1996, 3rd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p.  394. Events can be traced in the Russian Primary chronicle; see Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd Sherbowitz-Wetzor (trans.), The Russian primary chronicle: Laurentian text (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953). 14 In this chapter, I refer to a set of Russian chronicles and their English translations, including The chronicle of Novgorod 1016–1471, translated by Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes (London: Camden Society, 1914), and The Russian primary chronicle translated by Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Although the sources at hand often demonstrate conflicting narratives regarding the details of Mongol invasions, most of the prominent chronicles of medieval Russia speak of versions of the same ideological sadism brought about by the much-feared Mongol Horde; see Maureen Perrie, The Cambridge history of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 137. 15 Georges Bataille, Blue of noon (London: M. Boyars, 1986). 16 Bataille, Blue of noon, p. 174. 17 Bataille, Blue of noon,p. 176. 18 Roman Hautala, ‘Russian chronicles on the submission of the Kievan Rus to the Mongol Empire’, Zolotoordynskoe obozrenie, 1 (2013): 207–21 (207). See also Marie Favereau, The Horde: how the Mongols changed the world (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021), ­forthcoming at the time this essay was written.

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19 Although the Russian chronicles are rich sources of information, there is one significant shortcoming, which is their fragmented nature. Often, instead of referring to the chronicles for direct quotes regarding particular instances, it is necessary to refer to secondary sources that have analysed them in tandem with official records of correspondence as well as neighbouring people’s accounts. 20 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1989), p. 39. 21 Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, p. 100. 22 Jacques Derrida and Christine Irizarry, On touching–Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 65. 23 Perrie, The Cambridge history of Russia, p. 130. 24 Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 213. On the chronicles as sources see Perrie, The Cambridge history of Russia, p. 130. 25 Mitchell and Forbes, The chronicle of Novgorod. 26 Hautala, ‘Russian chronicles’, 211. 27 Martin, Medieval Russia, p. 164. 28 Slavoj Žižek, The metastases of enjoyment: six essays on woman and causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 50. 29 T. R. Galimov, ‘Hierarchy of the Russian church and relations between the horde and the Russian church during the Tatar-Mongol invasion of 1237–1240; according to contemporary estimates’, Golden horde review, 5.1 (2017): 29–55. 30 ‘Sadism’, Deleuze studies, 8.3 (2014): 391–8 (397). 31 A. Shahmatov (ed.), Ipat’evskaja letopis’ [Hypatian chronicle]: A complete collection of the Russian chronicles, vol. 2 (Moscow: n.p., 1997). 32 V.A. Riasanovsky, Fundamental principles of Mongol law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 204. 33 Riasanovsky, Fundamental principles of Mongol law. 34 V. L. Egorov, ‘Gosudarstvennoe i administrativnoe ustrojstvo Zolotoj Ordy’ (State and administrative structure of the Golden Horde), Voprosy istorii (Questions of history), 2 (1972): 32–43. 35 According to Žižek, the Kantian understanding of law is through the notion of ‘superego agency’, which is the act of sadistic enjoyment due to the subject’s deadlock, and their inability to meet its inexorable demands. Žižek gives the example of the proverbial teacher who tortures pupils with impossible tasks and secretly savours their failings. For further reading, refer to Slavoj Žižek, The indivisible remainder (London: Verso 1996). 36 Žižek, The indivisible remainder, p. 169.

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37 Žižek, The indivisible remainder, p. 173. 38 In La philosophie dans le boudoir, de Sade mentions the individual’s ‘right to happiness’; Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1990), p. 261. Lacan elaborates on this by speaking of the ‘Maxim of Jouissance’. The latter is not necessarily a fight for libidinal gratification but rather the ethical right to the attainment of satisfaction through whichever means that the individual prefers – devoid of any judgement about the ‘perverse’ nature of this act of gratification. Therefore, the ‘right to happiness’ is equated with gratification, without the sociocultural implications of guilt or crime. 39 Virgil Ciociltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 121. 40 E. D. Simon et al., Moscow in the making (New York: Routledge, 2014). 41 Simon et al., Moscow in the making, p. 68. 42 Perrie, The Cambridge history of Russia, p. 216 43 Konstantin Lidin, ‘The silence of the Kulikovo field’, Project Baikal, 13.49 (2016): 116–19. 44 Perrie, The Cambridge history of Russia, p. 161. 45 Martin, Medieval Russia, p. 311. 46 Serhii Plokhy, Lost kingdom: a history of Russian nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin (London: Allen Lane, 2017), p. 33. 47 Temuchin, known as Chinggis Khan, united Mongol and Turkish tribes of the Eurasian Steppe in the second half of the twelfth century and created an empire; having gained control over most of China, Chinggis turned towards the West. 48 Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David Morgan, The Mongol empire and its legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 300. 49 While Berke was responsible for Batu’s territories, the supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire, Mongke, passed away. Since there were difficulties in assigning the succession of the throne, Berke was considered to be an independent ruler. 50 Hugh Kennedy, When Baghdad ruled the Muslim world: the rise and fall of Islam’s greatest dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005), p. 64. 51 Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks: the Mamluk-Ilkhanid war, 1260–1281 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 52 Kennedy, When Baghdad ruled the Muslim world, p. 138. 53 David Sigler, ‘“Read Mr. Sacher-Masoch”: the literariness of masochism in the philosophy of Jacques Lacan and Giles [sic] Deleuze’,

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Criticism: a quarterly for literature and the arts, 53.2 (2011): 189–212 (189). 54 Marc De Kesel and Sigi Jottkandt, Eros and ethics: reading Jacques Lacan’s seminar VII (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 55 Simon Franklin, ‘Pre-Mongol Rus’: new sources, new perspectives?’, Russian review, 60.4 (2001): 465–73 (465). 56 Franklin, ‘Pre-Mongol Rus’’, 465. 57 Franklin, ‘Pre-Mongol Rus’’, 469. 58 Igor Froianov, Kievan Rus’: essays in socio-economic history (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974). 59 Franklin, ‘Pre-Mongol Rus’’, 473. 60 ‘The victim cannot be masochistic, not merely because the libertine would be irked if she were to experience pleasure, but because the victim of the sadist belongs entirely in the world of sadism and is an integral part of the sadistic situation. In some strange way she is the counterpart of the sadistic torturer’ (‘Sadism’, 396). 61 Froianov, Kievan Rus’, p. 104. 62 Kennedy, When Baghdad ruled the Muslim world, p. 64. 63 Maurice Blanchot, Stuart Kendall, and Michelle Kendall, Lautréamont and Sade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 126. 64 Kennedy, When Baghdad ruled the Muslim world, p. 122. 65 Lorraine Markotic, ‘Deleuze’s Masochism and the heartbreak of Waiting’, Mosaic, 49.4 (2016): 21–36 (24).

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10 Fetishising the past: Troilus and Criseyde, sadomasochism, and the historophilia of modern BDSM Kersti Francis In E.  L. James’s 2011 erotic novel Fifty shades of Grey, the protagonist Anastasia Steele hesitates on the threshold of her lover Christian Grey’s ‘playroom’. Christian has just laughed off Ana’s confusion; this room is not, as she originally thinks, meant for late-night PlayStation or X-box marathons; it is actually his sex dungeon. When she opens the door and looks inside, it feels like I’ve time-traveled back to the sixteenth century and the Spanish Inquisition … There is a large wooden cross like an X fastened to the wall facing the door. It’s made of high-polished mahogany, and there are restraining cuffs on each corner. Above it … hang all manner of ropes, chains, and glinting shackles. By the door … swing a startling assortment of paddles, whips, riding crops, and funny-looking feathery implements. … But what dominates the room is a bed. It’s bigger than king-size, an ornately carved rococo four-poster with a flat top. It looks late nineteenth century.1

Ana’s initial response to Christian’s sadomasochistic proclivities invokes a confusion of temporalities. She ‘time-travels’ not only to the sixteenth century and the entirety of the Spanish inquisition, which took place in various waves from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, but also explicitly to the eighteenth century (‘rococo’ style) and the nineteenth century in a manner of moments. At one point, she even likens Grey’s cabinet of dildos, vibrators, and nipple clamps to a case in a ‘crusty old museum’.2 When Ana steps into his sex dungeon, she feels as though she has stepped into the past, ultimately suggesting that this entire room serves as a time capsule of history that simultaneously exists in her 2011 present.

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Ana’s thoughts here imply, to the trappings of bondage, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism, or BDSM. For a twenty-firstcentury audience, the implication is clear: the past was a place of sexual violence and depravity, and the very trappings of pain used for pleasure generate an experience of temporal dissonance that is simultaneously titillating and disorienting. Ana’s kink-induced temporal dislocation is not unique to Fifty shades, however. Nor is it a recent phenomenon. In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians viewed the pre-Christian Classical past as a site of both inspiration and sexual deviance absent of the mores of the Church. Medieval authors of romance would often deploy historical settings in their tales of suffering lovers and doomed relationships, as with the quasi-Trojan setting of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Troilus and Criseyde. These texts depict erotic suffering as both endemic to and generated by the depravities of a historical past that was considered part of medieval society’s origin story and yet disturbing for their contemporary system of sexual morality. Centuries later, the connection between the painful pleasures of historically remote societies and their material objects of torture became even more explicit. The comparison between sadomasochistic practice and the supposed brutality of the past underpins the very idea of a ‘sex dungeon’, a concept that dates back at least as far as the Marquis de Sade’s 120 days of Sodom (1784). To refer to a room intended for sadomasochistic sex play as a ‘dungeon’ implies that the sex acts performed within are a form of behaviour that is recidivist, re-embodying a perceived medieval origin, particularly given the medieval roots of the ‘dungeon’ as ‘a strong underground prison cell, especially in a castle’.3 BDSM practitioners themselves highlight the temporally disruptive powers of kink, describing the headspaces entered in sadomasochistic sex play as out-of-body, outof-time experiences.4 Yet Ana’s sense of time-travel to premodernity is particularly endemic to twentieth- and twenty-first-century American depictions of BDSM culture.5 What is it about pleasurable suffering that induces temporal dissonance across the centuries? Why do we culturally invoke the past, particularly the medieval past, in modern depictions of BDSM? How do our perceived notions of premodernity influence our

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contemporary understandings of sadomasochism, and vice versa? Elaine Scarry, Esther Cohen, and Mitchell B. Merback agree that pain represents a rupture of temporal continuity. The moment of experiencing pain exists out of time; the experience of pain causes temporal boundaries to collapse in a moment of pure sensation and bodily response.6 As scholars of queer temporality such as Carolyn Dinshaw and Heather Love assert, temporal dissonance ‘reveal[s] with unusual clarity the constant pressure of other kinds of time on the ordinary, everyday image of one-way, sequential temporality’.7 That is, moments of temporal collision between time frames or temporal systems, or asynchrony, demonstrate that temporality – much less linear temporality – is neither static nor absolute. Much like how the ‘now’ of the present moment is ineffable because it is both instantaneous and transitional, pain operates on a similar ineffability generated by sensation, though it may endure beyond a single moment. This essay argues that medieval and modern literatures engage with temporal dissonance through their interpretations of the past because this dissonance generates erotic titillation, a treatment of the past that I call ‘historophilia’. This essay examines the phenomenon of historophilia in its medieval and modern contexts. By first clarifying the function of historophilia and its place in the larger context of post-medieval Western society, I make clear the stakes of kink-induced temporal dissonance to our cultural consciousness. I then explore the medieval iterations of sadomasochistic historophilia in Chaucer’s use of Trojan and Theban history in Troilus and Criseyde, focusing particularly on the role of Statius’s Thebaid, the place of Criseyde’s collar-like Theban brooch, and the narrator’s continual linking of history to torment for the purposes of pleasure. The latter half of this essay interrogates elements of American BDSM culture ranging from its material objects, such as floggers and bondage furniture, to its self-characterisation in fetish photography and BDSM comics of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I investigate a variety of texts and objects from UCLA Library Special Collections’ extraordinary sadomasochism collection – over ten thousand American images and documents produced and circulated underground throughout the mid-twentieth century – alongside medieval histories of pain and torture. These documents reveal that the use of the Middle

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Ages in sadomasochistic sex play is a form of medievalism based in a fantasy that blends together historical fact and fiction. Though this fantasy in part emerges from the reality of past methods of interrogation, torment, and control, it is also the product of postmedieval views of history, which depicts Western history as a teleological narrative of progress from the barbarous past to the civilised present. The creation of this fantastic view of the past stems from the very pathologisation of sadism and masochism in the nineteenth century; as a result, the Middle Ages are inextricably tied to sadomasochism in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American popular imagination. As the use of premodern and particularly medieval Europe in fantasies of the history of sadomasochism makes clear, the Middle Ages represent more than an actual historical period in our cultural imagination: rather, the Middle Ages function as a site of familiar estrangement that allow us to project our own desires, interests, and beliefs upon it. This is not unique to the medievalism found in sadomasochism, however. As scholars of queer medievalism have noted, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ deployment of the trope of the Middle Ages functions as a way for modernity to define itself against the construction of an absolute other and distinct past. The idea of the medieval past as a particularly brutal epoch governed by violent desires underpins a twenty-first-century American worldview of the tensions between past and present, yet this view has existed for far longer in our understandings of sadism and masochism. Larissa Tracy persuasively demonstrates that modernity ‘look[s] back on the medieval world armed with assumptions of alterity and Otherness’, yet fails to recognise that torture was as notorious and denigrated in the Middle Ages as it is today.8 In medievalism’s queer potential, its violent trappings, and its use in depictions of BDSM, it becomes clear that the idea of the Middle Ages functions as a mirror against which we can articulate ourselves in the present. The queer potential of medievalism found in many nineteenthand twentieth-century popular texts similarly operates on our conception of the medieval as a time of degenerate sexual desires that are both recognisable and deemed abhorrent in a mainstream Western Christian worldview. The trope of the Middle Ages functions as

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a site of negotiation between past and present, wherein the otherness of the past can enable a queer fantasy without condoning it.9 Premodernity in sadomasochistic discourse functions in much the same way. The past operates as an imagined site wherein suffering is/was not just a fundamental part of life, but is/was also celebrated. Yet the very degeneracy ascribed to the past in our modern teleological worldview of sexuality makes it clear that these past desires must be condemned in our current moment. Where sadomasochistic medievalism differs is its reliance upon a specific reading of history to generate its titillation. Think, for instance, of the cultural conversation surrounding HBO’s Game of thrones, which continually deploys sexual violence against women in ways that have been argued both as historically accurate (despite the fact that the show takes place in a fictional world) and as morally outrageous. Despite protests from many viewers, the medievalism of the world of Westeros allows for the inclusion of sexually provocative and violent scenes in the name of historical realism. Examples such as this demonstrate that the fetishisation of pain that structures sadomasochism can be read as a fetishisation of the past; the medievalism inherent in advertisements for and depictions of BDSM reveals a desire to participate in a sexual legacy of a fantasy of the Middle Ages wherein more brutal desires reigned supreme. This fantasy rests upon a blend of fact and fiction. Though sadomasochism was first pathologised and recognised as a specific type of desire in the nineteenth century, Slavoj Žižek asserts that twentiethand twenty-first-century sadomasochistic desire directly descends from the courtly love ideal perpetuated in medieval romance, allowing us to view elements of S/M inherent in medieval systems of desire. In Courtly love or woman as thing, Žižek persuasively argues that the legacy of courtly love is only rendered visible by the development of the modern sadomasochistic couple in the last century.10 Modern practitioners of sadomasochism, meanwhile, view medieval history as the appropriate site for violent sexual fantasies, ‘since the semiotics of power relations in premodern cultures are popularly thought to be crudely figured in terms of dominance and submission or starkly organised into social institutions such as feudalism or the Church’.11 That is, the erotic capital of the premodern hinges upon a partially fictitious and certainly unnuanced view of the Middle Ages

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as a time wherein clear-cut boundaries and more stringent social hierarchies reigned supreme. While this figuration can be useful  – Žižek relies on an overly simplistic understanding of the role of courtly love in the Middle Ages to provide a compelling structural analysis of modern sadomasochism – the confusion between the real and imagined view of medieval society lends itself to the creation of a fantasy that supports a particular form of desire predicated on power dynamics and the exchange of social power. Though sexual violence and sadomasochism are distinct concepts, the use of medievalism in depictions of BDSM similarly reveals that the past is not merely a mirror when used in sex play, but in fact generates pleasure in the psychological negotiation between past and present.12 That is, BDSM’s use of the past reveals that the ­supposed history and legacy of sadomasochism is just as titillating as its practices. BDSM, then, is an enactment of historophilia. While Elaine Scarry, the groundbreaking author of The body in pain, describes pain as world-destroying, I agree with the premodernists Mitchell Merback and Esther Cohen who assert that medieval pain, and pain more broadly, is predominantly world-making.13 For instance, during the fourteenth-century flagellant movement, members of flagellant groups would wear matching garments, share meals, and live in spontaneously constructed communities of their fellow penitents for thirty-three and a half days before permanently disbanding. Even after this time of communal pain, each member of the collective was bound by the promise to flagellate themselves yearly on Good Friday for the rest of their life, in memory not only of Christ’s suffering but also of their experience as part of the flagellant community.14 In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the communal experience of pain and its world-building capacity can be seen today in the active kink communities that form around BDSM practice. Group suffering helps form the basis of a shared identity. Sadism and masochism are primarily motivated by a sexual attraction to giving and receiving pain, respectively. The centrality of pain to these categories of desire illuminates yet another dimension of the eroticism of historophilia: the resonant pleasures of experiencing pain that are not solely physically but also ‘temporally’ generated. Early medieval philosophers of pain, including

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Alexander of Hales, Matthew of Acquasparta, and Galen, all agree that ‘pain is the rupture of continuity’.15 This belief reflects Galenic humoral theory, which governed understandings of the body throughout the Middle Ages. In this medical framework, the human body should maintain a state of balance wherein each of four humours is carefully calibrated to prevent excess. Galenic theory itself was predicated upon the understanding that the body is but a microcosm of the macrocosmic universe, which must similarly remain balanced and continuous. In this worldview, pain represents a way to disrupt both the individual human experience as well as the larger temporal structures that control the humours of the body and ultimately the universe.16 Sadism and masochism indicate that there is something pleasurable not only about the experience of pain, but about the temporal disruption it causes. Just as humoral theory saw the microcosm as instrumental to understanding the larger meaning of the universe, so too can medieval understandings of the temporality of pain help us understand the larger eroticism of modern historophilia.

Temporal titillation in Troilus and Criseyde Medieval writers recognised the erotic potential of temporal dissonance and deployed it to great effect in romances, allegories, and epics. Whereas twentieth-century American BDSM culture locates the painful pleasures of the past in the Middle Ages, some medieval texts turned instead to ancient Troy and the Trojan War as a temporally distant example from which they were themselves directly descended. During the medieval period, history was conceptualised not as a teleological process, as is often the case in modernity, but rather as a narrative of tragic failures that further distanced society from a pure, unified Edenic origin.17 To put this another way, in the Middle Ages, to read history was to opt in to reading the stories of tragedy, struggle, and pain, and to choose to read history for entertainment was, in this context, inherently pleasurable and painful, or historophilic. Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Troilus and Criseyde (hereafter T&C) relies upon this erotic tension between past tragedy

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and present entertainment in order to both produce this romance as well as to facilitate the relationship between its titular lovers. That is, T&C’s historophilia operates on two levels: first, on the level of the medieval reader encountering the text; and second, on the actions of the characters, particularly Criseyde, within the story itself. Much as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries imagine the medieval past as the locus of sadomasochistic pleasure, T&C’s quasi-Trojan setting and selective use of history indicates that there is something pleasurable about encountering temporal distortion; furthermore, this subtextual tension between the ancient past and the medieval present generates as much titillation as the conflict between pleasure and pain. Troy was the single most popular origin story in the European Middle Ages. Medieval rulers, ecclesiastical authorities, and contemporary historiographers all asserted the unbroken linear history of the empires that supposedly sprung from its collapse, particularly Rome and Britain.18 This direct genealogy from past to present legitimised the authority of kings, popes, and most other medieval institutions, all of which operated under the guise of translatio imperii. For Chaucer and his medieval audience, then, the setting of T&C was not simply a well-known past, but their own history, much as White American culture today treats medieval history as its own origin story.19 Yet as Chaucerians have often noted, the Troy of T&C is in many ways ahistorical. Trojan and Greek warriors are depicted as ‘knyghts’; the medieval system of courtly love structures the interactions between Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus; the resonances of Boethian philosophy can be identified throughout; and the medieval figure of Fortuna predominates the minds of the protagonists. In other words, T&C transposes a medieval courtly setting onto the backdrop of ancient Troy.20 The centrality of the Trojan War to Chaucer’s tragic romance only emphasises the intrinsic relationship between pleasure and pain in this text. Though Lee Patterson sees these elements as indicative of T&C as ‘a mediation on history that effaces the historical’,21 he and other scholars acknowledge that the erotic relationship between Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus would not be possible without the events of the Trojan War. Troilus’s martial prowess against the Greeks in part convinces Criseyde to accept his

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suit; Pandarus uses the excuse of alerting Criseyde to developments in the war to press Troilus’s case with her; the same night that Criseyde and Troilus consummate their relationship, her father, Calkas, arranges the prisoner exchange that forecloses their erotic future. T&C plays with the dissonance between historical fact and fiction in its depiction of Troy to generate an eroticism grounded in historophilia. The status of T&C as literature of entertainment given its tragic scope and clear connection between sex and war demonstrates, in part, the sadomasochistic element of historophilia. As mentioned above, medieval conceptions of history were inherently pessimistic. While Chaucer-as-narrator may laud the past as a time of more courtesy and chivalry than his present, the ideal and absolute origin of mankind was almost always seen as the result of divine will and was thus impossible to return to by humanity, rendering the subject of history as one of pain, failure, and disappointment. Furthermore, given the popularity of the Trojan story and its importance to medieval England’s self-conception as well as the contemporary popularity of epics such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie and Giovanni Boccacio’s Il filostrato (Chaucer’s source text), the story of Troilus and Criseyde’s doomed relationship was one well known to his medieval readership. The sadomasochism of T&C emerges not only from the emphasis on the painful pleasures of lovesickness experienced by Troilus, or from the eroticised martial violence that occurs in each book, but also from the emotional experience of willingly reading tragedy for pleasure, despite – or perhaps even because of – the painful trials experienced by the protagonists. The very opening to T&C makes its investment in masochism clear. The narrator laments that he relates ‘the double sorwe of Troilus’ and invokes Thesiphone, ‘thou goddesse of torment/ thou cruel furye, sorrowing ever in peyne’, to guide his writing.22 By continually referring to the sadness of his story and his woe at telling it, the narrator in some ways attempts to elide his own sadomasochistic choice to narrate this particular tale; Chaucer does not have to write this story, nor does his narrator have to emphasise the pain and torment that its protagonists endure. Instead of invoking the goddess of torment to curse or harm, Chaucer’s narrator sees generative potential in her influence: the power of torment can be

