Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages.

Print version record.

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Jerome in a Dress; 1. Translating Sodom; First Things First: Moralizing the Fall; Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Bibles moralisées and Translation; Sodomitry, Rats, and Hemorrhoids; For Your Eyes Only: Reception, Audience, Impact; 2. Transgender Time; How to Do the History of Transgender; "A Strange and Perverse Adultery": Sequence and Imitation in Hildegard's Scivias; Ovid in Other Words: Iphis and Ianthe, and Their Transformations; How to Do Queer with Things; Imag(in)ing Transgender: Illustrated Ovide moralisé Manuscripts.

Presenting Transgender: Christine de Pizan's Le livre de la mutacion de FortuneLesbian Futures: Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy; 3. The First Sodomite; Sidestepping Orphic Pederasty in the Middle Ages; Unnatural Unions and "Masculine" Love in the Ovide moralisé; Other Medieval Responses to Orpheus: Gender Inversion and "Un-love"; Orpheus, "First Sodomite," in Art; Orpheus with Lot's Wife: Retro-visionand Gender; Looking/Feeling Backward; 4. The Sex Lives of Monks; Vézelay, Mary Magdalene, and Translatio; Eugenia, Temptation, and Transformation; Ganymede in Hell; Benedictine Regulations of Sex.

Ganymede Revisited: Ambivalence, Translatio, Divine LoveThe Sex Crimes of Priests; 5. Orientations; Holding it Straight: Virginity as a Sexual Orientation; "Sodom Thy Sister": Friendship, Sodomy, and the Anchorhold; Phenomenology of the Anus; The Sodomites of San Gimignano; Conclusions; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled "sodomitical" or evoked the use of ambiguous phrases such as the "unmentionable vice" or the "sin against nature." How, though, did these categories enter the field of vision? How do you know a sodomite when you see one? In Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills explores the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture, on the one hand, and those categories we today call gender and sexuality, on the other. Challenging the view that ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form in the Middle Ages, Mills demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period--and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took. Among the topics that Mills covers are depictions of the practices of sodomites in illuminated Bibles; motifs of gender transformation and sex change as envisioned by medieval artists and commentators on Ovid; sexual relations in religious houses and other enclosed spaces; and the applicability of modern categories such as "transgender," "butch" and "femme," or "sexual orientation" to medieval culture. Taking in a multitude of images, texts, and methodologies, this book will be of interest to all scholars, regardless of discipline, who engage with gender and sexuality in their work.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Copyright 2015 taken from title page

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