Sexuality

Abstract

Medieval sexuality has been the focus of substantial recent commentary from a number of perspectives. Ruth Mazo Karras (2005: 5) usefully defines sexuality as "[the] whole realm of human erotic experience-the meanings that people place on sex acts, not the acts themselves-not the history of sex." These meanings have been explored by medievalists from different directions (Bullough and Brundage 1996; Harper and Proctor 2008; Evans 2011). In older scholarship, the range and repetition of ecclesiastical regulation, commentaries and penitentials dealing with sexual behavior attracted the attention of James Brundage (1985, 1987). These are revealing of changing ideas not only of what constituted a valid marriage, but also of changing attitudes to the sexuality of priests, for whom chastity was increasingly emphasized (and required) from the eleventh century onwards. Brundage also briefly explored the regulation of sexual activity on the First Crusade, to which we shall return. The possibilities of [mainly male] same-sex relationships in the medieval past were the focus of early work by Michael Goodich (1979) and John Boswell (1980, 1994), and then of their critics, who highlighted the relative absence of women in the formulations set up (Murray 1996; Sautman and Sheingorn 2001; Lochrie 2005). Feminist interventions highlighted women's relationships, but the limitations of the gender binary also led to further reflections on male-male relationships and the transgender possibilities open to medieval people (Herdt 1996; Puff 2013). Medievalists have drawn heavily onand critiquedMichel Foucault's (1990) formulation of individual and collective sexual history evolving from a sexual act to a sexual identity (a