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not only the subject of a story but also the means by which it is written. Intriguingly, the narrator gives as his reason for engaging in ‘this travaille’ the hope that this story ‘may do gladnesse/ To any lover, and his cause availle’.23 The framing of this romance is, from the start, grounded in the ‘peyne’ of its narrative and in the pained experience of the narrator who masochistically relates it of his own free will. To suggest that some lovers will gain ‘gladnesse’ and aid from this story suggests also that some readers derive pleasure from experiencing or reading about past pain in love, and that to encounter painful love narratives can be useful for lovers blessed and cursed in love alike. Presenting the narrative in this way allows the narrator to not only elide the pleasurable elements of his tale but also his own part in the enterprise. Despite the poem’s anachronistic treatment of Trojan history, Book  2 makes its historophilia explicit in yet another narratorial invocation. Whereas Book 1 began with the invocation of the Fury of Torment, in the prologue of Book 2 the narrator addresses the Muse of History by name: O lady myn, that called art Cleo, Thou be my speed fro this forth, and my muse, To ryme wel this book, til I have do; Me nedeth here noon other art to use. Forwhy to every lovere I me excuse, That of no sentement I this endite, But out of Latin in my tonge it write.24

Beyond serving as an invocation of inspiration and a self-­deprecating translator’s note, this appeal is noteworthy primarily because it is directed to Cleo, and not Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, Erato, the muse of love poetry, or any of the other ‘literary’ muses. History, Chaucer’s narrator states, is the only ‘art to use’ in the telling of this tale, immediately establishing that, although it may engage in literary ahistoricism, T&C should be ultimately perceived as history, and not simply a romance for entertainment. By grounding his text specifically in this ‘art’ and then asking ‘every lovere’ to excuse him for his lack of sentiment, the narrator both gestures to his main audience for this epic romance – lovers – and indicates that the past, although flawed, can serve as a didactic example for

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his ­contemporary readership. As in Book 1, the narrator’s claims of simply translating the tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde’s relationship allows him to distance himself from his subject matter and its anachronism while also granting his narrative additional authority. By presenting this text as a translation of a history, the narrator elides the fictionality of his tale and implicitly reinforces the masochistic practice of reading painful history for pleasure. Despite narratorial claims to the contrary, the composition, production, and circulation of T&C’s doomed romance further demonstrate the erotic possibilities of emotional masochism via historophilia. Yet the most powerful example of historophilia within T&C occurs not in these opening salvos or even in the text’s use of the Trojan War to facilitate its erotic action. Rather, the poem plays with temporal dissonance even more in its continual references to the Siege of Thebes, which occurred approximately a generation before the Trojan War. These references occur in nearly every book, and the events of that past are viewed as directly analogous to the narrative present (as we will see in the seer Cassandre’s use of this history to explain Troy’s future to her brother Troilus in Book 5). In Book 2, the past becomes directly a part of the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde. Immediately following his invocation of Cleo, the narrator relates Pandarus’s first attempt to woo his niece Criseyde for his friend Troilus. Pandarus is awoken for this loveerrand by the swallow ‘Proigne’ and ‘hir cheteryng/ how Tireux gan forth hir suster take’.25 The story of Proigne, or Procne, was well known in the later Middle Ages thanks to the re-introduction of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the twelfth century, which relates the myth in Book 6.26 Procne, an Athenian princess, marries Tereus, the king of Thrace, and after several years asks her husband to bring her beloved sister, Philomela, to live with them. Tereus is struck with lust at the sight of Philomela, however, and rapes her once he has brought her to Thrace. After she threatens to expose him, he rapes her again, cuts out her tongue, and imprisons her in the forest, thinking he has successfully silenced her. Philomela, however, weaves her story into a tapestry and sends it to her sister; Procne decodes it and, filled with rage, saves her sister. Together, the sisters murder Procne and Tereus’s son, Itys, and cook him for Tereus’s dinner that night. Once they have revealed their act of vengeance,

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they flee Tereus’s anger and all three are turned into birds: Tereus a hoopoe, Philomela a nightingale, and Procne a swallow. Though this moment could be read simply as a flowery metaphor for birds tweeting in the morning, Chaucer’s reference to Ovidian myth also frames this book – and the very relationship between Troilus and Criseyde, through Pandarus – as instigated by a tragic story of sexual violence and revenge, foreshadowing the misfortune of their own relationship. Once awoken by this story of rape, Pandarus arrives to Criseyde’s home to begin his courtship when he fonde two othere ladys set, and she [Criseyde] Within a pavëd parlour, and they thre Herden a mayden reden hem the geste Of the siege of Thebës while hem leste.27

Pandarus, not knowing what text the maidens hold in their hand, smoothly asks if their book ‘is … of love?’, in keeping with his amorous assignation. Instead, he is told: This romaunce is of Thebës that we rede, And we han herde how that kynge Layus deyde, Thorugh Edipuss his son, and al that dede. And here we stynten atte thise lettres red, How the bisshop, as the book kan telle, Amphiorax fil thorugh the ground to helle.28

Pandarus immediately rebuts, ‘Al this knowe I my selve,/ And alle thas sege of Thebës and the care;/ For herof ben ther makëd bookës twelve’, thereby identifying the text that Criseyde and her ladies read as Statius’s Thebaid.29 In this scene, the text depicts Criseyde and her ladies as a quasi mise en abyme. Their anachronistic reading of the Thebaid for pleasure mirrors the very experience of T&C’s medieval readership encountering its literary anachronism for the purposes of masochistic pleasure. Statius’s twelve-book epic was composed in 96  CE, some twelve centuries after the earliest accepted date for the Siege of Thebes, but it reached its zenith in popularity in the Middle Ages, where it served, in part, as an instruction book for Latin literacy.30 At any rate, T&C’s medieval audience would have recognised the

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asynchrony of Criseyde and her ladies reading this far-later Roman epic. As many scholars have noted, their choice of reading material is surprising for reasons beyond its temporal impossibility. The Siege of Thebes, for a start, was not an origin myth with which medieval Europe identified; it was always depicted in medieval manuscripts in relation to the Trojan War.31 Furthermore, epic poetry was rarely associated with female readership; as Catherine Sanok puts it, ‘Statius’s poem, with its vividly gory account of the siege of Thebes, certainly seems unlikely reading for Criseyde and her female companions’.32 Some scholars have read Chaucer’s inclusion of the Thebaid as an instance of literary irony or satire, much like Virgil’s inclusion of Dido in the Aeneid,33 yet to do so ignores both the purpose of Criseyde’s reading and the contents of her text. Statius’s ‘vividly gory account’ of this war could be in part enticing to Criseyde because of its bloody and violent subject matter. As a woman living under siege in Troy, Criseyde’s turn to the escapism of an even-more-traumatic war account could serve several purposes, from a sort of self-instruction on the effects of war on women, as Sanok argues, to gaining greater historical understanding, or because to read traumatic accounts can, much like modern slasher films, simultaneously titillate and horrify. Regardless of their motivation, Criseyde and her ladies’ choice of text clearly demonstrates the pleasures of historophilia. Just as Chaucer’s narrator’s emphasis of his text’s melancholy subject matter belies its masochistic potential as entertainment, so too does Chaucer’s inclusion of this scene – which was not part of his source text – reveal the masochistic pleasure that comes from experiencing temporal dissonance through emotional pain and literary anachronism. Book 2 explicitly depicts Theban history as a source of diversion from the war that rages outside of Criseyde’s city, thus demonstrating that, despite the horrors of war it depicts, histories such as the Thebaid can function as sources of enjoyment just as tragedies such as T&C can generate ‘gladnesse’. The payoff of T&C’s historophilia ultimately occurs only for the reader and not Criseyde herself. She and her ladies end their reading of the Thebaid before they reach the part most relevant to her erotic future: the actions of Tydeus, father of her eventual lover Diomedes. When Pandarus enters the ladies’ chamber in Book 2, they have just

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completed the seventh book of Statius’s epic. But in the very next book, Criseyde would have discovered Tydeus’s cannibalism and rejection by his patroness, Pallas Athena.34 This knowledge, closed off from Criseyde but known to Chaucer’s medieval audience, functions as a form of hermeneutical prolepsis that hinges upon the pleasurable tension between past and present: while Criseyde is doomed to her tragic fate, the reader instead reads her sorrows for the masochistic emotional pleasure they generate. By the moment of Cassandre’s exegesis of her brother Troilus’s dream in Book 5 of T&C, the links between the Theban past and the Trojan present are clear but not concrete. The night before he comes to Cassandre, Troilus receives a dream from Jove that reveals Criseyde’s ‘untrouth’ and Troilus’s ‘disadventure’ and links them both to the figure of a boar.35 Rather than turn to the future  to explain this sign to her brother, the Sibyll Cassandre instead tells him that the answer can only be found by listening to ‘a few of olde stories’.36 Eventually, she relates to him all twelve books of the Thebaid, ending with the revelation that Diomedes is the son of Tydeus, represented by the sign of the boar. It is this sign, she tells him, that reveals that ‘thy lady, wherso she be, iwys/ This Diomede hir herte hath and she his’.37 It is in this moment that the reader realises that the stories of Thebes and Troy are not, for Chaucer, distinct; rather, they are one and the same, directly connected by linear history and a shared cast of characters. By invoking Thebes and clearly articulating its repetition in the Troy story, Chaucer demonstrates that history can be both linear and teleological. As Lee Patterson points out, this is a late medieval idea, and a troubling one, but I view this complexity as freeing. It grants the reader, in their present moment, a sense of self-knowledge that can be gained from studying the past, just as Cassandre demonstrates to Troilus. Though this is a seditious idea in the Middle Ages given the domination of translatio imperii as institutional justification, in T&C Chaucer explores what a nonlinear history looks like and how it influences the present moment, creating pleasurable temporal ruptures on multiple scales. The final, most salient manifestation of Chaucer’s use of historophilia can be seen in the continual invocation of the brooch that passes between Criseyde to Troilus to Diomedes. In Book  3,

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Criseyde gives to Troilus ‘a broche, gold and asure/ In which a rubye set was lik an herte’, and pins it to his shirt.38 As David Anderson points out, the description of this brooch resonates with Chaucer’s description of the mythological Brooch of Thebes in his Complaint of Mars. In that text, Mars refers to a ruby-studded gold brooch as the jewellery detailed in Statius’s Thebaid that was given away during the Siege of Thebes by Argivia, who is revealed in Book 4 of T&C to be Criseyde’s mother. The loss of this brooch during that siege mirrors the loss of Thebes itself, Mars claims, so that it is cursed to give its wearer ‘double wo and passioun’, the same phrase used to describe Troilus’s relationship with Criseyde in T&C.39 In Book  5 of T&C, the brooch reappears when Criseyde gives her lover, Diomedes, ‘a broche … that Troilus was’.40 Following his defeat of Diomedes, the Trojan Diophebus brings back his enemy’s cloak as a prize; when Troilus beholds it, he ‘on the coler founde withinne/ A broche that he Criseydë gaf’.41 Scholars disagree whether these brooches are one and the same, or if they are even references to the Brooch of Thebes, citing the differing number of rubies in Chaucer’s descriptions and pointing out the narrative illogic of Criseyde’s possession of a brooch that her mother gave away, but these details are beside the point.42 As the confusion over the text that Criseyde reads in Book  2 makes clear, T&C is not concerned with narrative logic or historicity, but instead with the larger effects of historical association. The very transformation of this object from its designation as a ‘molier’, or collar, in the Thebaid, to the ‘brooch’ in Chaucer’s texts serves as yet another blurring of the lines between the purportedly Trojan setting of T&C and Chaucer’s own time. Laura Hodges attributes this shift from collar to brooch precisely because the latter ‘was a popular love gift in the late fourteenth century and worn by both men and women’, noting that, ‘regardless of Chaucer’s substitution, such a brooch … evokes Theban associations and history for both Chaucer’s contemporaries and modern critics’.43 What Hodges points to here is historophilia in action: Chaucer adapts the past and its trappings in the service of erotic storytelling. The continually emphasised connection between Criseyde, her Theban genealogy, and the brooch as a symbol of her affection all imply that this brooch is more than a simple piece of jewellery, but instead

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a conflation of historical significance and erotic control. In an ironic resonance with its original depiction in the Thebaid, this brooch can be read as a symbolic ‘collar’ in the sadomasochistic sense, functioning as a symbol of emotional and erotic ownership between Troilus and Criseyde. The courtliness of Chaucerian Troy is essential to its enactment of historophilia: in courtly love, the masculine party is performatively, if not in reality, in complete service to their feminine love object, willing to endure intense physical and emotional pain for the pleasure of the return of their affections – though, in many cases, the torment of unrequited love seems just as titillating as that of fulfilled desire. As the female love object in this courtly relationship, Criseyde purportedly has the power of domination over her romantic supplicant and lover, Troilus; yet Troilus’s response to her transferal of affections is not submissive but anguished and aggressive: In many cruel batayle, out of drede, Of Troilus, this ilke noble knight, As men may in these olde bokes rede, Was sene his knighthod and his grete might. And dredelees, his ire, day and night, Ful cruelly the Grekes ay aboughte And alwey most this Diomede he sought … they mette/ With blody strokes and with wordes grete Assayinge how hir speres weren whette.44

Troilus’s ‘ire’ at Criseyde’s transferal of the brooch immediately translates into violence aimed at any and all Greeks, but above all Diomedes. Troilus issues out pain ‘ful cruelly’, the active sadist when pursuing Diomedes rather than the passive masochist he played with Criseyde. As Paul Megna argues, Troilus’s response here indicates that ‘the courtly lover’s masochism always carries with it an implicit threat of mutating into violent sadism’.45 By reminding the reader of ‘these old bokes’ that hold the historical account of Troilus, Criseyde, and the Trojan War, the narrator invokes history as integral to understanding the battle between pleasure and pain enacted between Troilus and the objects of his desire, revealing the narrative’s reliance on historophilia.

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The moments Diomedes and Troilus meet in battle are fraught with erotic tension. ‘They mette/ with blody strokes’ could be read as either meeting in battle-blows or in violent caresses by punning on the multiple meanings of ‘stroke’.46 The text reinforces this innuendo immediately when the two men test their spears against each other. The specific framing – that each man uses ‘words grete’ to ‘assay how hir speres weren whette’ – plays with the homophone ‘assay’ and ‘I say’, a narrative intrusion used frequently throughout T&C.47 Read as a sexual pun, the two men exchange blows/caresses while shouting about the mutual wetness of their ‘speres’, either a reference to sexual play with each other or to their mutual intercourse with Criseyde. Unlike his prior sexual encounter with Criseyde, however, Troilus’s (blood)lust for Diomedes goes unquenched: ‘But natheles, fortune it nought ne wolde/ Of others hond that either deyen sholde.’48 Instead, the frustrated ‘wraththe of Troilus’ kills thousands of Greeks (more than any Trojan save Hector), except for Diomedes, until Troilus’s death in battle at the hand of Achilles.49 The masochistic sexual relationship between Troilus and Criseyde is exchanged for the violent war-rage enacted by Troilus against Diomedes, but the sexual punning of these lines blurs the boundaries between the two acts, and thus the boundaries between pain and pleasure – much like sadomasochism itself. It is in T&C’s treatment of this brooch and Troilus’s violent response to its transferral that the full extent of the inextricable link between S/M and historophilia is clear, a relationship that becomes obvious in twenty- and twentyfirst-century uses of the Middle Ages in BDSM erotica.

The Middle Ages in the modern sexual imagination Though our modern cultural performances of pain have broadly shifted from their medieval context, the sexual culture of t­ wentiethand twenty-first-century BDSM’s reliance on the trope of a harsh and unyielding past full of pain reveals that this understanding of pain as performance endures. What is more, the continued invocation of premodernity as a space wherein these desires can be freely expressed exposes a desire to be part of a sexual legacy that reflects the world-building capacity of pain. Most importantly, each

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attempt to contextualise the trappings of sadomasochism means grappling with the cultural heritage of pain and its meanings. Just as in the Middle Ages, pain today represents a sign to be interpreted. This very act of interpretation, as Roland Barthes reminds us, is inherently pleasurable.50 To uncover the meaning of a sign is to experience a quasi-erotic thrill. Given these realities, the moments of temporal confusion reflected in the accounts like those of Fifty shades’ Ana Steele and the case studies examined shortly are not only recognitions of the rupturing potential of pain but are also indications of the pleasurable experience of encountering an unfamiliar sign and attempting to interpret it. Each instance of temporal dislocation in depictions of BDSM represents, then, not only the juxtaposition of past and present but also of pain and pleasure. The archive for these claims is both materially expansive and provenancially opaque. Despite the wealth of the sadomasochism collection at UCLA, little information is known about its provenance. All that is known is that, in 1972, an anonymous donor deposited fifty-four boxes of sadomasochism materials produced in America between 1950 and 1972.51 This is not the collection of a formal scholar of masochism, sadism, or BDSM culture more broadly. Rather, this collection of over ten thousand documents and images represents a personal collection of erotica that spans twenty years. In its fifty-four boxes are clippings from popular men’s lifestyle magazines of the period known colloquially as cheesecake magazines. These magazines attempted to evade prosecution for obscenity by presenting scantily clad women, sexually innuendous short fiction, and supposed anthropological studies of human society and sexuality as non-erotic and of public interest.52 In addition to these magazine excerpts, the collection contains over twenty albums of erotic photography and cartoons, many of which circulated as part of an underground network of BDSM enthusiasts in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Following a raft of prosecutions over obscenity in the 1950s and 1960s, most producers of fetish erotica destroyed their entire archive.53 This archive, therefore, represents one of the largest collections of extant fetish materials from this time period. The erotic magazines, the erotic cartoons, and the fetish photography found in this archive draw upon the pleasurable tension

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generated by the negotiation between past and present inherent in sadomasochism detailed above. The collection’s original compiler not only cut and pasted entire pages of these materials to the scrapbooks that make up most of the collection but also transcribed and reproduced hundreds of excerpts from contemporary pulp fiction and history books. This archive is simultaneously materially unique and indicative of twentieth-century American sadomasochistic practice and culture, particularly given its massive scope. The historophilia inherent in the titillation of sadomasochism is even more obvious in the many historiographies found within the collection that claim to reveal the long, perverse legacy of medieval forms of punishment and control, clearly demonstrating the erotic potency of historophilia. There are over two dozen ‘histories’ of medieval torture devices, each of which regularly asserts that these devices were recognised in the Middle Ages as paradoxically sites of both torment and pleasure, a view not supported by most scholars. The rack, the Catherine’s wheel, and the St Andrew’s cross in particular form the subject of these quasi-historical investigations. Uncoincidentally, these three objects are clearly recognisable to BDSM aficionados as popular forms of bondage equipment. The St Andrews cross, for instance, takes a predominant role in prompting Ana Steele’s temporal confusion in Fifty shades of Grey. It would have been equally clear as bondage equipment to a twentiethcentury reader familiar with the subculture of American BDSM.54 These historical narratives elucidate for the reader the trappings of sadomasochism seen earlier in the archive’s fetish photography and comics (see figures 10.1 and 10.2).55 These images are presented without context in most of the collection’s scrapbooks. Because of this omission, the e­ ncounters with these histories titillate not only because of the practices they describe but also because they catalyse the affective pleasure generated by interpretation in their elaboration of these hitherto-unnamed objects. But to what extent are these histories factual? How reliable are their interpretations of the past? Historians of medieval punishment concur that the Catherine’s wheel and the rack were without question employed in medieval strategies of torture and interrogation. The rack (Figure 10.3) was used as a form of slow torment, gradually stretching the body until it broke. This gradual process

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made the rack a favourite of the various Catholic inquisitions that took place between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries.56 The Catherine’s wheel (Figure 10.4), meanwhile, remained the secondmost-popular form of execution after hanging until the end of the seventeenth century.57 Also known as the breaking wheel or execution wheel, the Catherine’s wheel’s very appellation refers to the early medieval St Catherine of Alexandria (d. fourth century CE). A favourite subject of medieval ­historiography and the focus of a major religious cult in the later Middle Ages, St Catherine was reportedly sentenced to die for her Christian belief by means of a spiked breaking wheel by Emperor Maxentius, only for the wheel to shatter at her touch. Though St Catherine was eventually executed by beheading, the wheel upon which she was meant to suffer took her name and carried with it the connotations of the barbarism of the past that persist even to the present day.58 The St Andrew’s cross (Figure 10.5) that features predominantly both in this collection specifically and in sadomasochistic sex play more broadly similarly has its roots in medieval historiography.59 Named after the apostle Andrew, this form of cross (sometimes referred to as a ‘saltire’ or a ‘crux decussata’) was so called because of the late ­medieval belief that, at his martyrdom, St Andrew asked to be  bound (or crucified in some sources) to this form of cross because he  did not wish to supplant or imitate Christ’s mode of death. Unlike the rack or the Catherine’s wheel, however, there is little evidence that this form of cross was ever associated with St Andrew prior to the tenth century; only upon this development was the saltire first imagined as a form of punishment.60 Even given its connotations of torture post-tenth century, the St Andrew’s cross had no noticeable impact or presence in medieval interrogation; indeed, it only reached its zenith as a Christian iconographic symbol in the seventeenth century.61 The popularity of the St Andrew’s cross to BDSM play may, in fact, be more prosaic than the historophilia inherent in its title suggests. As one photograph in the collection of a submissive woman tied to a St Andrew’s cross demonstrates, this position, unlike a traditional Christian cross, renders the ‘victim’/submissive fully exposed to the dominant’s touch. Yet the very persistence of the incorrect idea that this cross served as form of torture prior to the

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tenth century – much less to the death of St Andrew in the first century CE – reveals the ease with which we accept the supposed sexual violence of the medieval past. After all, this cross is the first object Ana sees in Christian’s red room of pain in Fifty shades; this cross is the impetus for Ana’s belief that she is returned to the Middle Ages. All three of these devices – the rack, the Catherine’s wheel, and the St Andrew’s cross – appear repeatedly in the comics, photos, and stories found elsewhere in the UCLA archive, but only upon encountering their given histories does the reader fully understand the weight of their legacy in our cultural understanding of sadomasochism. The chastity belt serves a related but distinct role. Chastity belts (Figure 10.6) can be seen across every form of media that this archive contains.62 They are present in works of fiction, drawings of torture devices, photos taken reportedly from major museums, cheesecake magazines, erotic photography, sadomasochistic cartoons, as well as the historiographic narratives that reoccur continuously throughout the  scrapbooks. One such historical survey describes the history of the chastity belt as follows: The use of chastity belts in Europe and the United States apparently stems from lessons learned by the Crusaders of the Middle Ages. They discovered that Oriental men commonly insured the fidelity of their wives by a process known as infibulation. This consisted of either sewing the woman’s genital opening together or passing a metal ring through it. … The Crusaders apparently recognized the value of insuring a wife’s loyalty. However, being both more humane and more inventive than the Orientals, they devised the chastity belt as a substitute for infibulation … There is evidence that the devices were used in Europe as early as the latter of the twelfth century.63

