From the sources 12: Hilary the Englishman, a gay poet of the twelfth century

 

Happy LGBT History month everyone. Since its that time of the year, I thought I’d explore something I’ve barely ever touched on here – the history of medieval sexuality.

Why might the abduction of Ganymede by the lusty Zeus be the subject of a Romanesque column capital in the twelfth century monastery of Vezelay in Burgundy? More about that later ...

Scene from the Moralised Bible of Vienna, (Codex Vindobonensis 2554); Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, thirteenth century. The not so tolerant side of medieval attitudes towards homosexuality, which did get more severe in the Later Middle Ages.

The problem with studying LGBT history before about 1800 is basically twofold. The first is that the modern concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism are all very recent concepts for classifying people – the first three are all essentially Victorian, while the latter was first used in 1965. And for most of human history, people wouldn’t have identified themselves according to the type of person they felt a physical and psychological attraction to. In Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (I’m less confident talking about non-western societies here), sexuality was about what you did to others or to your own body, not what you felt deep down inside. That’s not to say that there weren’t people back then who, in our modern terms, would be called straight, gay, bi or trans. In the same way, people of different skin colours have existed for millennia, yet it was only in relatively recent times that people started thinking in terms of “white people” and “black people.”

The second problem follows from this. How can we identify anyone who lived before the nineteenth century as gay? Its not as easy as you might think in the premodern sources named historical people who we can definitely show were exclusively attracted to their own biological sex.

Take for example one of the most famous gay men of Medieval England – Edward II. Did he have long-term sexual relationships with his right-hand men, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger? The evidence generally suggests that he did. Was his marriage to Isabella of France a marriage of dynastic political necessity? Yes. But contrary to all the ingenious efforts of historical fiction writers to cast doubt on Edward III’s paternity (Mel Gibson making William Wallace a time-travelling paedophile has to be the most atrocious example), Edward II could get sufficiently aroused by his wife to father a son and heir. And while his wife Isabella was still a prepubescent girl, he fathered an illegitimate son, Adam Fitzroy, from an unnamed mistress in 1307. So, Edward II would be bisexual in our terms, right? That would probably make most sense.

 Similar things could be said about hundreds of other people from premodern history, from Alexander the Great to James VI of Scotland and I of England. That’s of course not to disregard the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, and that very few people are exclusively heterosexual or homosexual in their inclinations.

 And for some other noteworthy premodern gays, its all a matter of speculation. Take for example Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519). We know that he was arrested for sodomy with the goldsmith’s apprentice and gigolo Jacopo Saltarelli by the Florentine authorities in 1476. The charges were soon dropped, Leonardo never faced trial and no one made such accusations ever again. Was Leonardo homosexual? It’s a reasonable inference that he was. He certainly loved drawing and painting the (nude) male figure, he never married or had any known sexual relationships with women and he had a number of apprentices who weren’t very talented artists but were quite good-looking young men. At the same time, while it’s a reasonable inference to draw from the facts, even when put together they don’t exactly constitute proof either.

Thus for many figures in premodern history, especially from less well-documented periods (the late middle ages/ early modern period are much better in terms of sources than the early middle ages), we’re left with this dilemma. To say the historical figure in question was likely not gay can come across as mildly homophobic, or at the very least unable to read between the lines. This is brilliantly parodied in the popular meme format “historians … they were roommates.”

On the other hand, to say that these historical figures were gay without firm proof, bearing in mind of course that proof to the historian is somewhat different to proof for the lawyer or the scientist, can invite accusations of modern progressive wishful thinking.

Therefore, some historians would argue that it’s best not to focus on finding gay people in the medieval past. Instead, they would argue for focusing on how medieval people themselves thought about sexuality and what they saw as normal or deviant sexual behaviour, and how these things can be very different from our assumptions about human sexuality now. This is essentially the divide between LGBT and queer history explained, just how gender history differs from women’s history or the history of race differs from black history.

Still, I think we can find plenty of people who we can justifiably call gay in the Middle Ages. While there’s definitely too few sources to make medieval LGBT history anything more than a fairly small sub-field, what survives is actually quite rich and amounts to a lot more than political accusations of sexual transgression or records of homophobic persecution. For the pre-1200 period, the bit of the Middle Ages I’m mostly interested in, we have a surprising amount of Latin poetry written by clerics, monks and nuns that is undoubtedly homoerotic in tone. Whether monasteries were secret refuges for LGBT people or even gay subcultures hiding in plain sight, like the mollyhouses of eighteenth-century England, is debatable at best. And the very idea that LGBT people would have been more attracted to the religious vocation than straight people in the Middle Ages relies on all kinds of modern assumptions about masculinity and sexuality. To understand medieval monks, you’ve got to take seriously the idea that forsaking marriage and sex was once a lot more manly than it is now. Early medieval historian Rachel Stone has done some very good posts about why speculating about gay monks (but interestingly, not lesbian nuns) is fraught with problems but also a worthwhile historical exercise.

