A groundbreaking examination of sexuality in the Middle Ages.

This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives-literary, theological, philosophical, medical, historical, and art historical-to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires.

Always considering sexuality in relation to gender, the body, and identity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of that period. Examining a range of medieval texts and images, the contributors explore the medieval understanding of sodomy, the historical construction of heterosexuality, the polymorphous erotics of female mysticism, and the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, and religion. This work not only offers new perspectives on the ways in which queer theory might inform our views of sexuality in medieval Europe, but also suggests that medieval constructions of sexuality may offer important contributions to both queer theory and the history of sexuality.These essays, situated in the context of current debates, linger over various definitions of medieval sexuality; they speak to each other in their differences and their similarities to further productive thinking about the sometimes conflicting and always fascinating ways in which the Middle Ages regarded sex and sexuality. Contributors: E. Jane Burns, U of North Carolina; Joan Cadden, U of California, Davis; Michael Camille, U of Chicago; Dyan Elliott, Indiana U; Louise O. Fradenburg, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mark D. Jordan, U of Notre Dame; Steven F. Kruger, CUNY.

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.

Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.