The role of the chastity belt in these narratives serves multiple functions. First, it helps consolidate the idea of the Middle Ages as a time of overt sexual control wherein ‘loyalty’ was the highest value; in this framing, loyalty is not something to be given freely but instead can be controlled via chastity-ensuring devices. Intriguingly – and uniquely – the medieval chastity belt has little obvious relation to sadomasochism in this passage. The ‘Crusaders of the Middle Ages’ devise them, instead, as a way of avoiding the ‘inhumanity’ of the

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‘Orientals’, a form of dehumanising and racist rhetoric that represents the larger teleological models of pain as synonymous with barbarity and Western society as synonymous with civilisation. Chastity belts function instead as a form of constant power exchange, but one devoid of the eroticism of inflicting/receiving pain. Second, this history of the belt incites a blend of horror and fascination in its reader. The framing of this history within a racist ideology is clearly geared towards a white, cis, straight, male reader; part of the fascination, then, comes from an Orientalist worldview wherein the East represents a sexually other, and thus exotic and unsettling, society. By putting this orientalism in terms of the colonialist Crusade movements of the Middle Ages, the chastity belt becomes paradoxically a symbol of both progress and repression while also clearly situating its context in a violent power struggle. The emphasis on infibulation (‘sewing the woman’s genital opening together or passing a metal ring through it’) further establishes the idea of medieval relationships as inherently sadomasochistic, while this sadomasochism has been transferred from the medieval West to the medieval East. By shifting the sadism of infibulation from the Crusaders, the text generates further horror/fascination in its reader through the chastity belt’s creation of a simultaneous lack of control by the wearer alongside the explicitly sexual placement and purpose of these belts. Finally, and most insidiously, however, these depictions, accompanied with titles like ‘There’s no laws against them today, but the little lady can complain to the cops’,64 reveal that the chastity belt ultimately represents a fantasy of patriarchal control. By noting simultaneously that twentieth-century wives faced with the prospect of a chastity belt could complain to the police and that these belts were not illegal, this title winkingly suggests to its reader that few serious repercussions would occur from attempts to revive the practice even as it seemingly condemns the practice. In the imagined societies of East and West depicted here, the concern shared is that of female sexual submission and loyalty; the claim that loyalty must be ensured through either infibulation or these belts promotes an idea of women as inherently promiscuous and thus needing a device to control their sexuality. The continual invocation of the chastity belt across the UCLA collection, then, can be seen in part as a sign

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of longing for a fictitious past structured by a clear hierarchy of gender, race, and power wherein the bodily autonomy of one figure could be utterly controlled by that of another without negative repercussions. The insistence across each of the various historiographies, photos, comics, and magazine articles of the chastity belt’s historicity works not only to support a sexual legacy between the Middle Ages and modernity but also to naturalise an explicitly sexual system of dominance and submission by couching it in the historical authority of the past. The act these histories pay the most attention to, however, is flogging. In one scrapbook of over one hundred articles, eleven deal with the practice of flogging/flagellation and its medieval origins. As with the histories of chastity belts and medieval torture equipment described above, these depictions of flagellation treat fact and fiction interchangeably. One article claims: ‘The benefits of the whipping post must be very apparent … it is an infallible remedy for lewd behavior. This flogging for immorality in sexual matters dates from old Anglo-Saxon law’.65 Another article simply entitled ‘The history of orgies’ states that in the Middle Ages, particularly following the Black Death, ‘[t]he flagellomaniac cult was exceedingly widespread, and is of sufficiently well-recognized a sexual origin to be classified unreservedly as orgiastic’.66 Though these claims are seemingly paradoxical, the archive presents them as two sides of the same coin, each reflecting the sadomasochistic character of medieval sexuality. Flagellation represents both a punishment for and a means of sexual expression. By including these ‘flagellomaniacs’ under the category of ‘orgies’, this article provides an alternate vision of the world-building potential of pain. Whereas the flagellant communities that arose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries centred around Christian worship through self-mortification, this reconfiguration of history suggests that medieval flagellomaniacs were the first sadomasochist community, though called such by a very different name. Shifting this historical event from devotional practice to ‘unreservedly … orgiastic’ subtly works to establish a sexual legacy from the flagellant movement of late medieval Europe to the American trappings of BDSM depicted alongside this article in its scrapbook. Ultimately, the construction of this shared sexual history not only reveals that pain creates communities in distinct



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epochs throughout time but also can link two temporally distant communities together.

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Conclusion When Ana Steele sees Christian Grey’s ‘startling assortment of paddles, whips, riding crops, and funny-looking feathery implements’, her attempt to draw meaning from them brings her to the past for context. This temporal move not only drives home the supposed barbarism of sadomasochism, but it further indicates the potential of pain – and pain-causing implements, which signal the painful pleasure yet to come – to link together communities across time and space. The time-capsule quality of the ‘Red Room of Pain’, then, not only represents a relic of the past brought into the present but also the ramifications of American depictions of BDSM and their consolidation in the cultural mainstream. As Larissa Tracy notes, ‘modern culture, like its early-modern predecessors, makes assumptions about the Middle Ages based on a desire to be different, to have evolved from that which we consider barbaric and indeed “medieval”’, and our view of torture as inherently medieval contributes to that separation.67 Yet for American depictions of BDSM, this ‘desire to be different’ stems from a desire to join, rather than separate themselves from, a medieval past wherein sadomasochistic practice was imagined to be fundamentally part of normative desire, rather than its status as a ‘deviant’ sexuality in modernity. When L. P. Hartley categorised the past in his 1953 The gobetween as a ‘foreign country’, he captured a point of view that sees history as both familiar and other, both recognisable and disconcerting.68 The same point of view underpins not only my archive of 1950s–1970s American BDSM culture but also the consolidation of a fantasy of an erotically sadomasochistic premodern past that was rendered mainstream in Fifty shades of Grey and the resultant cultural phenomenon it provoked. From the time-travelling effects of the ‘Red Room of Pain’ to the temporal dissonance prompted by the historiographies contained within the UCLA sadomasochism collection, the intermingling of past and present has been a hallmark of American depictions of S/M for the last fifty years. Yet, as this chapter has made

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clear, the connection between history and titillation is not a modern invention. The same titillation of anachronism that structures the historophilia in Fifty shades of Grey can be found in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Modernity’s fascination with medieval sexuality, then, mirrors a continual preoccupation in expressions of sadomasochism throughout history: the relationship between past and present forms of desire. While this connection in its modern context is emblematised by a sexualisation of imagined medieval forms of torture, medieval texts such as Troilus and Criseyde instead use quasi-historical settings to voyeuristically experience second-hand the painful pleasures of sadomasochism. When Criseyde reads the Thebaid with her group of ladies as the Trojan War rages outside her walls, when changes in the battles between the Greeks and Trojans mirror the affections of Troilus to Criseyde, or when Troilus translates his frustrated desire for Criseyde into battle rage; each of these moments demonstrate the frequently simultaneous gut-wrenching/ecstatic pleasures of historophilic sadomasochism. Historophilia, then, serves multiple functions: it allows practitioners across all time periods to create and participate in a transhistorical legacy, and in some cases community, of sadomasochistic sex practice. It also helps cultivate a modern sexual identity imagined as either in union or in opposition to the past, as seen in the pathologisation debates surrounding sadomasochism that condemned its resonances with a supposedly primitive, violent past. What is more, these historical ties are inherently pleasurable: to imagine that the sex practices deemed deviant and obscene in a twentieth-century context date back to a historical period wherein the pleasure of pain was not only visible but celebrated allows the participants in an underground community to experience both the eroticism of engaging in a taboo while also providing some comfort of historical precedent and thus pleasurable authority. For a medieval audience, meanwhile, the continual interplay between past and present alongside the sadomasochism of courtly love provides its own forms of painful pleasures. Because pain itself is so temporally disruptive, the love of pain inherent in sadomasochism when coupled with these imagined histories suggests that the ultimate pleasures of sadomasochism are not solely physical, but in fact come from the pleasurable thrill of negotiating between past and present.

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Figure 10.1  A woman blindfolded, chained, and wearing a chastity belt. Collection of Material about Sado-Masochism (Collection 1122). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Figure 10.2  Detail of a cartoon imagining one version of the Catherine’s Wheel. Collection of Material about Sado-Masochism (Collection 1122). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

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Figure 10.3  A cartoon imagining a medieval torture rack reinvisioned for sadomasochism. Collection of Material about Sado-Masochism (Collection 1122). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Figure 10.4  An image of a model of a Catherine’s Wheel, presented as a “historical account” of medieval torture. Collection of Material about Sado-Masochism (Collection 1122). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

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Figure 10.5  A woman tied and bound to a St. Andrew’s Cross. Collection of Material about Sado-Masochism (Collection 1122). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Figure 10.6  A woman bound and masked wearing a chastity belt. Collection of Material about Sado-Masochism (Collection 1122). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

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Notes   1 E. L. James, Fifty shades of Grey (New York: Vintage, 2011), p. 84.   2 James, Fifty shades of Grey, p. 85.   3 ‘dungeon, n. 1’, OED online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), www. oed.com/view/Entry/58479 (accessed 21 June 2019, emphasis mine).   4 David M. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott, Sexual outsiders: understanding BDSM sexualities and communities (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p. 10.   5 For the purpose of this essay, I use ‘premodernity’ and the ‘premodern’ to refer to Western civilisation prior to the nineteenth century. I divide here not only by the methods of works such as Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (eds), Premodern sexualities (London: Routledge, 1997), but also by Michel Foucault’s notation of the late eighteenthcentury as a turning point in the history of punishment in Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (New York: Vintage, 1975).   6 Elaine Scarry, The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Esther Cohen, The modulated scream: pain in late medieval culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Mitchell B. Merback, The thief, the cross, and the wheel: pain and the spectacle of punishment in medieval and renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).   7 Carolyn Dinshaw, How soon is now? Medieval texts, amateur readers, the queerness of time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 6. For more on temporal dissonance and its effects on history, see also Heather Love, Feeling backward: loss and the politics of queer history (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).   8 Larissa Tracy, Torture and brutality in medieval literature: negotiations of national identity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 292.   9 Kersti Francis, ‘“A touching history … strange as a dream”: the exotic past in Cecil Dreeme’ (unpublished seminar paper, UCLA, 2016), pp. 2–5. 10 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Courtly love, or woman as thing’, in The Žižek reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 148–74. 11 Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s art and the Wife of Bath: the ethics of erotic violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 5. 12 Though many popular depictions of sadomasochism, including 50 Shades of Grey, conflate BDSM with sexual violence, practitioners and scholars of BDSM alike affirm that the two are distinct concepts that differ due to consent. For instance, in BDSM, a masochist consents to

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being flogged and may derive enjoyment from it, while the same action performed on an unwilling participant is clearly sexual violence. For more on this distinction, see Bill Thompson, Sadomasochism: painful perversion or pleasureable play? (London: Cassell, 1994), ch. 7; Peter Tupper, A lover’s pinch: a cultural history of sadomasochism (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), especially ch. 10; Ortmann and Sprott, Sexual outsiders. 13 Merback, The thief, the cross and the wheel, p. 20; Cohen, Modulated scream, p. 16. 14 Marla Carlson, Performing bodies in pain: medieval and post-modern martyrs, mystics, and artists (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 103–10. 15 Cohen, Modulated scream, p. 1. 16 Galen and Burgundio of Pisa, Burgundio of Pisa’s translation of Galen’s peri krasion ‘De Complexionibus’ (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1976). 17 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the subject of history (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1991), p. 18. 18 See, for example, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s assertion in Historia regum Britanniae that ‘Britain’ derives from the arrival of Brutus, a rogue Trojan who arrived to the British archipelago after the Trojan War and founded a new empire. 19 Immediate examples include the explicit connection between the American justice system and the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta as well as the use of medieval history and imagery in the service of White supremacy, as in the 2017 Charlottesville riots. For more on the connection between White Americanness and medieval history, see, for instance, Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, neoconservatism, and the war on terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007); Sierra Lomuto, ‘Public medievalism and the rigor of anti-racist critique’, In the medieval middle [blog], 4 April 2019, www.inthemedievalmiddle. com/2019/04/public-medievalism-and-rigor-of-anti.html; and Helen Young, ‘Where do the “White Middle Ages” come from?’, Public medievalist, 21 March 2017, www.publicmedievalist.com/white-mid​ dle-ages-come (both accessed 21 June 2019). 20 For more on the medievality of Troilus and Criseyde, see James I. Wimsatt, ‘Medieval and modern in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, PMLA, 92.2 (1977): 203–16. 21 Patterson, Chaucer and the subject of history, p. 85. 22 T&C, I.1–9 All references to Troilus and Criseyde are taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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23 T&C, I.19–21. 24 T&C, II.8–14. 25 T&C, II.76–7. 26 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. John A. Hanson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), VI, ll. 412–674. 27 T&C, II.81–4. 28 T&C, II.100–5. 29 Scholars disagree on whether the text that Criseyde and her ladies read is Statius’s Thebaid, a translation of the Thebaid, or the medieval French Roman de Thebes. In light of Paul Strom’s work regarding the flexibility of the term ‘romance’ in medieval literature, I agree with Catherine Sanok and David Anderson that Pandarus’s response makes it clear that they read either the Thebaid or a translation of it. For these perspectives, see David Anderson, ‘Storie, spelle, geste, romaunce, tragedie: generic distinctions in the Middle English Troy narratives’, Speculum, 46 (1971): 348–59; and Catherine Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: women and the Theban subtext of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in the age of Chaucer, 20 (1998): 41–71. 30 Dominique Battles, The medieval tradition of Thebes: history and narrative in the Roman de Thebes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1–2 31 Patterson, Chaucer and the subject of history, p. 98. 32 Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid’, 43. 33 Anderson, ‘Storie, spelle, geste, romaunce, tragedie’, 125, Alain Renoir, ‘Thebes, Troy, Criseyde, and Pandarus: an instance of Chaucerian irony’, Studia neophilologica, 32.1 (1960): 14–17 (16). 34 Jane Wilson Joyce, Statius’s Thebaid: a song of Thebes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). For more on the implications of this identification, see Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid’. 35 T&C, V.1445–9. 36 T&C, V.1459. 37 T&C, V.1516–18. 38 T&C, III.1370–2. 39 David Anderson, ‘Theban history in Chaucer’s Troilus’, Studies in the age of Chaucer, 4 (1982): 109–33 (128 n. 35). 40 T&C, V.1040–1. 41 T&C, V.1658–9. 42 See, for example, Dominique Battles’s qualms with Anderson’s identification in The medieval tradition of Thebes, p. 127. 43 Laura Hodges, ‘Sartorial signs in Troilus and Criseyde’, Chaucer review, 35.3 (2001): 223–59 (254 n. 50).

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44 T&C, V.1751–61. 45 Paul Megna, ‘Courtly love hate is undead: sadomasochistic privilege in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, in Everything you wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 267–89. Though outside the scope of this essay’s focus on historophilia and sadomasochism, Megna’s argument provides a thorough explanation of Slavoj Žižek’s and Jacques Lacan’s interpretations of medieval courtly love alongside the transformation of Troilus-as-lover in the sadomasochistic courtly framework. 46 Both the Middle English ‘stroken’ (v.) and ‘stroke’ (n.) share an etymological ancestor in the Old English ‘strācian’ and their meanings overlap throughout the Middle Ages. See ‘stroken, (v.)’, Middle English dictionary, online edition in Middle English Compendium, ed. Frances McSparran et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, ­2000–18), https://bit.ly/3q18dr0; and ‘stroke (n.)’, Middle English dictionary, https://bit.ly/31BFsaV (both accessed 21 June 2019). 47 See, for instance, T&C, V.1778: ‘Ne I sey not this al-only for these men …’ 48 T&C, V.1763–4. 49 T&C, V.1800–6. 50 Roland Barthes, The pleasure of the text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 10. 51 UCLA Library Special Collections (hereafter UCLA LSC), ‘Finding aid’, Sadomasochism collection (Collection 1122). 52 Joanne Meyerowitz, ‘Women, cheesecake, and borderline material: responses to girlie pictures in the mid-twentieth-century United States’, Journal of women’s history, 8.3 (1996): 9–35 (10). 53 Robert Bienvenu, ‘The development of sadomasochism as a cultural style in the twentieth-century United States’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1998), p. 157. 54 Bienvenu, ‘The development of sadomasochism’, pp. 71–118. 55 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 1, Box 1, Anonymous photographs. 56 Robert Mills, Suspended animation: pain, pleasure and punishment in medieval culture (London: Reaktion, 2006). 57 Merback, The thief, the cross and the wheel, p. 158; UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 6, Box 1, Anonymous subject tied to Catherine’s wheel. 58 Merback, The thief, the cross and the wheel, pp. 158–60; Mills, Suspended animation, pp. 104–10.

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59 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 1, Box 1, Anonymous subject tied to St Andrews cross. 60 Francis Dvornik, The idea of apostolicity in Byzantium and the legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Studies, 1958). 61 Judith Calvert, ‘The iconography of the St. Andrew Auckland cross’, The art bulletin, 66.4 (December 1984): 543–555 (545 n. 12). 62 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 1, Box 1, Anonymous photo of chastity-belt wearer. 63 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 1, Box 24, Typed history of the chastity belt (anonymous). 64 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 2, Box 24, Cut-out article from unknown magazine (anonymous). 65 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 2, Box 24, ‘A history of flagellation’, fragment from unknown magazine. 66 UCLA LSC, Sadomasochism collection, Binder 2, Box 24, ‘The history of orgies’, fragment from unknown magazine. 67 Tracy, Torture and brutality in medieval literature, p. 297. 68 L. P. Hartley, The go-between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 1.

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11 ‘My warlike grip broke his beating heart’: masochism and the deadly embrace in Beowulf ll. 2501–2508a Christopher Vaccaro Beowulf seems to be a poem about death: how to die, how to seek out death, how to meet it head on, how to get it before it gets you, how to glory in defiant incomprehension of it, how to make it so commonplace that it becomes an old familiar, how to choose it, privilege it, embrace it. Everywhere in the poem this deathly embrace spawns a variety of forms of closure, a continual need for resolution, the notion that choice is heroic, inescapable, and reducible to simple binary oppositions – one or the other. Gillian Overing, Language, sign, and gender

The dissolution of the self While providing strategies on how to read the poem, Gillian Overing astutely observes that Beowulf is about death: ‘how to choose it, privilege it, embrace it’. It is a ‘tale of men dying’, she writes.1 Men confront death at every turn, fighting alongside it, even sharing ale with it.2 It would not be an exaggeration to say that death for the early medieval English warrior is an ever-present ‘swaes gesīþ’, a ‘dear comrade’ with all of the homoamorous potential that this phrase provides.3 If Beowulf is about how to ‘embrace’ death then it is also about how to ‘desire’ it, even ‘welcome’ its necessity, how to ‘submit’ to its inevitability. In fact, the desire for death is so strongly pronounced in the poem that it shapes all the symbolic undercurrents. As this argument will detail in the following pages, a satisfying submission to death’s inevitability is a feature of the human psyche; this is not about feeling hopelessly suicidal

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but about a deep psychospiritual longing for long-lasting continuity. This chapter investigates the potential libidinal satisfaction around physical submission within Beowulf’s combats, what might be called a masochist’s ‘joy of losing’, and the role of ‘wyrd’, ‘fate’, in the production of this satisfaction. It also considers the audience’s role in filling in the gaps of the narrative through erotic fantasy. While Overing observes that there is little need to translate forms of desire into psychoanalytic readings of a death deferred because death ‘is continually present, always in the poem’s foreground’,4 something similar can be said of sadomasochistic pleasure. In such an investigation into pleasure, it is necessary to examine where death and desire intersect. For Sigmund Freud, death meets sexuality through conservative ego-instincts that drive the living organism ‘to restore to an earlier state of things’. Claiming in his ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ that ‘the aim of all life is death’, Freud theorised that each organism seeks ‘an ancient goal … an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads’.5 The first instinct of living organisms then, what Freud will call ‘Thanatos’ or ‘primary masochism’ is a drive towards an earlier state before life; ‘eros’ is what Freud calls the drive towards life and productivity. Within the sexual instincts of living organisms there is a ‘vacillating rhythm’ from one motion to another: One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.6

The sadistic component of the sex instinct comes from the death instinct directed outwards away from the ego towards an external object and in ‘service of the sexual function’, which is characterised by aggression. Sadistic pleasure that finds no outward object is redirected and ‘turned round upon the subject’s own ego … a return to an earlier phase of the instinct’s history’. Freud labelled this inwardly redirected destructive force ‘secondary masochism’.7 In all situations, the destructive urge is accompanied by libidinal satisfaction. In fact, a libidinal valence appears throughout all the instincts.

