As pride month nears its end, I thought I’d look at a medieval source often remarked upon for its frank treatment of sexual themes: aristocratic poetry. We’ve had two weeks of stuffy ecclesiastical types, so to balance that out I thought it would be good to end on a more down to earth type of literature.

Week 1 was on the interrogation of John/Eleanor Rykener, which can be read here.

Week 2 was on the letters of St. Anselm, which can be read here.

Week 3 was on lesbians and Hildegard of Bingen, which can be read here

Week 4: ”You Don’t Go For Women” - Accusations of Homosexuality in Courtly Love

To conclude, I’ve got two medieval poems with comments on homosexual knights and the role of homosexuality in courtly love. The first is Lanval by Marie de France. It is one of the Arthurian romances and was written around 1200 AD. The other is L'autrier avint en cel autre païs, a dialogue written by Conon de Bethune, also written around that time. In both poems, a great knight is propositioned by an undesirable noblewoman, and when rejected both women take it rather badly and accuse the knight of being gay.

At the time, accusing someone of homosexual conduct would have been quite a serious issue. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 had decided that the penalty for sodomy should be excommunication, the harshest spiritual sanction available. In France, sodomy was punishable by hanging, though the lack of records of people being hung for sodomy suggests that it was not well enforced. Nevertheless, the official punishments for homosexual acts were severe and it was not a casual accusation to make.

In Lanval, we follow the titular character, a knight in Arthur’s court. One day when out of the woods he meets some fairy lady and they start seeing each other. Lanval wants to keep this a secret, so it appears to everyone else that Lanval’s sexual interest in women seems to have vanished. Guinevere, in her endless quest to be the least faithful queen in literary history, propositions Lanval. Lanval makes the reasonable point that having an affair with the king’s wife is maybe a bad idea, and that Guinevere really ought to be more faithful. Guinever responds:

“Lanval, says she, I am quite aware: you don't care for this sort of pleasure. People told me often enough that you don't go for women. You have well endowed young men/servants, and find your pleasure in them, base villain! Malformed freak! My lord is very ill advised to have suffered you near him, if you ask me, God will punish him.”

At this point, Lanval decides to come clean and tell Guinevere about his secret fairy girlfriend:

“Madam, says he, I don't go in for that, but I love, and am the beloved of, her who… [lots of mushy stuff about how hot the fairy is]

Throughout the poem, Guinevere is portrayed as being in the wrong and Lanval as being an innocent party, so it’s perhaps notable that Guinevere goes all in on accusing Lanval of homosexuality while Lanval himself does not regard the insult with quite the same invective. He seems remarkably unbothered, saying “I don’t go in for that” before he explains himself, while Guinevere reaches for insults as if throwing a tantrum. Guinevere is positioned as an entitled harlot (something of a trope in medieval literature), while Lanval is chivalric and respectful. He doesn’t challenge Guinevere’s interpretation of homosexuality as a sin - as I mentioned earlier, pretty much every authority at this point agreed that it was - but he does challenge her notion that it’s some massive deal. He doesn't even seem insulted by it.

Marie de France was an unusual author. We do not know exactly who she was, except that she lived in England by the end of the twelfth century and was well known among the noble courts of England. Her poems were a sensation in the court of King Henry II of England, and they reveal a lot about aristocratic attitudes to relationships at the time because the themes of her work evidently struck a chord with the nobility. She was very blunt in her treatment of courtly love, often pointing out that affairs and sneaking around usually brought short term fun at the expense of long term honour and happiness. Although her subject matter is fictional, the themes are not. She knew the courtly culture of medieval Europe. She knew what happened in the quiet corridors and private quarters of a castle, and knew that homosexuality was among such things. This poem tells us that if a knight spent very little time courting young women, but did spend a lot of time among attractive male servants, then the rumour mill would go to work.

L'autrier avint en cel autre païs is a dialogue between an old noblewoman who is “past her prime” and one of her knights, whom she propositions. The young knight is blunt in rejecting her, saying that she is no longer beautiful and that if she wanted to sleep around with her knights then she’s left it a bit late. The noblewoman responds with a series of insults toward the knight’s sexuality. Firstly, she suggests that the knight is incapable in bed and wouldn’t be able to please her anyway. Then she says:

Not at all, by God! But rather the fancy to kiss and embrace a pretty young man would take you!

The pair continue to trade insults, with the noblewoman continuing to insult the knight’s sexual ability and the knight comparing her to a city that’s already been sacked (Troy, specifically). After explaining why men are no longer interested in her, the knight decides to revisit the idea of homosexuality:

And therefore I commend you for providing an excuse. Let them be accused of heresy, those who henceforth would not love you

He finds it impressive that this old noblewoman can think of any manner of reasons to avoid sleeping with her that have nothing to do with her own lack of attractiveness. It’s also interesting to see the changing social attitude to homosexuality, framed here as the sexual equivalent of heresy. Like Lanval, the knight here regards homosexuality as a sin but not a serious one, and isn’t personally bothered by the accusation. Instead, he sees it as a convenient way of handling rejection. The author, Conon de Bethune, was a prominent nobleman of his time and participated in the Fourth Crusade as an envoy for the crusaders, singled out by accounts of that crusade for his eloquence and chivalry. Like Marie de France, he was steeped in the culture of aristocratic courts, and like Marie de France he portrays homosexuality between men as a normalised sin. I think it's also interesting that the knight finds this more acceptable than the accusation of impotence that the old woman makes first. It seems that for a knight sensitive about his sexual ability, impotence was a far worse accusation to make than one of being homosexual.

These poems, and others like them, say a lot about the sexual attitudes of the nobility c.1200. They tell us about the prevalence of affairs, and much of historians’ interest in the love life of medieval aristocracy has focussed on that. We know that most noble marriages at the time were not happy, and that both men and women in these relationships would have secret affairs. They certainly enjoyed literature about it, perhaps as a form of wish fulfilment. But these poems also tell us the aristocracy was well aware that some of their knights weren’t into women, preferring each other or male servants, and suggest an ambivalence toward it.

This contrasts with the increasingly pervasive attitude of the church. Last week I discussed how “contemptible” same-sex relationships between women were in the view of Hildegard of Bergen, and when both Marie de France and Conon de Bethune were writing the penalties for sodomy were increasingly severe. But when homosexual conduct comes up in romance literature, it is usually a condemned but quietly tolerated feature of court life. While no hero of any chivalric poem is homosexual, an accusation of homosexuality doesn’t make a character into a villain either. In Lanval, Guinevere knows that some knights slept with their male servants, and uses it to diminish Lanval’s honour and uses the legal threat of prosecution against him (fortunately, the fairy lady shows up to save the day). In L'autrier, the noblewoman uses homosexuality to ridecule the young knight who won’t sleep with her by questioning his masculinity. In both, homosexuality appears as an obvious explanation for why a virile young man would not have sex with a woman. This shows that medieval authors were not naive to what went on in the castles and palaces around them, and that homosexuality was widely known of in aristocratic circles and treated as something that was sinful yet normal. But In both cases, the women are mistaken. Lanval is already taken and the young knight in L'autrier just doesn’t find the old woman attractive. The women are also positioned as being wrong in both poems, and it is left up to the reader to decide whether their wrongness extends to their position on homosexuality. Away from the watchful eyes of the church, homosexuality seems to have been tolerated in some aristocratic courts, making them significantly more sexually liberal than the conservative values commonly associated with the Middle Ages would suggest.

Sources:

Kłosowska, Anna. Queer Love in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Mills, Robert. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 2015.