🧵: In my continuing quest to document medieval depictions of queer people, I am looking at depictions from Dante's Inferno of the sodomites, depictions that often seem to emphasize buttocks and temptation (and feature a lot of monks!).
Certainly, there are depictions where the sodomites clearly writhe in pain in the fiery rain, like this one, but a lot of the depictions don't show much suffering and present the sodomites as almost tempting Dante.
(BnF, Italien 2017 f.191)
There are a remarkable amount of men with monastic tonsures in this one, suggesting people saw priests as particularly prone to sodomy.
(Morgan Library, MS M.676 fol. 25r)
Some more tonsures in this crowd too, as well as at least one bishop's (?) miter.
(Bodleian Library MS. Holkham misc. 48, p. 22)
Side-note on that last image, in which the sodomites are almost all making the same gesture: touching their heads with a finger. It MIGHT be a gesture described in some classical Roman sources that scholars have argued was a marker of a homosexual subculture.
That gesture, here described in Craig Williams' Roman Homosexuality, was scratching the head with a single finger. Could it have survived for almost a millennium as a marker of men attracted to other men? I honestly don't know.
Anyway, a puzzle but if anyone has any ideas what the sodomites are doing here, let me know!
It might just be the artists trying to not show genitalia, but it seems to me that most of these illustrations emphasize the backsides of the sodomites, and show them presenting their bottoms to both Dante and us.
(Morgan Library, MS M.676 fol. 25r)
This tiny sketch is hard to make out but it also looks like they primarily have their backsides towards Dante/us. It also suggests, in the figure closest to Dante (probably Brunetto Latini), a kind of temptation, an attempt to draw Dante to join them.
(BnF, Italien 78 f.75)
The affection & not-totally-negative portrayal by Dante of Latini (& the sodomites generally) in the Inferno has been noted by many scholars, so it's interesting to see these images show affection, even temptation.
Latini, despite being Dante's teacher, is beardless & young.
Another image of Dante being pulled by a beardless Latini (who then acquires a beard?), then of the sodomites (again, mostly tonsured) departing.
(Brit Library, Yates Thompson 36 f. 27 )
This all comes together in this image, where a beardless Latini (?) seems to be trying to draw Dante towards the beckoning crowd of sodomites, all while presenting his backside to Dante/the viewer.
(Brit Library, Additional 19587 f. 24v)
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Why are we not talking about Sir William Neville & Sir John Clanvowe, the two gay English knights buried together in a tomb with marriage motifs???
Who were friends with Chaucer and possibly the inspiration for his The Knight's Tale?
And also maybe SPIES? #MedievalTwitter
So the above image is the tombstone of Sir William Neville & Sir John Clanvowe, who died in Galata (outside Constantinople) in 1391 within days of each other. Their shields are "impaled"; that is, their coats of arms are merged. This really only happens with married couples.
The article about their tombstone tries SO hard not to say gay.
I want to highlight an example of the whitewashing & erasure of the work of scholars of color--particularly Black & Indigenous ones--in the work of white medievalists. I came across it yesterday, & it's such a clear demonstration of how their work gets credited to white people.
This isn't a critique of the article's claim or its contribution to the field of race studies in Old English.
This is about how white medievalists who start publishing on medieval race draw on the work of scholars of color while obscuring them.
So this article came out recently in PMLA, a journal that has notably blocked work on race by premodernists of colors (medium.com/the-sundial-ac…)
That matters, since this article will be highly visible and cited in a way that the work of scholars of color won't.
🧵: So several scholars of color are pointing out the problems with racists mad about the new LoTR series. I did the same. My tweet got tepid responses, while the scholars of color faced vicious racism immediately *often from the same people*
[CW: racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia]
Most the people disagreeing with me didn't make it an issue of my identity & didn't insult me. These are among the meanest ones.
Easily a third of the responses to the scholars of color were hateful.
Dr. Ramírez got six comments on his main tweet and two of those were immediately vicious insults.
🧵The AHA president's "scholarship on race is ahistorical and presentist" blog isn't an outlier view or a brave take in the face of "the woke mob" or the "radical Left". It's been the party line among many senior scholars for decades.
Take medieval studies. (Really. Take it).
Look at basically any "state of the field" forum in medieval studies from the last few decades, especially in Old English studies. A lot of the big names--Allen Frantzen springs to mind--made careers out of slamming new approaches as presentist and ahistorical.
Here's Frantzen in 1990, complaining about "revisionists" (who he calls "Professors of Otherness") rewriting the teaching of history.