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In his essays on sexuality, Freud argues that ‘satisfaction’ for the masochist ‘is conditional upon suffering physical or mental pain at the hands of the sexual object’, recognising that ‘every pain contains in itself the possibility of the feeling of pleasure’.8 This important conclusion becomes useful later in this chapter when exploring the deadly embrace in the Beowulf poem. Masochism is frequently defined as a love of, desire for, pleasure in experiencing pain, punishment, humiliation, loss of control, and the dispersal of self – what Volker Woltersdorff calls a ‘masochistic self-shattering’.9 ‘Dispersal’, according to the Oxford English ­dictionary, means: ‘To cause to separate in different directions; to throw or drive about in all directions, to scatter; to rout’.10 It captures well the fulfilment of the masochistic wish. The possibility of psychic or somatic dispersal is the locus of masochistic pleasure, the potential for mind and body to be scattered in all directions to the  point of disappearance. Woltersdorff argues that masochism should be read, ‘as a “queering” of both the death drive and the pleasure principle’ residing ‘at the very point of ambivalence between productivity and destruction’.11 He builds conceptually off of Leo Bersani’s notion of libidinal pleasure or jouissance as ‘selfshattering’, an idea itself taken by Bersani from Jean Laplanche’s term ébranlement, a sexual experience of ego disruption and boundary dissolution.12 Sadism too has states of decentring ego and is defined as a pleasure manifest through the causing of pain and humiliation, through control and power, and through the annihilation of the ego of the other. In contemporary BDSM, participants explore the psychological effects of pain play. In these ‘torture’ scenes (void of actual torture), the Dominant compels the submissive to relinquish control. Both participants might recognise that the Dom administering the physical pain is thinking for two people, is making decisions for two people. Darren Langdridge remarks: ‘This is likely to be part of the appeal of this role for the torturer, who may come to enjoy the sense of power (and responsibility) that results from living out the world of two people as one’.13 While those pleasured by dominating others could experience a state of euphoria and expanded state of consciousness, scholars frequently recognise the greater transformational experience to

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belong to the masochist/submissive. Andrea Beckman defines S/M as a series of bodily practices that offer ‘bottoms’, ‘subs’, and ‘slaves’ the possibility to experience ‘transcendental states’ as they are enabled to let go of the control of the ‘internal supervisor’ while being ‘topped’ by a trusted ‘dom’ … For some, consensual ‘SM’ serves mainly as a tool to heighten sensual and ‘sexual’ experiences or as a release of pressure or guilt feelings, while for others the achievement of ‘transcendental states’ appears to be a core motivation.14

The production of pain finds an important place in the shattering of the self and one’s world. In The body in pain (1985), Elaine Scarry speaks of a blurring of inside/out, between self and other, and the disintegration of consciousness that accompany the world-­ destroying experience of non-consensual torture. Langdridge, however, suggests S/M play does the opposite: ‘the possibility of absolute privacy made all the more safe by the loss of agency and the presence of a trusted other and self-exposure’.15 Pain play ‘offers up a very real and visceral way of fusing the bodily horizons of self and other: a fleshly intertwining across a divide of otherness’.16 In both conceptions, pain blurs the boundaries of the self. And as the boundaries between pain and pleasure dissolve, a painful pleasure could also potentially reach a degree where the self is obliterated. Some key terms belonging to contemporary BDSM provide a useful lexicon with which to speak of sadomasochistic pleasures found in earlier times. S/M sex is frequently described in terms of a ‘session’, a ‘scene’, or a ‘game’, with participants taking on specific roles to which they may adhere throughout or only temporarily: ‘a “top” or “Dominant” is a person who controls the action, administers the punishments, determines what is going to happen, where, when, and how; whereas a “bottom” or “submissive” follows the top’s lead’ while also supplying subtle cues to the Dom.17

Cratolagnia in Beowulf Eroticised powerlessness in the face of an unwavering will is a key feature of masochism and is, according to practitioners, highly

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‘erotic and attractive … within the imaginations and practices of BDSM sexualities’.18 The source of the arousal comes from an eroticisation of the power disparities as Ortmann and Sprott elucidate: ‘By eroticization we mean the way people can perceive power as having a sexually exciting dimension. They experience the expression of power as part of an exciting erotic allure and, generally, it is the power difference that creates the spark’.19 The relationship between power and sexual excitement is not limited to S/M sexual practices; S/M merely amplifies an element already well integrated into human sexuality and society. Within contemporary S/M play, the disparities in power and control are often produced by the restraining, tying up, or pinning down of the submissive’s body before ‘contact play’. This disparity need not be factual, only perceived or acted out, though an obvious difference in strength and size could facilitate such a performance. Yet the central thrill comes from being physically overpowered, restrained, and punished. The erotic valence could work in both directions as a Dominant might experience sadistic arousal through exhibiting physical power over another while the masochistic victim could be aroused by this dominance: Often, it is the notion of being helpless and subject to the will of another that is sexually titillating. It is the illusion of violence, rather than violence itself, that is frequently arousing to both sadists and masochists. At the very core of sadomasochism is not pain but the idea of control – dominance and submission.20

The erotic heat comes from being subjected to the power and will of another, from being at another’s mercy. Concerning the eroticisation of physical domination, today’s gay practitioners speak in terms of homoerotic wrestling, contact or impact play, and body worship, arguing that, ‘[t]he carefully regulated, blatant expression of dominance or aggression celebrates not only the joyful physicality of the human body but the heroic ideals of gender’.21 The winners of these combative scenes are lauded for their physical prowess, their bodies perceived as ‘nature’s primary work of art, wondrously balanced and shaped, prepared for battle, capable of great feats of strength’.22 Those who are into S/M also frequently turn to contact or impact play in order

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to ‘torture’ or ‘subdue’ the passive participant using hands, fists, forearms, paddles, floggers, and so on. ‘Impact play’ is defined by BDSMwiki.info and Submissive Guide as, ‘an SM practice in which one person (the bottom) is struck (usually repeatedly) by another person (the top) for the gratification of either or both parties’.23 Individuals practise this play sanely, that is to say with warm-ups and thoughtful consideration of the submissive’s current physical state. Safety is paramount during play and the session is followed up with ‘aftercare’ and sensitivity, often with the sub recovering in the Dom’s arms. ‘Cratolagnia’ is the term for the arousal brought on by feeling the strength of another; in S/M, the submissive’s worship of a Dom’s power-infused body instils humility and devotion.24 The Encyclopedia of unusual sex practices links this to ‘muscle worship’.25 While today, strength and power are more likely to be assigned equally to men, women, and non-binary individuals regardless of sexual identification, the worship of the male body and of male strength was a key element of the early Germanic warrior ethos and could certainly reach the level of arousal. When examining Old Norse texts, Jenny Jochens points out: ‘Without doubt the most admired male attribute was physical strength. Almost every man credited with good looks was also said to be “a large and strong man” (mikill maðr ok sterkr)’.26 To be strong and big (as Beowulf was) was also to be desired by others. A queering of Anglo-Saxon patriarchal structures exposes the intra-male masochistic potentials within this warrior ideal and the space for erotic fantasy.27 Clare A. Lees recognises the degree to which Beowulf is obsessed ‘with the ways in which aristocratic warriors dominate other men’, and how it ‘ritualizes aggression both physically and verbally to enforce obedience of the dominated to the dominant’.28 A central pleasure in the poem revolves around this ‘obedience of the dominated’ and correspond to the sadomasochistic turn-on, which – akin to Allen Frantzen’s ‘shadow of same-sex desire’ – serves to define and outline the text.29 Both sadism and masochism circulate within the theatre of warrior culture. To highlight the masochistic pleasure – located not only in the dominated but in the Dominant too – is to queer this culture. A desire to relinquish power, to be forced to relinquish it through

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domination is the masochist’s ultimate pleasure. Much of the amorous and erotic energy of Beowulf emerges from same-sex relations, and so the S/M is mostly linked to this valence, though some instances, which shall be addressed further on, emerge from a heterosexual orientation. There are significant examples of sadomasochistic pleasure in Beowulf, many initiated through the experience of psychic and somatic dispersal.30 The ritualised discursive ‘sacrifice’ surrounding Beowulf’s verbal sparring with the character Unferth reveals the degree to which the eros of submission and humiliation is in play. The narrator’s description of Hondscio’s gruesome death coupled with Beowulf’s own description of his potential death by Grendel correspond to imagery Georges Bataille examines of the ecstatic reactions to ritualised torture. Men’s fantasies (and women’s too?) respond to the power displays of the regal, proud, and ‘butch’ queens in the poem. The necessity of failure and death brings even the strongest Geat warrior to almost ecstatically submit to ‘Wyrd’, the most dominant force in the poem. And, in the case to be discussed below, an intimately violent death occurs where the suffering of a body is the result of a deadly embrace. When death happens within and on account of an embrace – could anything be more intimate? Where there is the potential for a voluntary submission to power – could anything better capture the queer erotics of masochism? It is useful to consider here the fluid nature of S/M desire in the sexually charged grappling scenes involving Beowulf in the poem, keeping in mind Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that the expansiveness of the erotic surpasses corporeal boundaries. They argue, ‘desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures – an always nomadic and migrant desire’.31 Such is ostensibly the case with the circulations and flows of pleasure in the hand-to-hand combats on the early medieval English battlefield and in the textual passages to be examined next. Beowulf’s corporeal combat with Grendel shares the erotic power and strength disparities located in many contemporary S/M scenes. Immediately upon their meeting, Grendel is faced with Beowulf’s

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physical superiority: ‘þæt hē ne mētte middangeardes,/ eorþan scēa[t]a on elran men/ mundgripe māran; hē on mōde wearð/ forht on ferhðe’, ‘he had never met on middle-earth in any region of the world, another man with a greater handgrip, in his heart he was afraid for his life’ (ll. 751–4a).32 The alliterative and metrical link between ‘mundgripe’, ‘handgrip’, and ‘mode’, ‘heart’, is a close parallel to what we will see in the encounter with Dæghrefn, anticipating the effects of Beowulf’s grip on that adversary’s heart. Beowulf’s strength (and thus his attractiveness and desirability) is the cornerstone of the epic. Grendel finds himself for the first time helpless: ‘Hēold hine fæste/ sē þe manna wæs mægene strengest/ on þæm dæge þysses līfes’, ‘He pinned him fast,/ he who was the strongest of might among men/ in those days of this life’ (ll. 788b–90). Ultimately, Grendel’s body is broken by Beowulf’s strength: ‘Līcsār gebād/ atol æglæce; him on eaxle wearð/ syndolh sweotol, seonowe onsprungon,/ burston bānlocan. Bēowulf wearð/ gūðhrēð gyfeþe’, ‘The loathsome creature felt/ a great pain in his body; a gaping wound opened/ in his shoulder-joint. His sinews sprang apart,/ his joints burst asunder. Beowulf was given/ glory in battle’ (ll. 815b– 19a). All Danes and Geats must recognise (alongside the poem’s audience) their own physical inferiority compared to Beowulf, given what happens to Grendel.33 Beowulf’s superior power and Grendel’s intense pain approximates the blurring of boundaries Langdridge locates in S/M play. Langdridge points to the potential for S/M to fuse the two participants.34 As the two wrestle for their lives, Beowulf’s tortuous grappling begins to dissolve the solidity of their personal boundaries: ‘fingras burston;/eoten wæs ūtweard, eorl furþur stōp’, ‘His fingers burst;/ the giant turned outward, the earl stepped inward’ (ll. 760b–1). Boundaries are blurred; despite Roy Liuzza’s inclusion of the possessive pronoun, the text provides an ambiguity around whose fingers are bursting. The two monstrous beings synchronise their movements and behave as one entity hybridised through pain. Beowulf’s grappling with Grendel’s Mother takes on a heterosexually sadomasochistic cast. The erotics elicited in the episode could correspond to a well-known type involving the heterosexual male masochist and cruel female torturer popularised by Sacher-Masoch

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in his influential work Venus in Furs, where the protagonist, Severin, derives pleasure from being cruelly treated by his lover, Wanda. Within contemporary S/M practice, ‘some admire women who, in manner and physique, emulate mythical female archetypes such as the Amazons’.35 A physical manifestation of the valkyrie image and anti-type of the Anglo-Saxon queen,36 Grendel’s Mother, the ‘ides āglæcwīf’, ‘warrior-lady’ (1259a), possesses a powerful, aggressive female body that dominates Beowulf’s own. He comes very close to losing this combat, even so far as being sat upon (quite literally ‘Topped’) and almost slain: Hēo him eft hraþe handlēan forgeald grimman grāpum ond him tōgēanes fēng; oferwearp þā wērigmōd wigena strengest, fēþecempa, þæt hē on fylle wearð. Ofsæt þā þone selegyst, ond hyre seaxe getēah brād [ond] brūnecg; Quickly she gave him requital for that/ with a grim grasp, and grappled him to her –/ weary, he stumbled, strongest of warriors,/ of footsoldiers, and took a fall./ She set upon her hall-guest and drew her knife,/ broad, bright-edged. (ll. 1541–6a)

The male identity comes close to fracturing here as the heroic ideal is tested and found nearly lacking. And yet, ultimately, Beowulf finds what he needs (divinely given) to reclaim his manhood when he discovers a giant sword on the wall. It is almost as if the beating he takes is employed in that project of reifying masculine identity. In a psychoanalytically informed analysis of Scorsese’s 1980 film Raging Bull, Jack Halberstam illuminates a point astonishing in its ahistorical potential: ‘masochism is built into male masculinity’. What is true of that film seems very accurate of this early medieval grappling scene as well: ‘the most macho of spectacles is the battered male body, a bloody hunk of ruined flesh, stumbling out of the corner for yet another round. The winner is always the one who has been beaten to a pulp but remains standing long enough to deliver the knockout punch’.37 That is what this combat scene provides: Beowulf’s hard-fought victory heightens the masochistic pleasure built into masculinity. The suffering of the knockdown (the humiliation, and the brutal attack on the male body) ultimately

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concretises male power. While Beowulf’s pleasure does not appear dependent upon the mother’s cruelty, it is, however, based on his suffering at her hands. For the remainder of this chapter, I wish to examine the scene in which Beowulf narrates before his own Geatish court his slaying by hand of the champion, Dæghrefn, on the battlefield. While critics have attempted to explain Beowulf’s ‘out-of-place’ methods for killing a human warrior with bare hands, frankly none are satisfying.38 Adrien Bonjour argues that the poet wished to represent Beowulf solely as a monster killer, and so chose from possible source material a conflict in keeping with that style of fighting. Yet this seems to ignore the various ways in which Beowulf is deliberately shown to surpass that classification. R. E. Kaske briefly considers the possibility that Dæghrefn possesses the hint of a giant form, which would make this scene more comparable with the other battles. It would provide a closer tie to Beowulf’s fight with Grendel and mean that this standard-bearer was the biggest and strongest (and the most attractive) of the enemy forces.39 Yet there is little to suggest anything monstrous about Dæghrefn; it is Beowulf that comes across as a brute, and the scene remains an odd and highly erotic addition to the poem. The scene’s introductory passage provides evidence of death’s inevitable encroachment, and the description of the combat scene (ll. 2425–509) is rife with the language of eroticised domination.40 Here Beowulf speaks of Hreðel’s exhausted heart (‘hreðre hygemēðe’, l. 2442) after losing his son, Herebeald – an anticipatory image considering the breaking of Dæhrefn’s own beating heart (‘heortan wylmas’), which ultimately punctuates the scene. Beowulf sadistically boasts of his domination and humiliation of Dæghrefn, the Frankish champion of the Hugas tribes, when he shares his story with his beloved ‘heorðgenēatum’, ‘hearth-companions’: Him wæs geōmor sefa wæfre ond wælfūs wyrd ungemete nēah, sē ðone gomelan grētan sceolde, sēcean sāwle hord, sundur gedælan līf wið līce; nō þon lange wæs feorh æþelinges flæsce bewunden



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His heart was grieving,/ restless, ripe for death – the doom was immeasurably near/ that was coming to meet that old man,/ seek his soul’s treasure, split asunder/ his life and his body; not for long was/ the spirit of that noble king enclosed in its flesh. (ll. 2419b–24b)

As Arthur Brodeur has acknowledged, Beowulf’s mood here is fey;41 that is to say, he appears unconcerned whether he lives or dies, like a man already straddling the two worlds. This serves to accentuate a libidinal liminality wherein death and desire merge. His relationship to death is intimate in its proximity (‘ungemete nēah’) and in its receptivity (‘wælfūs’). Death actively seeks him in return. This is the closest Beowulf comes to a union with something else; this union with death, which he intimately seeks out, is Beowulf’s ‘queerest’ desire, disrupting expectations and social roles. And this doom (‘wyrd’) matches that desire and seeks Beowulf out. Of course, ‘wyrd’ is the ultimate Dominant, whom Beowulf and other warriors have watched beat their kinsman down time and time again through battle or sickness and age. It is a reminder of one of Freud’s observations: ‘If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime [Necessity], than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped’.42 This is the great chain of domination within the culture. ‘Wyrd’ is coming as death to greet the old man, seeking his soul in order to split it from his body, just as Hroðgar predicted in his homiletic speech to the hero. In that speech, Howell Chickering recognises what we could call the ‘masochistic jouissance’ over death’s inevitability: The organ tone – all stops pulled out – in which Hrothgar thunders home his point about the inescapability of death is rhetorical, not dramatic. It invites a pleasant shudder. … Yes, death is inevitable and will level us all, even the hero. Why, look at old Hrothgar himself – why, look even at me!43

What else is Chickering’s ‘pleasant shudder’ but a masochistic recognition from characters and audiences alike of our required submission to death’s necessity? Beowulf himself continues to be an instrument of ‘wyrd’ in the poem, ultimately dominating every adversary but death itself. And

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so it is in this liminal position that Beowulf recounts his slaying of Dæghrefn: syððan ic for duguðum Dæghrefne wearð tō handbonan, Hūga cempannalles hē ðā frætwe Frēscyning[e], brēostweorðunge bringan mōste, ac in c[a]mp[e] grecrong cumbles hyrde, æþeling on elne; ne wæs ecg bona, ac him hildegrāp heortan wylmas, bānhūs gebræc. [S]ince I slew Dæghrefn, champion of the Hugas,/ with my bare hands in front of the whole army./ He could not carry off to the Frisian king/ that battle-armor and that ‘breast-adornment’,/ but there in the field the standard-bearer fell,/ a nobleman in his strength; no blade was his slayer,/ but my warlike grip broke his beating heart,/ cracked his bone-house. (ll. 2501–8a)

Bookending this slight digression with statements about his swordplay, Beowulf boasts here of his un-manning of the Hugas standardbearer whose sword, Nægling, he then takes.44 With nothing but his bare arms he breaks Dæghrefn’s body in what seems an apparent retaliation for the slaying of his uncle, King Hygelac. Using only his ‘warlike grip’, Beowulf cracks the man’s chest, stopping the warrior’s ‘beating heart’.45 Stylistically, Beowulf’s grip and Dæghrefn’s heart are bound together through the ligatures of stress and alliteration (‘hildegrāp heortan’); the stumbling pulse here ends with ‘gebræc’, ‘breaking’ or ‘cracking’, which when recited simulates the climactic end to the man’s life. Psychology is made visible as the beating heart of one male body is stilled by the body of another, death and sensuality inextricably linked. The power discrepancy could not be made more obvious: Beowulf’s powerful arms wrapped tightly about Dæghrefn’s chest, a man’s life quelled by the another’s brute strength. A deadly eroticism is made manifest as the embrace simulates that of lovers in their mutual pull towards continuity, the two men becoming one in that moment of ecstatic anguish as pain and pleasure blur the boundaries of selfhood. That Beowulf performs this slaying before the strength of the Hugas army, ‘for duguðum’, is significant. Such public acts

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of domination, erotically charged in S/M scenarios today, are extremely important within the Germanic-Norse cultures and central to Beowulf’s identity. ‘Duguð’ defines the ‘body, strength, or might’ of the enemy host, and Beowulf effectively un-mans the army itself with so public a humiliation of its champion. To dominate Dæghrefn publicly is to castrate the enemy’s ‘body’ and its potency.46 That the scene occurs before the entire army amplifies the degree of Beowulf’s utter domination of both man and army. Dæghrefn is not only made utterly helpless, he is reduced to a spectacle. This moment of becoming ‘the object of someone else’s viewing’ is, according to Ortmann and Sprott, itself ‘a masochistic act’.47 The authors of Different loving state it just as succinctly: ‘To enjoy the spectacle of another person being inhumanely subjugated or violated requires that we see him as intrinsically less human than ourselves. The sexual kick that these spectacles may provide is widely known but rarely admitted’.48 The slain champion, bereft of dignity, is reduced in status, even in kind as he does not die by a sword as other warriors would but in a manner best fitting a beast slain by another. Roy Baumeister adequately speaks to this masochistic experience: ‘Attention is drawn to the self as a body, as a locus of sensation, as a helpless and vulnerable being deprived of dignity and esteem, as a mere sex object or sub-human creature. … Self is reduced to the here-and-now bare minimum’.49

The joy of losing Masochistic submission is a turning away from the social and a penetration into a sacrosanct internal space, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by one’s Dom. This may be why many submissives compare their erotic experience to a religious or spiritual surrender.50 The life and death trials of the battlefield resonate with this S/M headspace. Andrea Beckmann examines the ‘revival of the primitive’ within modern S/M practices and argues, ‘[t]he institution of transformation through ritual ordeal and/or sexual ecstasy has an ancient tradition in many cultures and some have striking parallels in the “bodily practices” of consensual “SM”’.51

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The correspondence between masochistic submission and the embrace of death is considered thoughtfully by Lyn Cowan: In the worship, in the submission, there is an inevitable surrender and submergence of the ego. This is not the suicide of hopeless depression, nor the unconscious mania of the accident-prone, nor the ­conscious self-termination of the ill and/or aged. It is, rather, the soul’s intolerable longing for liberation, the wild rush into death as one rushes madly into the arms of a lover.52

Is not this what Overing spied in the very foundation of Beowulf’s logic? With ‘intolerable longing’, the soul ‘rushes madly into the arms of a lover’, death, in the moment of masochistic submission: ‘It is death as ultimate union, as the soul’s truest home (the Underworld), death as the realm of psyche unencumbered by body and literalization’.53 Quoting Kevin Horney, Cowan makes the point that ‘all masochistic strivings are ultimately directed toward satisfaction, namely, toward the goal of oblivion, of getting rid of self with all its conflicts and all its limitations’.54 Georges Bataille also speaks to this sacredness of ritualised death in a way relevant to this examination: The victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains … is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.55

Within this ritualistic space there exists a yearning for continuity among discontinuous beings, a masochistic move towards the annihilation of the self: We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. … Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is.56

Focused on self-dissolution, Stephen Bush observes that the subject ‘experiences him- or herself as one with some other particular person or object or with the universe as a whole’.57 When speaking

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of these pleasures, Karmen MacKendrick makes a similar statement: ‘discontinuity is overcome. One loses a sense of the bounds of oneself’.58 In Ecce homo: the male-body-in-pain as redemptive figure, Kent L. Brintnall points to the dissolution and breaking of the male body as a powerful signifier in Western culture: ‘We must learn the lessons of death as the fundamental facts of existence, as the foundation of a new way of experiencing self and seeing the other’.59 He observes how the breaking of the male body reveals for all to see its vulnerability and the limits of masculine power, something Beowulf himself bears witness to at important times in the text. Such a scene of dissolution manifests a collective ecstasy. In interesting ways, Dæghrefn can be likened to a victim of ritualised sacrifice. The spectacle before both armies draws upon itself the focus of ultimate desire. When early medieval English warriors died on a battlefield, they did so in a manner that was layered with cultural signification and charged with religious, ideological, amorous, and erotic overtones. Otto Rank is one of a few scholars who points to the sadistic and sexualised nature of warfare. Though his is a somewhat heteronormative lens, Rank observed the links between conquest and sexual submission.60 Beowulf’s description of the scene matches perfectly the heroic ideal. The medieval battlefield, within the theatre of the warrior culture, is a ritualistic space of sadomasochistic fulfilment, of victory and sacrifice, punishment and atonement, of men dominating (erotically at times) other men, men submitting (erotically at times) to other men. The eros is amplified when we recall, as Gale Owen does, that ‘Germanic warriors traditionally fought naked, or wearing only cloaks’.61 The ‘continuity’ to which one returns in early medieval Germanic and Norse warrior culture takes the form of a homoamorous and homoerotic space linked to their forefathers.62 Witnessing a battle- and bench-companion return to continuity and to his ancestors, warriors and the audiences (inside and outside the text) could potentially view the spectacle of Dæghrefn’s violent and humiliating death and vicariously experience this masochistic mystery.

