This article argues that Bede – like modern intersectional analysis – believed that identity categories cannot be disentangled or understood in isolation. In Bede’s commentary on the Song of Songs, skin color, gender, and religious identity intermix with metaphors of sexuality. These categories coalesce in a monumental lesson on how to read. Bede claims that reading the Song literally – perceiving Black skin, eroticism, gender confusion – means reading like a Jew and prevents readers from seeing the feminine, metaphorical level below the masculine, carnal level. This article suggests that intersectional analysis is akin to much medieval thought rather than being an anachronistic imposition on a historical text. Intersectional analysis can lay bare how medieval theologians saw identity categories as interwoven and interdependent, even while the theologians themselves entrenched hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and religious difference. For Bede, Christian interpretation is a continual process of moving from a literal outside (Black, masculine, carnal, sexual) to a metaphorical inside (beautiful, feminine, allegorical, chaste, reproductive). Once inside, however, we – like the bird passing through the hall – must return once again to the outside in an endless movement between layers that echoes theological processes of rumination and blurs the divide between the contemplative and the active life.
The Old English and Latin Durham Proverbs are famously obscure. Durham Proverb 10 describes a man sitting on a pig; the man jokes that what happens next is up to the pig. Scholars have read this as a possible marital joke, since the man is called a ceorl or maritus ‘husband’, yet this article suggests that the context is that of pig butchery. Medieval art frequently shows pigs being butchered by a man sitting on top of them to hold them down. Moreover, they often show the butchery performed by a man and a woman, suggesting that this proverb was a reference to an activity that a couple performed together, rather than a sexist commentary on marriage.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: IN THE LATE seventh century, a woman asked Theodore of Tarsus (602–690), archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England, a question about marriage. She was one of many people who flocked to Theodore and his learned companion, the North African–born Abbot Hadrian (d. 710), after their arrival in Canterbury from Rome in 669/670. This nameless woman revealed that she had been married previously and, after the death of her husband, had vowed never to take another spouse. However, eleven years later, she was now remarried but still felt conflicted about her earlier vow. Her question reflects a deeply Christian understanding of marriage as a union making two people literally into carne una (one flesh), as Jesus had put it in the gospel of Matthew. Theodore would have been familiar with local debates over the interpretation of this passage, though [End Page 1] he was probably even more familiar with Eastern Orthodox theological opinions, such as John Chrysostom's influential treatise De non iterando coniugio (Against Remarriage).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.