![]() At the center of this miniature is the priest who interrogates the soul of Guy de Thurno. To the right is a group of five men and Guy’s widowed wife. To the far left (perhaps a double entendre referring to the Latin word sinister) of the composition is the marital bed, now purified by two holy books. The organization of the composition speaks where images and words are silent. It should be noted that, while that term could refer to a specific act, the medieval conception of sodomy also often included any act or position that did not have the possibility of procreation. Although this act is never visualized or represented within the manuscript, Robert Sturges has argued that the sin is sodomy. But almost every iteration of human sexual interaction imaginable existed beyond these images and stratified hierarchies, and not all intimate acts were for the purpose of procreation.Ī beautifully illuminated manuscript in the Getty’s collection, The Vision of the Soul of Guy de Thurno depicts a scene in which Guy’s ghost returns to his wife to urge her to repent for a sin they had committed. The Tables of Consanguinity and Affinity shown below, for example, display the degrees of separation between a person and his or her blood relatives (to prevent incest) and relationships to one’s spousal family members (to determine inheritance), respectively. ![]() Another way to visualize male-female relationships in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is through matrimonial diagrams in legal manuscripts. Yet it would be difficult to debate the fact that women today enjoy many more freedoms than they did in the Middle Ages. ![]() Despite such divided representations, women fulfilled numerous important roles in society and in popular imagination at the time-themes that will be explored in the upcoming Getty Museum exhibition Illuminating Women in the Medieval World (June 20–September 17, 2017). Interestingly, the angels closest to God the Father have often been considered to be genderless. This hierarchy would suggest that proximity to the divine coincides to some degree with gender. In another Book of Hours, the artist Guillebert de Mets depicted a stratified cosmos, with God atop a series of heavenly spheres, which are occupied by angels, prophets, apostles, male martyr saints, male cleric-saints, female saints, and finally the men and women of society. Rather than attempting to redefine or label these works, we hope that by approaching the material with a new critical vocabulary we may uncover a narrative that was rarely depicted, difficult to see, and often too easily ignored. Before examining the fluidity of ideas like gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is important to acknowledge that many of the terms we use today (and continue to develop and refine) such as hetero-, homo-, bi-, and a-sexual, did not exist at the time. This approach is not exclusively about gay, lesbian, transgender, or straight individuals but about the potential for multifaceted, iterative, and complex identity dynamics. Each image discussed in this post could be described as providing a queer lens with which to view the past-“queering,” if you will. In scholarship, the term “queer” is often used to describe any expression of sexuality or gender that disrupts or disturbs traditional binaries. Such binaries begin to break down under greater scrutiny. Even categories like male/female, gay/straight, or Christian/non-Christian risk essentializing, oversimplifying, or anachronism. It is sometimes tempting to generalize about what constituted “normal” male and female behaviors, expectations, identities, and relationships in the past, but the norm in one place and time was not necessarily the norm in another. Human sexuality and gender identity are complex topics, and our understanding of each is continually expanding and deepening.
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