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Reading Beowulf with a masochist’s pleasure As a boy in the 1970s, I enjoyed play-fighting with other boys on my block. Mostly at my instigation, we would construct narratives as to who we were, what we were fighting for, and who was in the right. I always enjoyed losing. Amid effusive protestations, I secretly welcomed the defeat at the hands of another boy. Falling at his feet, I merely got to evaporate in his attainment of the gold and the girl. My participation in his victory brought about an elated defeat that I would later come to understand as the nascence of my same-sex masochism. If he were stronger and bigger than me, then somehow these disparities made my humiliation even more predestined and more libidinous. How could the outcome be otherwise when facing such a ‘superior’ opponent? It is indeed challenging if not impossible to read Beowulf without recognising how my own desires participate in the development of the narrative. All literary works are, as Wolfgang Iser noted, ‘the convergence of text and reader’.63 In fact, they, ‘transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written … enabling us to recreate the world it presents’.64 When examining the aesthetics of Beowulf, Yvette Kisor pays particular attention to the reader’s participation in the production of meaning. Recognising the utility of Iser’s terms ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ to describe features of a text, Kisor avers that, ‘readers are constantly integrating and reintegrating different features of the text as they concretize the literary work’.65 In the narrative gaps and discontinuities, James W. Earl and Allen Frantzen both find opportunities for readers to hermeneutically connect the dots, and Overing concludes that Beowulf, ‘contains all the gaps, silences, paradoxes, questions, and interventions of marginal desire all of which are central to feminist critical inquiry’.66 And what Overing applies to feminist studies is true of queer and kink enquiries as well. A contemporary masochist also finds in the gaps and sparse details of Beowulf’s narrative a space to produce meaning. Richard Zeikowitz addresses this to a degree in his acknowledgement that readers may participate in the production of pleasure manifest by a narrative:



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A listener/reader may derive pleasure from vicariously participating in the action unfolding before his mind’s eye. … In a fantasy fight scenario certain male readers might feel pleasure imagining the heroic knight inflicting pain on his adversary; the reader might also derive pleasure from vicariously experiencing the pain inflicted by the adversary on the heroic knight.67

In a similar manner, the listener/reader of the poem may vicariously experience the pleasurable pain inflicted by Beowulf’s powerful arms tightening around the chest until both, consciousness and selfhood, dissolve into a greater continuity. The men of Beowulf are involved in a mutual embrace with death. Sometimes this embrace quite literally arrives through the arms of the most beautiful and most powerful of men, the heroic ideal. To die by the incomparable press of arms and chest of such an exemplary figure as Beowulf requires little erotic amplification. A reader or listener of the poem, longing to enjoy the bliss and freedom of submission, might easily identify (as even Beowulf might!) with Dæghrefn and imagine in his unique and very public defeat the sweet agony of such a loss of selfhood.

Notes

I need to thank Steven F. Kruger for his long-lasting encouragement and advice.

  1 Gillian Overing, Language, sign, and gender(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 69–70.   2 The Old English term ‘ealuscerwen’, ‘ale-sharing’, is generally defined as a ‘terror’ or ‘mortal panic’ (J. R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984)) and could refer to the degree of violence and death dispensed during a wild period of revelling. It is a particularly useful term when contemplating the union of pleasure and mortality.   3 On death in Beowulf, see Helena Soukupovà, ‘The Anglo-Saxon hero in his death day: transience or transcendence?’, Littearia pragensia, 9.18 (1999): 5–26; Paul Taylor, ‘Themes of death in Beowulf’, in Old English poetry: fifteen essays, ed. Robert Creed (Providence: Brown University Press, 1967), pp. 249–74; Francis Magoun, ‘Beowulf b: a folk poem on

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Beowulf’s death’, in Early English and Norse studies: presented to Hugh Smith in honour of his sixtieth birthday (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 127–40. On death in Old English literature more generally, see John Hill, ‘Heroic poetry: achievement and heroic death in Old English literature’, in Death in the Middle Ages and early modern times: the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), pp. 59–74; John William Sutton, Death and violence in Old and middle English literature (Lewiston: Mellon, 2007); Jonathan Wilcox, ‘The moment of death in Old English literature’, in Heroes and saints: the moment of death in cross-cultural perspectives, ed. Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 30–46; Donald Fry, ‘The cliff of death in Old English poetry’, in Comparative research on oral traditions, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus: Slavica, 1987), pp. 213–34.   4 Overing, Language, sign, and gender, p. 70.   5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, The Freud reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York and London: Norton, 1989), pp. 594–626 (pp. 612, 613).   6 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, p. 615.   7 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, pp. 621 and 622.   8 Sigmund Freud, Three essays on the theory of sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 24–5. For more on Freud’s theorisations around S/M, see also ‘The economic problem of masochism’ (1924) and ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’ (1915). See also Benno Rosenberg, Masochisme mortifère et masochisme gardien de la vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). Also Jean Laplanche, Life and death in psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).   9 Volker Woltersdorff, ‘Masochistic self-shattering between destructiveness and productivity’, in Destruction in the performative, ed. Alice Lagaay and Michael Lorber, Critical Studies, 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 133–51. See also Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (eds), Toward a theology of eros: transfiguring passion at the limits of discipline (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 10 ‘disperse, v.’, OED online(Oxford: Oxford University Press), www. oed.com/view/Entry/55006 (accessed 2 June 2020). 11 Woltersdorff, ‘Masochistic self-shattering’, p. 134. 12 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 101. See also Lynda Hart, who critiques Bersani in order to scrutinise the privilege of selfhood; Lynda Hart, Between the body and the flesh: performing sadomasochism (New York: Columbia

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University Press, 1998), p. 99. See also Tim Dean, ‘Sex and the aesthetics of existence’, PMLA, 125.2 (2010): 387–92. 13 Darren Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable: S/M and the eroticisation of pain’, in Safe, sane and consensual: contemporary perspectives on sadomasochism, ed. Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 91–103 (p. 98). 14 Andrea Beckmann, ‘The “bodily practices” of consensual “sm”, spirituality and “transcendence”’, in Langdridge and Barker, Safe, sane and consensual, pp. 104–24 (p. 117). 15 Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable’, p. 97. 16 Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable’, p. 99. 17 Nikki Sullivan, Critical introduction to queer theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 153. 18 David M. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott, Sexual outsiders: understanding BDSM sexualities and communities (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 85–6. 19 Ortmann and Sprott, Sexual outsiders, pp. 85–6. 20 Thomas Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel, ‘S&M: an introduction to the study of sadomasochism’ in S and M: studies in sadomasochism, ed.  Thomas Weinberg and G.  W. Levi Kamel (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1983), pp. 17–24 (p. 20). 21 Gloria Brame, William Brame, and Jon Jacobs, Different loving: an exploration of the world of sexual dominance and submission (New York: Villard, 1993), p. 461. 22 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 464. 23 ‘Impact play’, BDSMwiki.info, last updated 11 February 2015, http://bdsmwiki.info/Category:Impact_Play; ‘SM and impact play’, Submissive Guide, www.submissiveguide.com/fundamentals/series/ series-sm-and-impact-play (both accessed 10 June 2020). 24 ‘Body worship is a supreme romantic surrender by the submissive to her dominant, and, for the dominant, an exciting display of the submissive’s humility and devotion’ (Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 84). 25 Brenda Love, Encyclopedia of unusual sex practices (Fort Lee: Barricade, 1994), p. 313. 26 Jenny Jochens, ‘Before the male gaze: the absence of the female body in Old Norse’, in Sex in the Middle Ages: a book of essays, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York and London: Garland, 1991), pp. 3–29 (pp. 4–5). 27 With the disturbing current trend among white supremacists to rally behind a concocted signification to the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, I have limited the use of the term to instances where it is clearly under scrutiny

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and susceptible to de/re-constructive enterprises. That seems preferable than simply its erasure. For a reading of Beowulf as a celebration and critique of this heroic ideal, see David Clark, Between medieval men: male friendship and desire in early medieval English literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 28 Clare A. Lees, ‘Men and Beowulf’, in Medieval masculinities: regarding men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Medieval cultures (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 129–48 (p. 142). 29 Allen J. Frantzen, Before the closet: same-sex love from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Angels in America’ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 13–14. 30 See Christopher Vaccaro, Sadomasochistic Beowulf, New queer medievalisms series, ed. Christopher Michael Roman and Will Rogers (Boston: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming). 31 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 292. 32 All translations from Roy Liuzza, Beowulf, 2nd edn (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2012). 33 The 2019 performance The ninth hour: the Beowulf story performed at the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Met Cloisters provides a glimpse into the sadomasochistic tensions between hero (Kate Douglas) and monster (Shayfer James) during their duet, singing, ‘I will punish you. You belong to me.’ 34 Langdridge, ‘Speaking the unspeakable’, p. 99 35 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 464. 36 See Helen Damico, Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the valkyrie tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), and Jane Chance, Woman as hero in Old English literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 37 Judith Halberstam, Female masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 275. 38 See J. R. Hulbert, ‘Surmises concerning Beowulf’s source’, Journal of English and Germanic philology, 50 (1951): 11–18 (17). Also Adrien Bonjour, ‘The problem of Daeghrefn’, Journal of English and Germanic philology, 51.3 (1952): 355–9. 39 R. E. Kaske, ‘The Eotonas in Beowulf’, in Old English poetry: fifteen essays, ed. Robert P. Creed (Providence: Brown University Press, 1967), pp. 285–303. 40 See Christopher Vaccaro, Remembering same-sex love: homo-amory in Beowulf and other Old English texts (New York: Routledge,

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f­ orthcoming) where I cover the deep amorousness within the seemingly transactional revenge topos. 41 Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 84. 42 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, p. 616. 43 Howell D. Chickering Jr, Beowulf: A dual-language edition (New York: Anchor, 1977; rprt 2006), p. 346. 44 See Adrien Bonjour, The digressions of Beowulf, Medium Ævum Monographs V (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 32. 45 Howell Chickering avers that we should read the a-verse ‘brēostweorðunge’ (l.  2504) as a compound term, referring here to Dæghrefn’s crushed chest (Chickering, Beowulf, p. 368). While it seems more likely that this term refers to the neck-ring first bestowed by Wealhtheow, this is an interesting reading that accentuates in a fairly sensual way, the manner of Dæghrefn’s death. 46 ‘duguð, n.’ Bosworth Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionary online, https:// bosworthtoller.com/8095; also Dictionary of Old English online, https://tapor-library-utoronto-ca.ezproxy.uvm.edu/doe/ (both accessed 9 January 2022). 47 Ortmann and Sprott, Sexual outsiders, p. 93. 48 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 151. 49 Roy Baumeister, Masochism and the self (New York: Psychology Press, 2014), p. 42. 50 Brame, Brame, and Jacobs, Different loving, p. 74 51 Beckman, ‘The “bodily practices” of consensual “sm”’, p. 106. 52 Lyn Cowan, Masochism: a Jungian view (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1982), p. 106. 53 Cowan, Masochism, p. 106. 54 Karen Horney, New ways in psychoanalysis (New York and London: Norton, 1966), p. 248. See Cowan, Masochism, p. 106. 55 Georges Bataille, Erotism: death and sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), p. 22. 56 Bataille, Erotism, p. 15. 57 Stephen S. Bush, ‘Sovereignty and cruelty: self-affirmation, self-­ dissolution, and the Bataillean subject’, in Negative ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the study of religion, ed. Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 38–76. 58 Karmen MacKendrick, counterpleasures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 118. The rupture of the dualistic paradigm in S/M is recognised by Andrea Beckmann as consistent with the passion and ecstasy of the ‘Dionysian state’, which ‘represents, and is

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experienced as, an abysmal loss of “self”, a state of indetermination and of rupture of the perception of the dualistic, reductionist modern binarism of “inside/outside”’ (Beckmann, ‘The “bodily practices” of consensual “sm”’, pp. 107–8). 59 Kent L. Brintnall, Ecce homo: the male-body-in-pain as redemptive figure (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 98–9. 60 See Otto Rank, ‘Conquering cities and “conquering” women: a contribution to the understanding of symbolism in poetry’, in Circulating metaphors of sexuality, aggression, and power: Otto Rank’s analysis of ‘conquering cities and “conquering” women’, trans. and ed. David G. Winter, Political psychology, 31.1 (February, 2010): 1–19 (14). 61 Gale R. Owen, Rites and religions of the Anglo-Saxons (London: David & Charles, 1981), p. 14. The image is enticing though the warriors in these scenes are often dressed in battle gear. 62 While the focus here is on same-sex S/M relations, there is evidence of female warriors in this theatre as well. 63 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The reading process: a phenomenological approach’, New literary history, 3.2 (Winter 1972): 279–99 (279). 64 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The reading process’, 283. 65 Yvette Kisor, ‘The aesthetics of Beowulf: structure, perception, and desire’, in On the aesthetics of Beowulf and other Old English poems, ed. John Hill (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 240. See I. A. Richards, Principles of literary criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), and Iser, ‘The reading process’. See also Wolfgang Iser. ‘Interaction between the text and reader’, in The reader in the text: essays on audience and interpretation, ed. Susan Suleiman and I. Crossman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); rprt in The Norton anthology of theory and criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 1673–82. 66 Overing, Language, sign, and gender, p. 111. Kisor refers to Allen Frantzen’s Desire for origins (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and James W. Earl’s Thinking about ‘Beowulf’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 67 Richard Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and chivalry: discourses of male same-sex desire in the fourteenth century (New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 78.

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Death drive and the maiden: the queerness of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim Philip Liston-Kraft

Introduction Do the works of the canoness Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960) belong within the canon of queer texts and, if so, in what respect can they be deemed queer? The self-proclaimed ‘strong voice of Gandersheim’1 certainly evinced a keen interest in all matters sexual, judging from her plays and legends, while at the same time advocating her particular theology of virginity and continence. The three dramas Dulcitius, Pafnutius, and Abraham, which shall serve as reference points in this chapter, portray a range of transgressive behaviours, from the Roman general who, blinded by his frustrated lust for three virgins, makes delusional love to kitchen pots and pans in their stead; to the prostitute, whose allures threaten to unravel the social fabric; to an uncle who takes a prurient interest in his young niece’s virginity. Hrotsvit further incorporates the homosexual into her repertory with the legend of Pelagius, in which a sodomitic caliph importunes the beautiful and virginal male martyr to submit to his desires. It is not Hrotsvit’s attention to polymorphous sexuality in and of itself that defines her writings as queer, but rather her contraposition of the unruliness of the sexual drive, to a form of virginity inextricably linked to death, whether by fire, drowning, or being buried alive. Hrotsvit’s narratives examine what Teresa de Lauretis terms a ‘heterotopic space’ – a queer space – in which the sexual and death drives engage in a continuing battle for sovereignty over human existence. And while Hrotsvit may come down on the side of death, she nonetheless acknowledges the power and appeal of the competing forces.

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In this chapter, I shall first give an overview of Hrotsvit’s focus on the sexual element and how, in her works, the insistence on the sexual is repeatedly met with rejection by Hrotsvit’s protagonists who, on pain of death, defend their choice to retain their virginity or return to chastity. I shall then look at de Lauretis’s definition of queerness, paying particular attention to the interaction between the sexual and death drives or ‘instincts’ – Eros and Thanatos – with a view towards determining whether her model of queerness might assist in understanding the core conflict repeatedly presented by Hrotsvit. I will review the place of masochism as a subset of the interplay between the life and death instincts that informs medieval representations of martyrdom. I will then examine a selection of four of Hrotsvit’s works in turn – the three plays Dulcitius, Pafnutius, and Abraham, and one legend, that of Pelagius – within the framework of queerness as posited by de Lauretis. Finally, I will suggest how Hrotsvit’s theological programme attempts to take the queerness out of the queer: how she seeks to uncouple the vital energy inherent in all manner of sexualities, ranging from scopophilia to sodomy – i.e. ‘the queer’; how she would free that energy from its messy and complicated corporeality – its ‘queerness’; and how she would preserve it in a sublimated form to be rechannelled into a life of generative chastity. This task, as it turns out, can only be accomplished – and even then, not completely – by moving not only beyond the sexual but beyond and outside life itself.

Hrotsvit and sex A precis of Hrotsvit’s plays and poems very quickly reveals that sexuality, often taking the form of an outright assault on a virginal, resistant figure, male or female, is a prominent theme in her oeuvre.2 That a member of a women’s religious community – the imperial convent at Gandersheim – should have knowledge of various types of sexual activity should not be surprising: as a canoness, Hrotsvit would not have been cloistered; her life would have been ‘relatively free … compared to that of a nun. A canoness was, for example, permitted to maintain her own private apartments or houses within the Stift’s precinct, and her personal property

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remained at her disposal’.3 The Gandersheim library would have provided ample access to works of an amatory nature – to Ovid, and Terence, among others; and Hrotsvit’s religious companions would have included widows, women pregnant out of wedlock, and even wives who had escaped from unhappy marriages.4 However, as numerous critics have noted, it is nonetheless striking that a professed tenth-century virgin so often hones in on ‘the compulsive, perverse, ungovernable aspects of sexuality that confront us in the public sphere, in the family, in ourselves’.5 Those ‘ungovernable aspects of sexuality’ seem most often to centre around ‘women’s bodies and threats to those bodies, ­particularly – although not exclusively to sexual chastity’.6 Florence Newman points up the ‘traditional association of women with the body, which ordinarily connotes irrationality, sensuality and ­inferiority’; in allowing the female body, itself long considered ‘a liability in the quest for holiness’, to rise triumphant against various forms of brutality or deprivation, Hrotsvit is able to ‘illustrat[e] the spiritual strength women exercise through the body’.7 But these threats are not limited to women. Saint Pelagius, as more fully discussed below, faces a similar challenge as a potential victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his heathen captor. In each of these narrated battles between Hrotsvit’s besieged heroines (and hero) and the powers that oppose them, the victims secure their victory by espousing and embracing not simply virginity, but a virginity that, in its rejection of sexuality, necessitates – and welcomes – death. It would appear that Hrotsvit is exploring a peculiar space in her works – a queer space – the space in which the erotic, in the sense of an attachment to life, vies for dominance over the wish for self-annihilation. This queer space can be understood on both a physical as well as an imaginary level, grounded, as it is, not only in the theatre of the imagination but in the very real space of the stage, to the extent that such a place may have been said to pertain to Hrotsvit’s era and surroundings. There is no reason to believe that such an arena could not have existed: there is historical evidence of dramatic performances in the tenth century, of solo and group recitations of texts, and entertainments by mimes, at least in popular, open-air venues, though not, perhaps, in as cultured an environment as the convent

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at Gandersheim.8 Women did participate in liturgical singing and may have accompanied the enactment of religious rituals with movement and gesture.9 One commentator sees in Hrotsvit’s plays all ‘the hallmarks of place-and-scaffold dramas’ – the primary genre of dramatic performance in the medieval era, presented on a raised platform in a place where the public might gather.10 If there was such a physical, theatrical space, in which a performance or recital can be said to have occurred, it could have expanded to embrace any number of audiences who were privileged to read, hear, and possibly view Hrotsvit’s works. While the residents of the Frauenstift at Gandersheim would have constituted her closest audience, the sphere of Hrotsvit’s reach might well have extended to wealthy patrons of the cloister, to ecclesiastical visitors, and to Ottonian courtiers.11 Gandersheim served, after all, ‘as a school, hospital, library, political center, house of refuge, and center of pilgrimage’.12 Such audiences would have been ‘invited not only “to watch” the plays buy also “to be watched” by them, to allow their own lives to be implicated in the dramas’.13 They would have entered into the queer spaces depicted within Hrotsvit’s plays and poems – into those prisons, bedchambers, towers, and anchoretic cells in which her dramatis personae contend with instinctual forces at odds with each other in a life and death struggle. These observers themselves would have then become part of an ever-mushrooming queer space that originated in Hrotsvit’s fictive creations. To further understand how this space is constructed and the coaction of the competing pressures within it, the vocabulary offered by de Lauretis may prove useful.

The life and death drives of sexuality De Lauretis adopts a multifaceted approach to defining a ‘queer text’. The depiction of transgressive sexuality alone does not, in her view, in and of itself mark a given text as queer: ‘a queer text carries the inscription of sexuality as something more than sex’, a feature which is a ‘not sufficient but necessary specification’.14 What moves the text into the realm of queerness is the further recognition of ‘sexuality as an unmanageable excess of affect that can find textual

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expression only in a figural, oracular language, in hybrid images and elaborate conceits’.15 De Lauretis attributes that ‘unmanageable excess of affect’ to an admixture of the life and death instincts postulated by Freud. Freud first hypothesised the existence of a death instinct in his 1920 essay ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’: ‘If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons  – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones”’.16 Freud, ever the dualist,17 proposed a system of instinctual energies or drives, pitting Thanatos against Eros with the one force now gaining strength over the other, only to cede its position of priority in a form of continuing oscillation: the sexual instincts … are the true life instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which lead, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition between them and the other instincts, an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses. It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.18

Extrapolating from Freud’s drive theories, de Lauretis understands ‘sexuality as an undomesticated, unsymbolizable force, not bound to objects and beyond the purview of the ego, a figure of sexuality as, precisely, drive’.19 Within the realm of sexuality: two contrary psychic forces or drives, coexist[ ] and act[ ] together in different combinations at different times in the individual’s psychic life. The life drives are … bound to objects – people, fantasies, ideals, the ego itself … The death drive is sheer negativity … that undermines the coherence of the ego and, consequently, the cohesion of the social.20

A queer text, she argues, will interrogate the ‘heterotopic space’ of sexuality, in which life and death drives compete for dominance – a space in which gender, sexual identity, and object are ‘radically

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irrelevant’.21 It is the space in which, as Paul Ricoeur describes it, ‘the dualism of Eros and Thanatos appears as a dramatic overlapping of roles’.22 This space will, then, subtend all manner of nonnormative sexualities: ‘a sexuality polymorphous, nonreproductive, pleasure-seeking, compulsive, and unruly’.23 Among such ‘nonnormative sexualities’ is a category of peculiar relevance to tales of saints and martyrs such as those whose vitae were of particular interest to Hrotsvit, namely masochism. Masochism has classically been regarded as the quintessential manifestation of the fusion of the life and death instincts in the arena of sexuality. In his 1924 paper entitled ‘The economic problem of masochism’, Freud sought to explain a phenomenon that he deemed ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’ unless, in defiance of the supremacy of the pleasure principle, one were to allow the possibility of the experience of certain ‘pleasurable tension and unpleasurable relaxations of tension’ – a qualitative state that he ascribed to masochism.24 Freud went on to adumbrate three forms of masochism: ‘as a condition imposed on sexual excitation, as an expression of the feminine nature, and as a norm of behaviour’, or more simply coined as erotogenic, feminine, and moral.25 As Kaja Silverman notes, however, ‘no sooner are these distinctions enumerated than they begin to erode’.26 The foundation for so-called ‘feminine masochism’, Freud asserts, is ‘erotogenic masochism’ defined as ‘pleasure in pain’:27 ‘Implicit, then, in the notion of masochism, whether feminine or moral, would seem to be the experience of corporeal pleasure, or – to be more precise –corporeal pleasure-in-pain’.28 For Freud, furthermore, sadism and masochism are concomitant phenomena: the task of the libido is to render ‘the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards … towards objects in the external world’.29 To the extent that that outward-directed instinct becomes active in the sphere of sexuality, it ‘is sadism proper’; the portion of that instinct that remains internally and libidinally bound is the realm of ‘the original erotogenic masochism’.30 Freud summarises his conclusions as follows: If one is prepared to overlook a certain inexactitude, it may be said that the death instinct which is operative in the organism – primal