But anyway, here’s an example, one from the twelfth century by a certain Hilary the Englishman. We know almost nothing about him, except that he was apparently from England and he was one of the pupils of the great Peter Abelard, after his castration and separation from Heloise, at the Paraclete in Champagne in 1125. The poem is called “To an English boy” and goes thus:

Hail fair youth, who seeks no bribe,
Who regards being won with a gift as the height of vice,
In whom beauty and honesty have made their home,
Whose comeliness draws to itself the eyes of all who see him.

Golden haired, fair of face, with a small white neck,
Soft-spoken and gentle – but why do I praise thee singly?
Everything about you is beautiful and lovely; you have no imperfection,
Except that such fairness has no business devoting itself to chastity.

When nature formed you, she doubted for a moment
Whether to offer you as a girl or a boy,
But while she sets her mind’s eye to settling this,
Behold! You come forth, born as a vision for us all.

Afterward, she does finally extend her hand to you
And is astonished that she could have created anyone like you.
But it is clear that nature erred in only this one thing:
That when she had bestowed on you so much, she made your mortal.

No other mortal can be compared with you,
Whom nature made for herself, as if an only child;
Beauty establishes its home in you,
Whose sweet flesh shines brightly as the lily.

Believe me, if those former days of Jove should return,
His handservant would no longer be Ganymede,
But you carried off to heaven; by day the sweet cup
And by night your sweeter kisses you would administer to Jove.

You are the common desire of lasses and lads,
They sigh for you and hope for you, because they know you are unique.
They err or, rather, sin who call you “English”:
They should add letters and call you “angelic.”

(Translation is from John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the fourteenth century”, Chicago (1980), pp 373 – 374)

The poet is definitely trying to demonstrate how learned he is here. He of course imagines the youth he is infatuated with replacing Ganymede on Mount Olympus, which of course shows knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid Book V and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X both ancient Roman texts a well-educated twelfth century cleric with a good grasp of Latin would know. And at the end he humorously includes the incredibly famous pun (to medievalists anyway) supposedly said by Pope Gregory the Great in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History when he saw fair-haired slave boys in Rome in 590. Gregory’s pun of course works best in the original Latin where its non angli sed angeli. In another of his poems, to a certain boy of Anjou, Hilary refers to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus from Seneca, and to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife from the Hebrew Bible.

Thus some historians and literary scholars might argue that these poems were little more than just writing exercises used as a pedagogical tool for practicing writing poetry like Classical Roman authors, or were just playful intellectual games. But if so, that begs a lot of questions. Why do so by writing love lyrics? Surely the other genres of Classical Latin poetry, like epics, odes and even satires would be more appropriate. Or indeed, why did these twelfth century clerics focus so much on the literature of the Augustan age? Why not instead make your main schoolroom texts the Christian Roman poets of the fourth and fifth centuries? Why Horace, Ovid and Virgil rather than Claudian, Prudentius and Rutilius Namantianus?

What all of this demonstrates is two things. One, twelfth century Western Europe’s reverence for Classical antiquity was very deep indeed. If they were simply in need of poetic eloquence, they could find it elsewhere. The second is that Hilary’s poems and others like it were most likely written as genuine gay love poems. Indeed, there is evidence that some monasteries and cathedral schools were worried that routine poetry composition exercises in the scriptorium were being used to deviant ends. Our old friend, Guibert de Nogent, a few generations before Hilary, got into trouble when he wrote sexually explicit and obscene poems inspired by his adolescent reading of Ovid. Some might call it in his case the medieval equivalent of a geeky teenager writing a Kirk and Spock, Legolas and Gimli or Nico DiAngelo with half a dozen different characters from the Percy Jackson universe (before his relationship with Will Solace became canon anyway). Websites like Wattpad are basically devoted to this stuff. Of course, Guibert was writing his juvenile compositions in a conservative Benedictine monastery, Saint Germer de Fly. The world of the twelfth century schools that Hilary the Englishman inhabited may have been a bit more liberal in this regard, making it all the more possible to sneak in some gay love poems to fellow students while you’re busying yourselves with the trivium.

I aim to, in future posts, explore more of these gay love poems from the twelfth century, including some by women. I also want to look at what general medieval attitudes to what we would now call homosexuality were like.