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Death drive and the maiden 353 sadism – is identical with masochism. After the main portion of it has been transposed outwards on to objects, there remains inside, as a residuum of it, the erotogenic masochism proper, which on the one hand has become a component of the libido and, on the other, still has the self as its object. This masochism would thus be evidence of, and a remainder from, the phase of development in which the coalescence, which is so important for life, between the death instinct and Eros took place.31

Gilles Deleuze, as it turned out, was unprepared to ‘overlook the inexactitude’ which allowed Freud to equate sadism with masochism. Deleuze rejected the ‘unity of sadism and masochism’ which, he argued, ‘is simply taken for granted’ by Freud.32 For Deleuze, the coinage of the term ‘sado-masochism’ was a ‘semiological howler’:33 ‘It is always possible to speak of violence and cruelty in sexual behaviour and to show that these phenomena can be combined with sexuality in various ways’.34 Sadomasochism was, in his view, a vastly oversimplified and inappropriate rubric for any of a number of permutations of perversion involving violence and cruelty – constellations of symptoms – each of which demanded more painstakingly to be differentiated in terms of its etiological components. Notwithstanding his misgivings about the use of an  all-encompassing category of ‘sadomasochism’, Deleuze accepted that the death instinct was ‘undoubtedly the common  mould in  which both sadism and masochism present themselves’.35 One further gloss on Freud’s conception of masochism warrants noting in this context, namely that of Leo Bersani. Bersani, it appears, was prepared entirely to dispense with the boundaries between masochism and sexuality, rather than engage in an exhaustive and ultimately needless parsing of genres of the various fusions of pain and pleasure. Freud, according to Bersani, keeps returning to a line of speculation in which the opposition between pleasure and pain becomes irrelevant, in which the sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges when it is ‘pressed’ beyond a certain threshold of endurance. Sexuality, at least in the mode in which it is constituted, may be a tautology for masochism.36

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Envisioned here is a sexuality based in the ‘strong appeal of powerlessness, of the loss of control’ – a Dionysian state that bears along with it ‘a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self’.37 Engagement in such sexuality entails the search for and indulgence in self-debasement, the practice of which results in a shattering of the self.38 To the extent that integrative psychic structures are overwhelmed by the stimulation inherent in jouissance, ‘the very terms of a communication are abolished’.39 In order to communicate, there must remain an intact and distinct self, capable of interaction with separate and similarly intact and distinct other selves. De Lauretis underscores the negativity of Bersani’s conception of sex as ‘anticommunitarian, self-shattering, and anti-identitarian’.40 By her own definition, then, insofar as Bersani’s equation of sexuality and masochism ‘undermines the coherence of the ego and, consequently, the cohesion of the social’, it is, in its ‘sheer negativity’, perhaps the purest expression of the death drive within the sexual domain.41 No doubt, in whatever manner masochism is to be understood – whether as the convergence point of the sex and death instincts, whether as sadism in another guise, or whether as the essential equivalent of all of sexuality – its significance to representations of martyrdom, literary as well as artistic, cannot be overlooked. There is a ‘ritual structure to martyrdom representation, in which bodily inscription and the infliction of pain constitute the most important elements in an initiatory ordeal’.42 But while the martyr may constitute ‘corporeal sentience … as the most productive route to the divine’,43 that does not compel the conclusion that her experience of pleasure in pain – if, indeed, she does experience ‘pleasure’ in pain – runs to the extent of the dissolution of the self envisaged by Bersani. To the contrary, as the scholar Robert Mills suggests, it is the ‘excessive quantity of excitation signaled by the death drive which Lacan, following Freud, has termed jouissance and which … is what martyrdom representation militates against’; while martyrdom narrative may ‘gesture’ towards the disintegration of the self that is the hallmark of jouissance, it is nonetheless ‘fundamentally about selfaffirmation and pleasure (spiritual, erotic, or otherwise)’.44 Martyrs, both male and female, are traditionally placed in situations in which they must choose between confidently laying claim to the posture of



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impotence forced upon them and ‘lingering outside in a voiceless, powerless void’: Not surprisingly, they choose the former, willfully adopting gender liminality, painful suffering, and corporeal dismemberment as the necessary preconditions for achieving heavenly bliss … The tormented saint sees pain and punishment as prerequisites to obtaining pleasure. Contrary to the common supposition that the masochist is a pathological freak who finds pleasure in pain, it is rather the case that he expects pain as the condition that will bring about future pleasure.45

In approaching Hrotsvit’s literary productions, there is a middle path to be sought: on the one hand, to dismiss out of the hand the ‘pathology’ of her martyrs would be to overlook the psychological subtlety with which she limns her characters; while to label the complete array of sexually tinged behaviours that mark Hrotsvit’s martyrdom narratives as simply one form or other of masochism – or of sadism, its complement – would be not only to commit the Deleuzian offence of conflating all manner of sexual violence and cruelty, but also to deny the possibility that Hrotsvit acknowledged other forms of sexuality – perhaps those more infused with the life instinct, less ‘negative’ in import, and thus characterised less by corporeal pain than by a more genial libido. In the works of Hrotsvit, such sexual behaviours are to be identified among her lead characters as well as their supporting cast – saints and sinners alike: not everyone, after all, is a martyr. And while it is frequently possible to point up elements of sadism here and features of masochism there, it would be unnecessarily reductive – if not misleading – to sweep the multiplicity of sexualities under any single heading. To quote Albrecht Classen, ‘[t]here is no doubt that Hrotsvit was fully aware  of the full spectrum of human sexuality, both within and outside marriage, in hetero- and homosexual terms’.46 There have been other attempts to reduce Hrotsvit’s panoply of the human sexual condition to a ready formula. Some critics, relying on more traditional psychoanalytic trends, have interpreted Hrotsvit’s ‘preoccupation … with the glories of virginity’ as a mark of sexual repression,47 which, in their view, is only reasonably to be expected, given her choice to lead a celibate, religious

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life. The simplistic attribution of Hrotsvit’s emphasis on sexuality to an underlying neurosis assumes that Hrotsvit is interested in sexuality qua sexuality. Hrotsvit rather ‘uses the energy of sexuality to create situations and conflicts that embody the ideas she wants to explore’.48 Those situations, I would suggest, most often take place in that ‘heterotopic space’ in which the forces of Eros and Thanatos are evident, and de Lauretis’s framework offers a more fertile ground on which to explore the conflicts with which Hrotsvit seeks to engage.

Queer spaces in Hrotsvit’s plays and legends I have selected the three plays Dulcitius, Pafnutius, and Abraham, and the legend of Pelagius as examples of queer texts in which Hrotsvit grapples with sexuality ‘as a psychic force that is at once sexual and death drive’.49 In Dulcitius, Hrotsvit stages a confrontation between three ‘beautiful’, ‘delectable’, and ‘perfectly exciting girls’,50 and the lecherous governor Dulcitius, warden of the prison to which they have been committed because of their refusal to comply with Diocletian’s decree that they marry. The virgins interrupt their prayers to peer through a keyhole to observe their would-be rapist, whose sexual heat has led him into the hot kitchen, ‘fondling the pots/ And hugging the frying pans to his eager breast,/ Giving them all long, sweet kisses!’ The three sisters – deriving a sort of scopophilic pleasure – delight in the sight of their captor’s madness: ‘It’s the funniest thing I have ever seen!’51 The result of Dulcitius’s own indulgence in fetishism is that he is literally blackened by the soot of the pots, mocked and beaten by his inferior officers as a ‘vile and filthy creature’,52 and berated by his wife. The social order has been turned on its head: the governor’s overweening lust has lost him his authority, both over his underlings as well as his wife.53 Pafnutius offers a similar demonstration of the disruptive forces inherent in sexuality, as perceived by Hrotsvit. In the play, the hermit Pafnutius is distressed to hear of the ongoing danger that a prostitute poses to the community. Thais is that ‘certain shameless woman … filthy in the foulness of her sordid life’ – a



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­ ymphomaniacal courtesan, who is ‘not satisfied to be leading a few n men to eternal damnation’.54 The exercise of her particular brand of sexuality threatens the social fabric: Pafnutius. And it is not just frivolous youths   Who waste their family’s meager    property and substance   In order to court her and be with her,   But even powerful, important men scorn    their   Family’s precious furnishings and cart    them away,   Enriching her with gifts, much to their    harm and loss.55

Thais’s ‘lovers who have lost their senses’ soon vie with each other for her affections, going so far as to ‘break each other’s faces and noses with their fists’.56 This Thais is quite a different creature to the Terentian prostitutes ‘who serve as mechanisms for the reaffirmation of citizen values by helping to reunite families and establish suitable marriages’.57 The infectious and unbridled ‘eros’ ­ represented by Hrotsvit’s Thais results in financial ruin, the dismantling of family connections, and the unravelling of civilised norms. Abraham is a kind of companion piece to Pafnutius: Maria, the ‘young and pretty niece’ of the hermit Abraham,58 is just shy of eight years old when she is persuaded by her uncle to enter ‘a little cell, narrow of entrance’,59 where she will spend the next twenty years in a life of prayer and chastity. Seduced by a ‘deceitful lover … in the disguise of a monk’,60 she escapes into the world where her own sexuality soon overwhelms her. She takes up life as a prostitute, hired out by her pimp to many lovers. When her uncle, disguised as one such customer, seeks her out, she explains: ‘After I had fallen the first/ time I rushed on into sin’.61 Hrotsvit’s emphasis here is not so much on the harm that sexuality can inflict on society, but rather its deleterious effects on the self. Maria – unable to tame her sexual drive, once it is released – is no longer in control of her life and destiny, now a pawn to her pimp and, like Thais, now on offer to the highest bidder.62

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In Hrotsvit’s verse rendition of the legend of Saint Pelagius, the ‘sodomitic vice’63 of the caliph Abderrahman is the hallmark of the Saracen ‘already subject to the spontaneous conflation in medieval moralistic discourse of idolatry, sorcery, treachery, and sexual perversion’.64 As Mills incisively remarks, Hrotsvit ‘couldn’t have produced a more explicit space in which to explore resistant readings and queer wishes’.65 Rather atypically for the author of a male virgin martyr legend, Hrotsvit highlights the physical beauty of the young, chaste saint,66 who, like the virgins in Dulcitius, is ‘bound and thrown into a dark prison’.67 The Caliph’s courtiers, taken with ‘the captive’s lovely face’ and fully aware of their ruler’s proclivities, dress Pelagius in fine clothes and present him at court. Abderrahman, burning with love,68 ‘trie[s] to steal kisses/ From the desired youth, embracing his sweet neck’.69 Pelagius resists the King’s persistent attempts at a kiss, finally lashing out physically at the importunate heathen: But the martyr thwarted The King’s shrewd playful act And swung at the King’s lips promptly with his fist. He dealt such a blow to the King’s face below That the blood gushing forth from the inflicted wound Stained the King’s beard and wetted all his garments.70

Pelagius’s punishment is first to be ‘thrown over the walls/ and hurled from an engine’.71 When that manoeuvre fails to damage ‘the martyr’s glorious body’,72 he is decapitated and cast into the river. His head and limbs are later recovered by fishermen and his sainthood confirmed when his remains emerge intact from the burning furnace into which they have been thrown. It is worthwhile noting several features here that set apart the Pelagius poem from Hrotsvit’s dramas of female virgins. As a male heroic figure, Pelagius defies ‘the dominant fiction of compulsory heterosexuality’,73 which ‘calls upon the male subject to see himself, and the female subject to recognize and desire him, only through

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the mediation of images of an unimpaired masculinity’.74 The impairment of Pelagius’s masculinity begins even before his entry onto the stage, with the humiliation of his noble Christian father and the peers of the realm of Galicia, who, while not literally castrated, are effectively emasculated by their subjugation to a pagan invader. The symbolic castration of the father ends in the redemptive self-­sacrifice of the son. This tale is perhaps prototypical of a model of male martyrdom, as proposed by Mills, in which ‘[b]odily torment is the means by which martyrs negotiate their transition from positions of male-controlled wealth and power to a state of de-phallicized humility and fleshliness’.75 As Mills further explains: there are plenty of representations of individual men who embrace lack at the level of their unconscious fantasies and identities, and individual women for whom the earthly phallus is not the principal signifier of desire. Saints, in my opinion, come under this category. Male martyrs express their rejection of the phallus through ­exhibitionism – and even potentially ‘feminizing’ torment – that leads to their final, castrating death.76

The emphasis on the corporeal charms of the virgin Pelagius brings with it ‘connotations of frail femininity’ associated with fleshliness in the Middle Ages.77 That inflection of femininity is only further emphasised by the central ‘gender-transgressive element’ of the text, namely the advances of the lusty heathen tyrant.78 Whether Hrotsvit was prepared to condemn same-sex relations as sinful has remained a matter of some disagreement among commentators. John Boswell, for one, opined that Hrotsvit’s narrative is devoid of any suggestion that homosexual desire was ‘either praiseworthy or especially derogatory’.79 Rather than making any ‘theological statement’ about same-sex relations per se, she was more concerned to denounce personal relations of any kind between Christians and pagans.80 It is likely not so much the Caliph’s pederasty per se that is at issue in Pelagius as it is his embodiment of everything that threatens to upset the Christian world.81 As Gregory Hutcheson observes: ‘The Saracen operates as the negative projection of Christian goodness, an ancillary to the false prophet Muhammad whose preferred idiom is deception and in whom every virtue becomes its perverted opposite.’82 The Caliph

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is without question a character stained by an excess of sexuality, an ‘extravagance of the flesh’: ‘luxu carnis maculatus’.83 But in expressing that sexuality with the kiss of Judas, Abderrahman’s sodomy becomes, in de Lauretis’s terminology, ‘something more than sex’; it is emblematic of the challenge of the decadent East to the civilisation of Western Europe. In each of the examples of Hrotsvit’s writings under consideration, the display of sexual energy is met – and ultimately undone – with equal and opposing force by the embrace of a form of chastity linked with death. As driven as are Hrotsvit’s villains to sexual abnormality, Hrotsvit’s virgins and repentant whores are similarly urged on by drives of an equally ‘obstinate, and often destructive character’.84 The joy in jouissance that should by all rights bring on a total disintegration of the self is instead harnessed to the vision of a new self beyond death and desire. In Dulcitius, the virgin sisters Chionia and Agape ‘pray to be released/ From the bonds which tie our souls to this life./ When our bodies have perished,/ Then may our souls rejoice with Thee in heaven’.85 As irrefutable proof of their holiness, the flames of the pyre cannot destroy their hair, their bodies, or even their clothes. Like her older sisters, Irena stubbornly defies Sisinnius: ‘The more brutally I am tortured,/ The more gloriously will I be praised’.86 She, too, welcomes a martyr’s death: shot by an arrow, she ‘will enter the heavenly bridal chamber’,87 wedded to Christ in death. When Thais is confronted by Pafnutius with the curse of ‘everlasting damnation’, his ‘harsh words have cut into [her] breast/ like a sharp knife’.88 The energy that she previously expended in sexual promiscuity is very quickly turned to religious zeal, and the body that had served for pleasure is converted into the tool of her penance. Thais first consigns all her worldly possessions to the fire. She then spends three years ‘within a cruelly small, cramped cell’,89 contemplating her sins, during which time ‘the nauseating smell of excrement/ never [leaves her] nostrils’.90 Surviving her ordeal, Thais emerges from isolation only to face ‘the hour of [her] dissolution’,91 and she dies shortly thereafter. Seen through the lens of what has previously been described as the typology of martyrological masochism, Thais has successfully completed that rite of passage that transfigures the excesses of her pain and debasement – her



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heightened ‘excitation’ – into a triumphant loss of self;92 this dissolution of the self is, however, only temporary, for like all martyrs, Thais will be taken up into the community of heaven: Then this very Thais, in her own human body, Will rise again, perfect at last, To take her place among the lovely, shining white sheep, And be led into the joy of eternal life.93

In the play Abraham, Maria is about to shower her elderly uncle with incestuous ‘sweet kisses’, on his incognito visit to her as a client in her brothel, when she is suddenly reminded of the ‘fragrance of chastity’ that was once hers.94 She laments that if she had ‘only been dead and gone’ before her seduction, she would never have descended into a life of sin.95 She accepts her penance ‘with glad obedience’,96 willing to follow her spiritual father wherever he may lead her. Hers is the masochistic pleasure that depends on loss and pain – on separation from the world and a regimen of corporal torment; it ‘is the pleasure of passivity, of subject-ion’.97 At that ‘intimate junction of pleasure and pain’ that, as Silverman proposes, is the distinctive preserve of masochism, ‘pleasure proceeds not from our mastery of painful experiences, but from their mastery of us; in short, from passivity’.98 Pelagius, too, pursues the preservation of his chastity through death as his route to salvation. Not heeding his father’s protests, Pelagius delivers himself up to the King as a pledge in his parent’s stead, knowing that he might ‘be killed for faith in Christ,/ and might so reach the spot,/ where to die was his lot’.99 The Caliph warns him what will happen if he does not give in to the King’s desires: Are you not moved to bend, Knowing your young life must end And that you will make childless Your grieving parents?100

Pelagius’s answer is, of course, to choose death – specifically the martyr’s triple death ‘[w]ith which he is crowned/ for his virginity

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renowned’.101 He is first thrown over the ramparts, then beheaded and cast into the water, and finally committed to the fire before his relics are at last laid to rest ‘in a worthy tomb’.102 In the terminology of masochism, Pelagius has thus successfully negotiated the stages of male martyrdom: He has rejected the socially valorised role of a phallic ‘wielder of power’,103 a role already diminished in the persona of his father; he has been subjected to gender-­ transgressive torment; he has been decapitated and thereby symbolically ­castrated;104 and he has at the last been reduced to a collection of body parts. His ‘un-manning’, to cite Mills, has made the man.105

Hrotsvit’s ‘heterotopic vision’ and quasi-Utopia The uniqueness and sophistication of Hrotsvit’s dramatic vision – what makes her texts queer within the criteria proposed by de Lauretis – consists in her appreciation on some level of the presence of a destructive and disorganising force at work within the exercise and expression of uncontrolled sexuality. Hrotsvit somehow intuits that ‘the sexual remains within the social as an unmasterable, uncontainable excess, a force of conflict, disaggregation, unbinding. This is, in Freud’s conception, the negativity of the death drive’.106 Hrotsvit’s array of staged, sexual performances – a military general caressing kitchen pots, prostitutes serving hordes of men, young and old, a lecherous king making love to a beautiful adolescent boy – are evidence of a ‘heterotopic vision of sexuality as drive and of the radical irrelevance of gender, sexual identity, or anatomy to sexuality as such’.107 Virginity, then – or chastity regained and retained, in the case of her errant prostitutes – is the alternative, in Hrotsvit’s religiously based system, to the heterotopic vision which she seeks to escape. It is the organising principle that Hrotsvit puts forward with which to defend against the power of sexuality to shatter the self and to dismantle Christian society. Hrotsvit’s heroes and heroines, in essence, strive to de-couple the death drive from the life drive present in the forms of sexuality that face and challenge them. They siphon off the psychic energy from the death drive, arrogate it to themselves, distil it, and claim it for their own. In thus attempting to sever the tie

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between the drives at play in the heterotopic vision, Hrotsvit might be said to be trying to take the queer out of queer – to strip sexuality of the trappings of the life instinct, while preserving and rechannelling nonetheless its innate potency. The fire that burned in the lust of the seducers is repurposed to power the defence of the victims’ chastity. That chastity, is, moreover, linked directly with death. Nowhere, perhaps, is this pattern more apparent than in the figure of Thais whose zeal for the debauchment and exploitation of her clients is so readily transmuted into her fervent pursuit of atonement. The penance which she so eagerly seeks bears death immediately in its wake. In her career as a courtesan, Thais’s lust knows no bounds; she is ‘quick to win every man over with the temptations of her beauty/ And drag him to damnation with her’.108 Once Pafnutius’s remonstrations make her conscious of her guilt, Thais, in a complete volte-face and now ‘wholly possessed by the bitter taste of grief’,109 disposes of all her worldly goods in a pyromaniac frenzy. Relinquishing her many lovers and adopting a life of asceticism instead, she ‘gladly’ follows the path that Pafnutius prescribes.110 Thais is entrusted to the supervision of a religious female – a ‘venerable abbess’ – whom Pafnutius instructs to ‘feed’ Thais with her ‘life-giving advice and/ encouragement’.111 Even when Pafnutius later summons Thais to emerge from her tiny cell, she vigorously resists: No, no, venerable father, don’t! Don’t take me away from this dirt, For I am a poor, wretched, dirty thing, too. Let me stay in the place where I deserve to be.112

Longing to ‘be granted heavenly beatitude without end’,113 and singing God’s praises, Thais welcomes the arrival of her death. The vitality that Thais had poured into her life of disruptive sexual pleasure has been remobilised in the service of a life of celibacy – a life that soon cedes to the passionately desired entry into the kingdom of heaven. In Hrotsvit’s imagined world, the yearning voiced by her various characters for the heavenly bridal chamber (Irena), for the cramped

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cell (Thais), for oblivion (Maria), for the deep darkness of prison (Pelagius), becomes an almost pure expression of the death drive. Her protagonists seek:

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the place beyond pleasure, beyond mortality, where one becomes immortal … not merely the end of life, but the drive, both drivenness and passage, toward another, virtual form of life.114

In the religious and intellectual context in which Hrotsvit wrote, that ‘virtual form of life’ would be the union with Christ in the afterlife, whether as a sponsa Christi or in the enjoyment of his ‘amicitia’.115 By the late tenth century, sexual renunciation had already been lauded by theologians for several hundred years as the ultimate exercise in self-control among religious Catholics. Christians broke from the ancients early on in dismissing the calor genitalis as a shameful reminder of the indistinguishability between humans and beasts.116 As Peter Brown explains, Catholic theology in the early Middle Ages came to imagine the human body ‘as a quivering thing. Its vulnerability to temptation, to death, even to delight, was a painfully apposite concretization of the limping will of Adam’.117 Saint Augustine adopted and advocated celibacy as a vehicle through which to tame the errant will – to gain control over every aspect of the self, including ‘the most humble details of the body’s experience of sexuality’.118 Indeed, for many members of the medieval religious community, chastity – inasmuch as it specifically entailed abstinence from any manner of sexual activity – became in itself a form of ‘sexual identity. That is, it did not represent a lack of desire, or a lack of opportunity to satisfy desire, but a more or less deliberate orientation of desire toward matters of the spirit’.119 It is a mistake, according to Ruth Mazo Karras, to assume that the medieval virgin did not experience sexual desire. It is more correct, Karras argues, to see the virgin’s extant desire as channelled towards a relationship with the divine.120 That ultimate relationship, at least as imagined in the early Middle Ages, would have been one of submission to Christ, in fulfilment of the biblical promise held out to chaste virgins that they might ‘follow the Lamb wherever he goes’.121 The female virgin, moreover, often attained a heightened degree of sanctity above and beyond that of her unsullied, male brethren.

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Another strand in the theological history of Catholic virginity was an equivalence drawn between the virgin ascetic who foreswore the role of daughter, wife, and mother to devote herself instead to a life of chastity – whether lived in seclusion or conventually – and the Mother of Christ.122 The Virgin Mary, according to legend, had spent years in seclusion in the temple, watched over and nourished by an angel. Those women who followed her example by adopting chastity and a vocation away from lay society were thus representatives of the Virgin Mary on earth, if not in fact angelic themselves.123 The embrace of chastity, furthermore, afforded its adherent opportunities that she might not otherwise have enjoyed, were she to have remained subject to the traditional roles expected of her gender in a male-dominated society.124 Marriage and motherhood were the lot assigned to women by the patriarchy. A woman was thus shut out by and large from direct participation in governance, economy, or learning.125 The model of Saint Perpetua appealed to those women who rejected such restrictions: a woman could ‘declare her independence’ like Perpetua, by pursuing the option of virginity and accession to the will of God, rather than to that of her father or husband.126 No doubt, these several considerations factored not only in the life of the poet but also in her works. As Lisa Weston observes, every one of Hrotsvit’s fictive virgins, as well as Hrotsvit herself, ‘tacitly appropriates the patriarchal control of female lives’.127 For Hrotsvit, herself steeped in Augustinian theology,128 chastity signified above all the subordination of the body to the will.129 Hrotsvit, however, takes the exercise of self-control yet one step further by advocating not only that sexuality be subjected to the will, but that the very fate of the body be subjected to the will as well. To accomplish this goal, Hrotsvit must siphon off Thanatos from Eros – she must distil away that component of sexuality that derives from the death drive, preserve its force, and apply it to serve a goal other than satisfaction of carnal desire; she must, otherwise stated, transform the erotogenic into the thanatogenic. In extracting the death drive from the alembic of sexuality and appropriating it to her own brand of martyrology, Hrotsvit anticipates Freud by almost a millennium. For Freud the death drive is

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not simply an inexorable urge to die: it is the determination of each and every person to die in their own way.130 Hrotsvit’s saintly missionaries do not plead that they be spared death; rather they assert that the manner in which they will die remains subordinate to their will. Irena’s retort to Sisinnius in Dulcitius may be illustrative here: ‘Earthly pleasures and lust bring punishment,/ But trials bring the crown of Heaven./ There is no sin, unless the soul consents’.131 In withholding the consent of the soul, the martyr masters the death drive, transforming it into a tool subject to his or her authority. At the same time, her ‘[m]asochism works insistently to negate paternal power and privilege’.132 By expropriating the power to dictate her own death, the virgin martyr liberates herself from the law of the earthly father to place herself willingly at the feet of the heavenly one. The death to which Hrotsvit’s species of death drive tends is not Freudian oblivion – the inanimate state that existed before life. Nor is her practice of the death instinct ‘queer’ in the sense in which Lee Edelman would define it: ‘the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure; the negativity opposed to every form of social viability’.133 For Edelman, ‘the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance internal to the social, to every social structure or form’.134 This is most definitely not the alternative that Hrotsvit would propose to the ‘heterotopic vision’ that she perceives in unruly, uncontrolled sexuality. She does not ‘refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation’.135 Hrotsvit’s is very much a vision of an unending future, populated by her virgin sisters and brothers. Weston describes these as ‘quasi-utopian’ spaces: Hrotsvit’s virginal bodies are ultimately even more powerful when they become powerful reproducers of new Christian bodies without sexual reproduction. The spectacle of virgin martyrdom converts others to virginity – and often gathers them into homosocial ­communities – both explicitly in the actions narrated in the legends and dramas, and implicitly in the models they provide for Hrotsvit’s readers.136

Hrotsvit’s ‘quasi-utopian’ spaces – her unique brand of ­heterotopia – may be spaces in which there is no sexual r­ eproduction, but they

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are clearly not spaces of no production. Hrotsvit’s own project is the memorialisation of the tales that will not only inspire but create future generations, and she is not shy in declaring herself as a member of the vanguard in this mission. In the opening lines of Pelagius, for example, she identifies herself by name (‘Be mindful of Hrotsvit thy maid’), calling on the saint to assist her in singing his  praises so that her poem may continue to spread his renown.137

The queerness of quasi-utopia I have suggested that the plays and legends of Hrotsvit are indeed queer texts as such might be understood by Teresa de Lauretis – more particularly, in that Hrotsvit explores that heterotopic space in which the life and death drives are intermingled in an excessive sexuality that threatens to undermine self and society. That excessive sexuality, moreover, can assume the guise of what has been described as a martyr’s masochism, fuelled by the death instinct and reaching a heightened excitation that hovers on the brink of a disintegration of the self. I have further explored the notion that Hrotsvit, through her virgin martyrs and remorseful prostitutes, seeks to extract the energy of the death drive from sexuality of whatever form and apply it to a new vision: a vision of chastity bonded to the self-determined manner of death. That death, moreover, leads not to pure negativity, not to self-dissolution, but rather to the preservation of an ongoing, quasi-utopian, homosocial community – perhaps not unlike that at Gandersheim – united in ­friendship and in literacy. The nature of Hrotsvit’s quasi-utopia warrants closer inspection, though, in that drawing a bright line between the life and death drives is apparently an impossible task. Much as Hrotsvit strives to purify the death drive – to free it from any taint of the Eros that, try as one might, continues to tug at the body, the heart, and the mind; much as Hrotsvit would wish to rededicate the energy of a refined Thanatos to her quasi-utopian programme, the life drive refuses to withdraw gracefully. Hrotsvit keeps her audience ever mindful of the exhilaration of jouissance, in continuing homage, perhaps,

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to her pagan predecessor Terence. The outright voyeuristic glee of the three sisters in Dulcitius in witnessing the humiliation of their tormentor is inconsistent with a complete renunciation of the life drive; theirs is a delight meshed with the sadism of schadenfreude. Thais’s ready acceptance of, if not exultation in, the abjection that her confessor Pafnutius demands of her could be viewed as its own expression of sexual excess. Witness Thais’s cathexis of her faeces: as overtly negative as it may be, it could nonetheless easily be read as a type of masochistic coprophilia: Can there be anything more difficult, Or of a greater discomfort, Than to have to take care of all my bodily functions In the same place, without ever leaving it? I am sure that very soon it will be impossible to live here, Because of the terrible smell.138

Pafnutius’s own sadism in exacting this punishment from Thais cannot be overlooked, as indeed it is not by the Abbess who overtly questions the wisdom of its cruelty: Abbess. I am afraid that poor child is so    used to such a different kind of    life   That she will sicken   And be unable to stand the test of    such harsh treatment. Pafnutius. Do not be afraid of that, for a serious    fault   Calls for a powerful treatment.139

Pafnutius’s interaction with Thais might exemplify a species of sadism that Havelock Ellis would have described as ‘behavior motivated by love’.140 It is, after all, only out of his love and concern for the soul of Thais that Pafnutius is moved to draw tight ‘the reins of discipline’ and force her to ‘endure this humiliation’.141 Thais, as his ‘victim’, acknowledges the paternal love that is the inspiration of her punishment, declaring submissively:



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You have cared for me like a father. Whatever you order for me, I who am humbly grateful and unworthy, Will not refuse to do.142

The sadist and the masochist thus conspire in his administration of, and her suffering under the measures of an extremely harsh discipline, suffused all the while with the gentler light of a parent’s care for an errant child. The concern of an older relative for the spiritual wellbeing of a young ward is similarly suspect in another of Hrotsvit’s productions: Abraham’s prurient interest in the sexual desires and practices of his eight-year-old niece Maria might just cross the line between appropriate avuncular devotion and paedophilia.143 The beautiful boy Pelagius conceivably acts out an elaborate sadomasochistic performance of his own with his captor/tormentor, drawing blood from the Caliph only thereby knowingly to provoke the cruellest punishments in retaliation. Perhaps the pleasure of Hrotsvit in putting into words the allure of Pafnutius’s male body bespeaks a continuing attachment on the part of the author herself to the life drive.144 These may all be examples of the ‘sexual repression’ that psychoanalytic critics were so eager to point out in Hrotsvit’s writings; or as might be understood in de Laurentian terms, they are the remnants of the psychic force of the sexual drive that stubbornly cling to and contaminate Hrotsvit’s idealised vision of an alternate world subject only to the purified death instinct. They are additionally all instances of what have in the postFreudian era come to be dubbed ‘perversions’, and here Silverman’s analysis of the definition and function of these so-called perversions is instructive. A ‘perversion’, she posits, ‘turns aside from both biology and the social order, and it does so through the improper deployment or negation of the binarisms upon which each regime depends – binarisms that reinforce each other in the case of gender’.145 Perversions are subversions, challenging if not obliterating the arbitrary differences and distinctions imposed upon society by a patriarchal structure in order to maintain existing power ­relations. Perversion, as Silverman explains:

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strips sexuality of all functionality, whether biological or social; in an even more extreme fashion than ‘normal’ sexuality, it puts the body and the world of objects to uses that have nothing whatever to do with any kind of binary oppositions upon which the social order rests; it crosses the boundary separating food from excrement (coprophilia); life from death (necrophilia); adult from child (pederasty) and pleasure from pain (masochism).146

It is no surprise, then, that such perversions should intrude upon Hrotsvit’s quasi-utopian imagination – that perversions in particular should be the crystallised formations assumed by the lingering shadow of Eros in a world which Hrotsvit would seemingly prefer to reserve to Thanatos. Just as Hrotsvit’s entire project – her personal choice of virginity and of community and her assumption of an authorial voice within that community – were effectively a way of saying no to paternal power and privilege, so too do her fictive portrayals of sexuality interrogate the legitimacy of immanent, ­gender-based social constructs. Queerness thus remains ever an integral part of the utopia – ‘quasi’ or otherwise – of the ‘space of transit’ in which Hrotsvit’s bodies are transformed into immortal souls,147 and ­‘quasi-utopia’ turns out to be yet another species of ‘heterotopia’.

Conclusion: the spaces of Hrotsvit’s heterotopia Eros and Thanatos, angels and prostitutes, sanctity and perversion: where else can these coexist but in heterotopic spaces? In his preface to The order of things, Michel Foucault described the heterotopia as follows: Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.148

The Foucauldian heterotopia is at once an impossible place, existing only in the sphere of language and the imagination, while

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paradoxically maintaining at the same time a foothold in reality.149 As Foucault later suggested, it is ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.150 He likens it to the mirror, which – itself possessing a real surface – permits one to gaze into the ‘placeless place’ where one is not. It is thus ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.151 For Foucault, the theatre was the quintessential place of heterotopia, permitting the imbrication if not the full superimposition of incompatible sites, one upon the other.152 Hrotsvit’s choice, then, of the theatre, is the ideal setting for a world in which the sacred and the profane are interlocked. But perhaps it is more accurate to imagine Hrotsvit’s heterotopia as a set of concentric circles or Chinese boxes nesting one within the other, rather than conceive of it as limited to the ‘stage’ only: in the innermost such circle or box are the dungeons, prisons, and cells of Hrotsvit’s martyred hermits, heroes, and heroines; surrounding them is the framework of the drama or legend; the latter is then housed within the convent in which the drama is performed.153 Rising triumphant high above their oubliettes, their vitae, above the stage, the cloister, and life itself are Hrotsvit’s ‘Christian masochists’ – her rebels and revolutionaries, moved by ‘a strong heterocosmic impulse – the desire to remake the world in another image altogether, to forge a different cultural order’. Their pleasure consists in large measure in the pain of following in the path of ‘the suffering Christ, the very picture of divestiture and loss’.154 Hrotsvit’s heterotopia, though, leaves room for pleasures of a less celestial order. As heavenly focused as Hrotsvit and her religious sisters may have been on entering Gandersheim, they did not abandon their continuing interest in and attachment to Eros at the door of the abbey.

Notes 1 In her preface to the Liber Secundus of her six plays, Hrotsvit identifies herself as follows: ‘I, the strong voice [clamor validus] of Gandersheim, have not refused to imitate him [i.e. Terence] in writing

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while others honour him in reading – and by the same mode of writing in which the shameful sins of lascivious women are recounted – the praiseworthy chastity of holy virgins may be glorified according to the capacity of my poor ability’, in Anna K. Rudolph, ‘Ego Clamor Validus Gandeshemensis: Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim: her sources, motives, and historical context’, Magistra, 20.2 (2014): 58–90 (61–2). The Latin text is found in Die Werke Der Hrotsvitha, ed. K. A. Barack (Nürnberg: Bauer u. Raspe, 1858), pp. 137–8. 2 For a concise summary of each of her works, see Fidel Rädle, ‘Hrotsvit von Gandersheim’, in Die Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters Verfasserlexicon, vol. 4, ed. Kurt Ruh et al. (Berlin: deGruyter, 2010), pp. 195–210 (pp. 199–207). See also Charlotte Dorelle Butler, ‘Queering the classics: gender, genre and reception in the works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’ (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2016), p. 70: Hrotsvit’s heroines ‘are confronted with unwanted sexual violence and exploitation’. 3 Sabine Knap, ‘Negotiating autonomy: canons in late medieval Frauenstifte’, in Partners in spirit: women, men and religious life in Germany, 1100–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 367–400 (p.  367). The freedoms allowed a canoness were quite extensive, including maintaining servants, travel to visit family, eschewal of religious garb, and so on (Knap, ‘Negotiating autonomy’, pp. 371–2). 4 See Albrecht Classen, ‘Sex on the stage (and in the library) of an early medieval convent: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: a tenth-century convent playwright’s successful competition against the Roman Poet Terence’, Orbis Literarum, 65.3 (2010): 167–200 (192): ‘Hrotsvit’s audience in the convent and elsewhere was more worldly than in a standard monastic setting’. See generally, Jane Stevenson, ‘Hrotsvit in context’, in A companion to Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960), ed. Phyllis R. Brown and Stephen L. Wailes (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 35–47, in which she describes life in the convent at Gandersheim; the various types of women who chose – or were compelled by family – to join; and the volumes available to Hrotsvit in the Gandersheim library. The last Carolingian empress Richgard is a notable example of a divorcee who retreated to an abbey after the termination of her marriage: Richgard began ‘her “career” as a charismatic virgin saint’ by quitting her marriage to Charles the Fat and withdrawing to the abbey of Andlau that she herself had recently established. Racha Kirakosian, ‘The last empress: Saint Richgard and the end of the Carolingian dynasty’, Women’s history review, 30.3 (2021): 375–400 (383). Richgard soon attained the ‘reputation as a powerful virgin saint’

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who, according to legend, proved her chastity by withstanding trial by fire in a waxed shirt. In a comment that might possibly apply to other, similarly situated women of the era, Kirakosian proposes that Richgard’s entry into the religious community served ‘to buttress her willpower, wisdom, and agency. Still agency ironically occurs in the form of absence of activity, more precisely: absence of sexual activity’ (Kirakosian, ‘The last empress’, 387). 5 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Queer texts, bad habits, and the issue of a future’, GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, 16.2–3 (2011): 243–63 (250). See Ulrike Wiethaus, ‘Body and empire in the works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’, Journal of medieval and early modern studies, 34.1 (Winter, 2004): 41–63 (48): ‘Hrotsvit explored a remarkable range of sexual transgression in her writings’; Classen, ‘Sex on the stage’, 192: Hrotsvit shows familiarity ‘with an amazingly wide variety of sexual practices, perversions, customs, activities’; Lisa M. C. Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, in Brown and Wailes, A companion to Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960), pp. 267–85 (p. 268): Hrotsvit addresses a broad range of sexual themes. 6 Florence Newman, ‘Violence and virginity in Hrotsvit’s dramas’, in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: contexts, identities, affinities and performances, ed. Phyllis R. Brown, Linda A. McMillin, and Katharina Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 59–76 (p. 59). 7 Newman, ‘Violence and virginity in Hrotsvit’s dramas’, p. 72. 8 Edwin H. Zeydel, ‘Were Hrotsvitha’s dramas performed during her lifetime?’, Speculum, 20.4 (October 1945): 443–56 (449). See also Stephen L. Wailes, ‘Hrotsvit’s Plays’, in Brown and Wailes, A companion to Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960), pp. 121–45 (p. 122): Wailes is careful to assert that, notwithstanding ‘whatever mime and role-playing may have taken place in popular contexts such as fairs and marketplaces’, there is no evidence of ‘any kind of declamatory impersonation’ in northern Europe during Hrotsvit’s lifetime. 9 Janet Snyder, ‘“Bring me a soldier’s garb and a good horse”: embedded stage directions in the dramas of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’, in Brown, McMillin, and Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, pp. 235–50 (p. 236). 10 David Wiles, ‘Hrosvitha of Gandersheim: the performance of her plays in the tenth century’, Theatre history studies, 19 (1999): 133–50 (137). But see E. K. Chambers, The mediaeval stage, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), p. 207: Hrotvitha’s oeuvre ‘appears to have been an isolated experiment and the merest literary exercise. Her plays

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abound in delicate situations, and are not likely to have been intended even for cloister representation’. 11 Michael A. Zampelli, ‘The necessity of Hrotsvit: evangelizing theatre’, in Brown and Wailes, A companion to Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960), pp. 147–99 (p. 154). 12 Katharina M. Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: the ethics of authorial stance (Leiden: Brill, 1988), p. 148. 13 Zampelli, ‘The necessity of Hrotsvit’, p. 154. 14 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 244. 15 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 245. 16 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: Norton, 1989), p. 38. See also Kaja Silverman, Flesh of my flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 33  ff., discussing the evolution of Freud’s conception of the death instinct. For a consideration of the derivation of the theory of the death instinct as an attempt to account for the phenomenon of the repetition compulsion, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 286 ff. 17 See Ricoeur, Freud and philosophy, p. 292; Kaja Silverman, Male subjectivity at the margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 188. 18 Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle, pp. 40–1. 19 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 244. 20 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 250. 21 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 247. 22 Ricoeur, Freud and philosophy, p. 292. The duality of life and death instincts, according to Ricoeur, cuts across all manifestation of libido: ‘Object-love is both life instinct and death instinct; narcissistic love is Eros unaware of itself and clandestine cultivation of death. Sexuality is at work wherever death is at work’ (Ricoeur, Freud and philosophy, p. 293). 23 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 249. 24 Sigmund Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1923–25), pp. 155–70 (p. 160). 25 Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, p. 161. 26 Silverman, Male subjectivity, p. 188. 27 Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, p. 162. 28 Silverman, Male subjectivity, p. 188. Freud does attempt to ‘loosen’ the category of ‘moral masochism’ from sexuality. It is distinct from

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the other two categories in that here, ‘[t]he suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or by someone who is indifferent is of no importance. It may even be caused by impersonal powers or by circumstances; the true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow’. Freud, however, does not go so far as ‘to leave the libido out of account’ (Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, p. 165). 29 Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, p. 163. 30 Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, p. 164. 31 Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, p. 164. 32 Gilles Deleuze and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, an interpretation of coldness and cruelty: together with the entire text of Venus in furs (New York: Braziller, 1971), p. 114. 33 Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, an interpretation of coldness and cruelty, p. 115. 34 Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, an interpretation of coldness and cruelty, p. 113. 35 Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, an interpretation of coldness and cruelty, p. 111. 36 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the rectum a grave?’, October, 43 (Winter, 1987): 197–222 (217). 37 Bersani, ‘Is the rectum a grave?’, 217. 38 Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful bottom, beautiful shame: where ‘black’ meets ‘queer’(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 15. 39 Bersani, ‘Is the rectum a grave?’, 218 n. 25. 40 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 254. 41 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 250. 42 Robert Mills, ‘A man is being beaten’, in New medieval literatures 5, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 115–54 (p. 117). 43 Mills, ‘A man is being beaten’, p. 121. 44 Mills, ‘A man is being beaten’, p. 117. 45 Mills, ‘A man is being beaten’, pp. 143–4. 46 Classen, ‘Sex on the stage’, 193. 47 See Rudolph, ‘Ego Clamor Validus Gandeshemensis’, 75. The ‘most notorious’ proponent of the repression theory was Rosamund Gilder, cited by Rudolph, who claimed that ‘Hrosvitha obtained a certain release for her own emotional suppressions by elaborating these pictures of carnal dangers and the pitfalls of the flesh’ (cited in Rudolph, ‘Ego Clamor Validus Gandeshemensis’, 75).

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48 Stephen L. Wailes, ‘Beyond virginity: flesh and spirit in the plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’, Speculum, 76.1 (January 2001): 1–27 (12). 49 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 247. 50 The Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, trans. Larissa Bonfante and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren (Mundelein: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2009), p. 42. 51 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 44. 52 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 46. 53 Butler argues that Dulcitius further portrays the ‘destabilization of binary gender expectations’ (Butler, ‘Queering the classics’, p. 75). 54 Plays of Hrotswitha, pp. 114–15. 55 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 115. 56 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 115. 57 Butler, ‘Queering the classics’, p. 124. 58 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 79. 59 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 82. 60 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 84. 61 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 97. 62 See Classen, ‘Sex on the stage’, 188: Hrotsvit emphasises the purely monetary motivation of prostitution. 63 ‘Corruptum vitiis cognoscebant Sodomitis’, Die Werke der Hrotsvitha, p. 72, l. 206. 64 Gregory S. Hutcheson, ‘The sodomitic moor: queerness in the narrative of Reconquista’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 99–122 (p. 102). See also Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe: doing unto others, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 182, for the association of Muslims with sodomy in Christian Europe. 65 Robert Mills, ‘“Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: masculinity, masochism, and queer play in representations of male martyrdom’, Exemplaria, 13.1 (2001): 1–37 (25). 66 See Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 7: ‘hagiographic texts do not usually portray men’s bodies as inherently desirable’. See also Mark D. Jordan, The invention of sodomy in Christian theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 21; Jordan maintains that Hrotsvit’s approach to the physicality of Pelagius is different to that of the texts and legends which would have informed Hrotsvit’s composition: it is Hrotsvit’s ‘voice that describes throughout the ­beauties of Pelagius’s body’.

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67 Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 118. 68 ‘Ardebat formam regalis stirpis amandam’, Die Werke der Hrotsvitha, p. 72, l. 233. 69 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 120. 70 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 120. 71 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 120. 72 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 121. 73 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 9. 74 Silverman, Male subjectivity, p. 42. 75 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 9. 76 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 9. 77 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 11. 78 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 9. 79 John Boswell, Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 199. 80 Boswell, Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality, p. 200. Mills, on the other hand, takes the position that same-sex desire is in any event something that Hrotsvit would have seen as repulsive and alien to the Christian world (Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 25 n. 66). 81 An absolute binarism between homo- and heterosexuality ‘would have been incomprehensible to a medieval audience’ (Hutcheson, ‘The sodomitic moor’, p. 101). See also Wiethaus, ‘Body and empire’, 50–1: Pelagius associates sodomy specifically with ‘ethnic others’ but homosexual activity was well known among religious communities to be ‘widespread among Christians’. 82 Hutcheson, ‘The sodomitic moor’, p. 101. 83 Die Werke der Hrotsvitha, p. 72, l. 240. 84 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 248. 85 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 50. 86 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 51. 87 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 54. 88 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 121. 89 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 139. 90 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 143. 91 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 145. 92 See Mills, ‘A man is being beaten’, p. 117. 93 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 146.

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94 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 94. 95 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 95. 96 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 100. 97 Kaja Silverman, ‘Masochism and subjectivity’, Framework: the journal of cinema and media, 12 (1980): 2–9 (3). 98 Silverman, ‘Masochism and subjectivity’, 3. See also Christopher Vaccaro’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 11), in which Vaccaro discusses the potential sexual excitement of a perceived – or real – power differential: ‘The erotic heat comes from being subjected to the power and will of another, from being at another’s mercy’ (p. 00). 99 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 118. 100 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 120. 101 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 121. 102 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 123. 103 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 11. 104 See Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 16: the removal of the head ‘signaled abdication from worldly power – in other words, castration’. 105 Mills, ‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’, 37. 106 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 256. 107 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 248. Arguably, Hrotsvit did not presume to ‘judge’ any of these various manifestations of sexuality. As Abraham tells Maria, ‘Humanum est peccare, diabolicum est in peccatis durare’, ‘To sin is human, to persist in sinning is diabolical’ (Die Werke Der Hrotsvitha, p. 231). 108 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 115. 109 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 122. 110 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 128. 111 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 136. 112 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 143. 113 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 144. 114 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 248. 115 Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 279. Weston considers Pelagius as a ‘gender-bending metaphorical sponsa/us Christi’ (p. 277). 116 Peter Brown, The body and society: men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, twentieth anniversary edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 432. 117 Brown, The body and society, p. 434. 118 Brown, The body and society, p. 433. 119 Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe, pp. 69–70.

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120 Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe, p. 70. 121 Rev. 14:4. See also Dyan Elliott, ‘Gender and the Christian tradition’, in The Oxford handbook of women and gender in medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 21–35 (p. 25): a woman’s reward in heaven depended upon her sexual behaviour in life. 122 Elliott, ‘Gender and the Christian tradition’, p. 24. 123 Elliott, ‘Gender and the Christian tradition’, p. 24. See also Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe, p. 44 (‘[t]he sense of purity and bodily integrity connected with female virginity would be found, throughout the Middle Ages, in images of the Virgin Mary’). 124 Elliott, ‘Gender and the Christian tradition’, p. 22. 125 There were doubtless notable exceptions to the male monopoly of power in the Carolingian era, the empress Richgard being one example of a highly educated, politically active woman. See Kirakosian, ‘The last empress’, 376–81. 126 Karras, Sexuality in medieval Europe, p. 42. See also Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 270: ‘Virginity accordingly entails rejection of female sexuality as traditionally deployed for dynastic ends and as the object of male desire’. 127 Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 270. 128 See Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 268. 129 Newman, ‘Violence and virginity’, p. 64. 130 Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle, p. 47. An examination of the extent to which Freudian metapsychology maps onto medieval Christian conceptions of life and death is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is interesting to postulate how Freud’s superposition of death onto – or into – life might find a parallel in Hrotsvit’s theology of eternity. Freud, simply stated, argues that life and death are simultaneous processes. In his schema, ‘the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery’ function, surprisingly, not to sustain life, but rather ‘to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself’ (Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle, p. 47). The sexual instincts, by contrast, serve to prolong life to allow for reproduction – for survival beyond the individual organism – and thereby to ‘lend it the appearance of immortality’ (Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle, p. 52). Hrotsvit similarly could be said to blur the boundaries between life and death by incorporating present and compelling visions of immortality into the vitae of her beleaguered heroines. At the conclusion of

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Dulcitius, Irena, spirited away to the top of a mountain, is poised to ‘enter the heavenly bridal chamber of the Eternal King,/ To whom are honor and glory everlasting’ (Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 54). Pafnutius’s disciple Paul relates an elaborate vision in which he sees Thais, even as she is still literally imprisoned in life, reclining resplendent on a heavenly couch, attended by virgin maidens (Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 141). By introducing the everlasting into the realm of the mortal, Hrotsvit fractures ‘temporal conventions, creating via dramatic license God’s “eternal now”’ (Zampelli, ‘The necessity of Hrotsvit’, p. 170). 131 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 51. 132 Silverman, Male subjectivity, p. 211. 133 Lee Edelman, No future: queer theory and the death drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 9. 134 Edelman, No future, p. 4. 135 Edelman, No future, p. 4. 136 Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 272. 137 Petroff, Medieval women’s visionary literature, p. 114. See also n. 1 above citing the preface to Hrotsvit’s dramas. See also Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 279: Hrotsvit’s works are based on a ‘schema of identification leading to imitation, to performative replication, and ultimately to virginal reproduction’. 138 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 134. Kathryn Stockton would interpret this as the seductive power of abjection (Stockton, Beautiful bottom, pp. 12–13). With regard specifically to the olfactory aspect of abjection, medieval theologians associated foul odours with human depravity and with the community of demons; see Mary Thurkill, Sacred scents in early Christianity and Islam(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), p. 91. See also Katelynn Robinson, ‘The anchoress and the heart’s nose: the importance of smell to medieval women religious’, Magistra, 19.2 (2013): 44–64 (45): pleasant smells denoted the divine and the holy, whereas bad odours signified sin and the Devil. Derived from the ancient conception of the body as a sack of excrement, foul smell became for Christians a topos for moral condition and ­‘provided  … a powerful instrument of moral suasion’ (Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting salvation: ancient Christianity and the olfactory imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 210). The stench of lechery was associated in particular with the sin of female prostitution; see Robinson, ‘The anchoress and the heart’s nose’, 52. In the case of Hrotsvit’s portrayal of Thais, Karras points up a specific correspondence between excrement and the ‘financial aspect’ of the commerce of prostitution; see Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Holy

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harlots: prostitute saints in medieval legend,’ Journal of the history of sexuality, 1.1 (July 1990): 3–32 (12). 139 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 132. 140 Thomas S. Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel (eds), S and M: studies in sadomasochism (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1983), p. 19. 141 Plays of Hrotswitha, pp. 133–4. 142 Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 134. 143 Like his counterpart Pafnutius, Abraham does not shun the pleasures of life if they are suffered for a godly purpose: ‘Didn’t I, on your account,/ Desert the comfort of my hermit’s dwelling/ Leaving aside completely/ Every observance of orderly rules,/ With the result that you see me here, an old hermit,/ Become a pleasure-seeking partygoer’ (Plays of Hrotswitha, p. 98). See also Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 273: Abraham’s ‘excessive zeal’ for his niece’s virginity raises ‘the specter of explicit incest’. 144 See Weston, ‘Virginity and other sexualities’, p. 279, discussing Hrotsvit’s ‘feminine praise’ of the saint’s body. 145 Silverman, Male subjectivity, p. 185. 146 Silverman, Male subjectivity, p. 187. Hrotsvit’s play Callimachus, which I do not discuss in this chapter, presents an example of necrophilia: Callimachus wishes to have his way with the corpse of Drusiana, the chaste wife of the ruler of the land. She chose death rather than become the object of Callimachus’s ongoing obsession with her. 147 De Lauretis, ‘Queer texts’, 245. 148 Michel Foucault, The order of things: an archeology of the human sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. xix. 149 Kelvin T. Knight, ‘Placeless places: resolving the paradox of Foucault’s heterotopia’, Textual practice, 31.1 (2017): 141–58 (141). 150 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 16.1 (1986): 22–7 (24). 151 Foucault and Miskowiec, ‘Of other spaces’, 25. 152 Foucault and Miskowiec, ‘Of other spaces’, 25. 153 Whether and how Hrotsvit’s dramas and legends were ‘performed’ within the Gandersheim community remains a matter of debate. See, e.g., Butler, ‘Queering the classics’, p. 134. 154 Kaja Silverman, ‘Masochism and male subjectivity’, Camera obscura, 17 (1988): 31–66 (44).

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Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Abelard, Peter 133 Historia calamitatum 236 Aers, David 60, 66, 222, 232 agency 7, 11–15, 19–21, 44–6, 214, 224–6, 240, 277, 328 Albertus Magnus 221 algolagnia 13, 160 anatomy 212, 214, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 362 Anglo-Saxon 158, 314, 330, 333 appropriation of term 343 see also early medieval English Antichrist 226 antiquity 144, 214, 220, 265 anus 218 Aristotle 228n. 9 mounted 69 Arthur, King 210 Arthurian 211 Avicenna 218, 231 Baghdad 268, 272, 279, 280–7 Bataille, Georges 270, 288n. 15, 331, 338, 345 BDSM 37, 76, 86, 156, 293 bondage 7, 9, 10, 12, 21, 63n. 17, 74, 260n. 11, 293–4, 310

bottom 48, 50, 53, 62, 74, 84, 85, 87–90, 240, 244, 250–1, 260–1, 265, 328, 330 dominants 6–9, 268 humiliation 2–3, 12, 13, 19, 23–4, 47–8, 48, 53, 69, 76, 88, 112, 129, 131–2, 136–9, 143, 149–50, 179–205, 237, 268, 270, 273–5, 281, 327, 331, 333–4, 337, 340, 354, 356, 359, 368 role–play 6, 8, 10–13, 17 punishment 3–5, 15–16, 20, 30, 46, 52–3, 70–71, 74–85, 125, 151, 161, 176, 179–81, 188, 191, 233, 244, 258, 262, 271, 310, 311, 314, 320, 323, 327–8, 339, 355, 358, 366–9 safe word 10, 252 submission 1, 4, 7–12, 17–22, 27, 37, 55, 57, 60–1, 76–80, 86–8, 129, 131, 136–8, 144, 153, 156–60, 164–5, 170–3, 178, 202, 223–4, 237–8, 241–6, 257, 273–7, 281, 286, 293, 296, 313–14, 325–6, 329, 335–43, 364

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Index 383

submissive 9, 11–12, 15–16, 19, 47, 51–3, 61–6, 79, 82, 88, 90–1, 97, 138, 149, 159–62, 169–73, 256, 276, 307 top 48, 50, 85, 87–90, 170, 240–7, 250–2, 261, 328–36 whipping 11, 15–16, 20, 43, 48, 51, 90, 110, 160, 247, 314 Beguines 163 Beowulf 325–46 Bersani, Leo 6–7, 261, 327, 342n. 12, 353–4, 375n. 36 Bertilak, Lady 213–14 Birgitta of Sweden 39, 63n. 12, 65n. 36 Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy 253–4 Butler, Judith 57, 260n. 13 Caliph 280–1, 285, 347, 358–61, 369 Caliphate 268, 281 Catherine of Genoa 223 Chaucer, Geoffrey 222, 237–9, 242–57, 294, 299–300, 303, 304–6, 316–17, 322n. 21 Canterbury tales 222, 237, 242, 246–7, 252–4, 259–63 Clerk’s tale 22, 66n. 42, 235–66 Man of Law’s tale 247 Pardoner’s tale 242, 246, 262n. 22 Prioress’s tale 244 Second Nun’s tale 244, 247 Troilus and Criseyde 16, 22, 31n. 90, 250–3, 292–324 childlessness 211, 361 see also infertility Chretien de Troyes 17, 32n. 95

Christ 20, 37–8, 40–51, 54–7, 60, 63, 111, 116, 143–7, 155, 158, 172, 235, 245, 247, 263, 271–2, 297, 311, 360–1, 364, 371 crucifixion of 41–4, 79, 152n. 23, 235 fetishization of wounds of 42, 45, 48–9, 60 imitatio Christi 46, 60, 116 the Passion of 40, 42, 44, 48, 49, 56–7, 60, 90n. 36, 158 climax 102–3, 118, 210–12, 223, 227 see also orgasm clitoris 213, 216–26, 232 Cohen, Jeffrey J. 17, 32, 224, 233n. 74 Colum Cille 21, 77–82, 86, 89–91 conception 86, 98, 212, 214 consent 7–9, 20, 22, 26, 29, 37–8, 51, 53–6, 65, 97, 110, 216, 235–41, 244–7, 250, 253, 255, 258, 260, 264, 284, 320, 366 consolation 168, 210, 237–8, 253–5 coprophilia 368 costume 65 Cowan, Lyn 75, 88, 338, 345n. 52 Cú Chulainn 20, 72–82, 86–91 Dæghrefn 332, 334, 336–9, 341, 344n. 38 de Lauretis, Teresa 347–51, 354–6, 360–2, 367, 373–81 Deleuze, Gilles 5–6, 26, 108–9, 127n. 38, 225, 233n. 78, 271–5, 283–6, 289n. 20, 290, 331, 353 de Sade, Marquis Donatien Alphonse François 4, 268–71, 287n. 11, 290n. 38, 293

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Desmond, Marilynn 31n. 87, 69, 86n. 5, 234n. 82, 320n. 11 domination 8, 10, 21, 37, 156, 240, 246, 257n. 1, 305, 307, 326–8, 331–4, 337 domme 270 early medieval English 325, 331, 339, 344 Eastwood, Alexander 38, 62n. 4 ecclesiastical authority 39, 55, 79, 299 Edelman, Lee 263, 366, 380n. 133 Elliott, Dyan 163, 177n. 25, 225, 233n. 81, 379n. 121 endometriosis 209 eros 151n. 19, 326, 331, 339, 348–53, 356–8, 365–7, 370–1, 374, 377 failure 20–2, 75, 102, 113, 115–18, 129, 131–2, 139–45, 298 ecstasy and 331 fantasy 8–10, 14, 31–3, 37–8, 42–3, 46, 63–5, 76, 188, 235–8, 244, 250, 257–61, 274, 295–7, 313–15, 326, 330, 341 femininity 82, 124, 210, 359 Feminist theory 7–8, 64n. 22, 84, 213, 251 foreplay 158, 218 Foucault, Michel 2, 6, 24n. 6, 60, 130–1, 136–43, 147–62, 174n. 1, 256–8, 320, 370–1 Freud, Sigmund 4–8, 17, 23–7, 97, 212, 228n. 9, 326–7, 335, 351–4, 362, 366–9, 375, 379 Beyond the pleasure principle (1920) 8, 326, 342, 351, 374 The economic problem of masochism (1924) 375

frigidity 209, 210, 213, 220, 227n. 2 futurity 37, 49, 58–9, 61, 263, 366 Galen 215–17, 221, 298, 321 genitalia 127, 214, 219–21, 226 Gilbert the Englishman 221 Green, Monica 214, 231n. 38 Guinevere 32, 210–11, 224, 227 Guy of Chauliac 219, 231 Gwerful Mechain 221 hagiography 16, 20, 66n. 45, 77–80, 96–7, 102, 105, 116, 124n. 7, 125n. 15, 158 heterosexuality 22, 238–42, 249, 358 heterotopia 366, 370–1 Hildegard von Bingen 226 historophilia 295–323 holy crying 38, 41–3, 51–60 homoamory 325, 339 homoeroticism 79, 88n. 21, 89n. 32, 329, 339 homosexuality 2, 24n. 7, 176, 261n. 15 Honoré de Balzac 221 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim 347–71 Abraham 347–8, 356–7, 361, 369, 381n. 143 Dulcitius 348, 356, 358–60, 366–8, Pafnutius 348, 356–69, 380n. 130 Pelagius 348–9, 356–69, 376n. 66, 377n. 81 humoural medical theory 215, 298 hymen 127, 224 infertility 210 intercourse 49, 70, 210–15, 225–8, 308



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Isault 210–11 Islamic Golden Age 272, 280–1, 285 Jeffrey, Steven 215 Joan Bellinger 215–16 John of Gaddesden 219 jouissance 6, 12, 14, 22, 29n. 70, 103–5, 162, 209, 274, 277, 290, 327, 335, 353–4, 360, 367 Julian of Norwich 158, 226, 234n. 86 Karras, Ruth 14, 62n. 7, 225, 364, 380n. 138 Kempe, Margery 20, 37–9, 61–2, 158, 213, 222–3 kink 2, 8, 10, 24, 27n. 43, 37, 39, 43–58, 63, 65n. 41, 105, 122, 241, 293–7, 340 knowledge 129–50 Koedt, Anne 213, 228n. 11 kyriarchy 124n. 13 labia 217–18, 220 Lancelot 17, 210, 224 Laqueur, Thomas 212, 228n. 9 Largier, Niklaus 15, 20, 79, 90n. 36 law 22, 91n. 45, 111, 122, 145, 155, 225, 273–4, 277, 335 Lees, Clare A. 330, 344n. 28 lesbian 9, 66n. 52, 218–19, 265 Lessing, Doris 212, 228n. 10 Lochrie, Karma 174, 221–4, 230 Lollards 39, 60 Longinus 226 love courtly 16–17, 31n. 90, 83, 158, 169, 296–9, 307, 323n. 45 lust 5, 49–50, 215, 246, 270, 274, 347–9, 363 lycanthropy 77, 89n. 27

marriage 14, 22, 30n. 77, 40–1, 55–7, 62n. 9, 105, 168, 223–7, 237–49 martyrdom 14–16, 23, 44, 47, 72, 79, 89n. 35, 93–123, 158, 244, 247, 265, 275–6, 311, 347–8, 352–71 masculinity 17, 30–1, 79, 158, 242–3, 333, 344n. 37, 359 female 226 masochism ideological 267–86 malleus maleficarum 215, 221, 230n. 26 mamluks 280–1, 284, 290n. 51 Mandeville, John 226 marriage 14, 21–2, 40–1, 55–7, 87n. 10, 103, 168, 193, 222–7, 237–57 masculinity 17, 30n. 85, 31n. 91, 79, 158, 226, 242–3, 333 female 344n. 37 masturbation 108, 189, 219–20 Middle English terms assay 238, 241, 245, 250, 257, 307–8 assente 237, 238 entente 237, 256 grucce 246, 248 likerous, likerousness 246 merveil, merveillous 104, 241, 245, 250 sadness 241, 245, 246 midwife 219 Mills, Robert 15, 30, 72, 79, 87n. 8, 125n. 15, 158, 354 monasticism 132, 134–6, 149 de Mondeville, Henri 218 Mongol horde 267–88 Moschion 217 Moscow 268, 277–9, 283, 286, 290n. 40

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motherhood 49–50, 59, 64n. 32, 365 Muñoz, José Esteban 58–9, 61n. 1 mysticism 14–15, 20, 38, 40–1, 44, 46, 57–66, 92, 122, 152n. 23, 157, 162–3, 169, 175 nakedness 96, 111, 113, 115–16, 243, 339 normativity 8, 19, 167, 238, 240–1, 244, 251 orgasm 4, 22, 43, 48–9, 103, 118, 157, 209–14, 219, 227n. 5 one–sex model 212 oral sex see sex Orderic Vitalis 225, 233n. 79 Orthodox Church 40, 50, 58, 72, 273, 278 ovaries 217 Overing, Gillian 325, 341n. 1 paganism 83, 118, 130, 273, 276, 359, 368 Park, Katherine 259 parresia 159 pastoral power 136–7, 142, 149, 159, 176n. 10 patriarchy 10, 53, 55, 124n. 13, 238, 240, 257, 365 pederasty 359, 370 penance 45–6, 64, 79, 90, 137, 179–203, 219, 223, 360–3 penetration 42, 45, 209, 223, 337 penis 49–50, 69, 71, 83, 212 penitent 181, 186–203 penitentials 179–203, 219 perversion 4, 176n. 17, 238, 353, 358, 369, 370, Peter of Albano 219 phenomenology 165

pilgrimage 51, 61, 201, 220, 226, 254, 350 pleasure 3–20 masochistic 3, 5, 14–15, 40, 135, 142, 216, 224, 327, 330, 361, 369 monastic 129–50 sadistic 268, 275, 284, 326 sadomasochistic 19, 77, 83, 156–8, 294, 299–310, 315–16, 328, 331 Pompeii 82, 220, 232n. 52 power eroticization of 9, 11, 19–20, 29, 329 exchange 27, 37, 54, 63, 161, 237, 240–1, 257n. 1, 297, 313 Pugh, Tison 16–17, 32n. 93, 175n. 2, 266n. 38 punishment, queer 79, 174n. 2 consolation 235–6 futurity 58, 61n. 1 performativity 37, 57 space 349–51, 356–70 teleologies 2 theory, 6, 84, 213, 260n. 15 utopias 58 see also BDSM purgatory 51–3, 60, 223, 233n. 70 race 3, 7, 27n. 43, 29n. 70, 32n. 101, 33, 163, 287n. 5, 314 racism 7 rape 7, 31, 49–50, 65, 70–1, 93, 96, 105–6, 110–13, 121, 126–7, 163, 211, 214–16, 224, 230n. 29, 264 Reik, Theodor 5, 14, 26n. 24, 107, 127n. 35



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Renaissance 221 Richard of St. Victor 65n. 35, 156–74 On the four degrees of violent love 164, 177n. 36 Rykener, John 220, 231n. 47 Sacher–Masoch, Baron Leopold 4, 19, 109 Venus in Furs 241, 332 sacrifice 143, 223, 331, 359 ritualistic 339 sadism ideological 22, 267, 258–86 safe word see BDSM Salih, Sarah 14, 30n. 77, 223, 227 saracen 358–9 Saunders, Corinne 224, 230n. 29 scholasticism 132, 144, 157 scrotum 1 sex non–vaginal 220 oral 106, 219, 259 penis-in-vagina 157, 168, 209 vaginal 212–13, 223–5, 228n. 6 Sheela-na-gig 220 Silverman, Kaja 5, 25n. 23, 352, 361, 369 Simon, William 223 Sir Gawain 213–14, 229n. 14 Soranus of Ephesus 215–17, 230n. 23 submission see BDSM submissive see BDSM suffering 16–19, 22, 30n. 82, 45–51, 54, 61, 79, 102, 107, 119–20, 158, 191, 200–2, 209, 237–8, 255–60, 293, 331–4, 369–71 testicles 217 Thanatos 326, 348, 351–2, 356, 365, 367, 370

The book of Tobit 226 The Wife of Bath’s tale 30–1, 86n. 5, 211–13, 219–25, 246 theory of the female seed emission 210 top see BDSM trauma 13, 49, 56, 163 Trinity 38, 42, 51, 164 Tristram 210 trotula 218, 226, 231n. 38, 234n. 83 truth-games 21, 159, 162 urethra 217–18 uterine suffocation 219 uterus 212, 214, 217 vagina 212–13, 22 dentata 226 van de Velde, Theodoor 221 Vesalius 221 Victorines 164 violence 12–13, 18–21, 60–1, 102–3, 109–18, 179–82, 197–204, 241, 244 eroticised 69–71, 82–6, 300 sexual assault and 106, 296–7, 320n. 12, 355 virginity 104–5, 122, 175n. 3, 192, 347–9, 355, 361–2, 365–81 visions 14, 39–45, 49, 52, 55–57, 64n. 22, 163, 379 vulva 218, 220, 226 vulva on pilgrimage 220 Warner, Lawrence 214, 229 warrior culture 339 whipping see BDSM white martyrdom 79 white supremacy 24

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Wife of Bath see The Wife of Bath’s tale William de Conches 65, 215, 230n. 22 witchcraft 215 womb 11

wounds 42, 46–8, 56, 60, 74–5, 88n. 20, 115, 119–21, 169–73, 181–4, 197–8, 202 Žižek, Slavoj 16, 224, 233n. 75, 273, 277, 296–7