Richard the Lionheart, Contested Queerness, and Crusading Memory (original) (raw)

Tales of the Crusaders – Remembering the Crusades in Britain

2021

Engaging the Crusades The Memory and Legacy of Crusading Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes that offer initial windows into the ways in which the crusades have been used in the last two centuries, demonstrating that the memory of the crusades is an important and emerging subject. Together, these studies suggest that the memory of the crusades, in the modern period, is a productive, exciting, and much needed area of investigation.

Richard Lionheart: bad king, bad crusader?

Journal of Medieval History, 1997

This paper analyzes the impact of King Richard Lionheart of England during his tenure as leader of the Third Crusade. It examines crusade policy and the significance of Richard's decisions to deviate from it. The lack of control which both the Church and normative crusading precedents had over him becomes apparent. Richard's failure to take Jerusalem leads to the conclusion that his self-centred, puerile interests in personal adventures destroyed the chance for success of the Third Crusade, and thus prolonged warfare. Most wars have some sort of peace as the ultimate goal. The Third Crusade is no exception, but Richard subverted the goal of peace by turning away from a siege of Jerusalem and toward various other adventures, for example, attacks on Egyptian holdings, border skirmishes, the conquest of Cyprus from the Byzantines. Still, the Lionheart's legend persists from his day to our own to extol chivalrous virtues and courageous action. This paper presents the other side of the coin in the hope of approaching a more balanced, accurate portrayal of Richard's crusade leadership and of the ends of crusade ideology which he undermined.

Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture

This introduction outlines the rationale behind the essays collected in this book, aiming to unearth the Middle Ages as a site of the multiple and the queer, which, in turn, serves to disrupt temporal and spatial stereotypes and to uncover the disruptive presence of a present that is far more incoherent than generally understood.

Queer Theory and the Middle Ages

French Studies, 2006

Though it might surprise many, the Middle Ages are emerging as a kind of queer utopia, a historical period in which institutional state regulation as we know it hardly existed, in which marriage practices were not yet controlled entirely either by state or church and varied widely by class and region, in which same-sex segregation was a norm, particularly in intellectual communities, and in which love stories between men were common, if covert. 1 Texts, both literary and historical, actually spoke of same-sex eroticism, albeit it in a derogatory way, referring to such relations as sodomy, bougrerie, or heresy. Over the course of 1000 years, (c. 500-1500), when almost any sexual act or impulse which did not focus on sex exclusively in terms of procreative potential was branded as sodomitical, all readers conveniently find themselves in the same crowded boat, cast out one and all as sodomites. When that sodomite's every thought is ripe for interrogation, as we see in many of the major penitentials and theological works, we arrive, however proleptically, at that magic moment when the inviolable modern status of hetero and homo as polar opposites simply dissolves. 2 This perversely satisfying scenario finally promises a degree of equality in rejection and it requires a redefinition of the parameters within which we read medieval texts. When all readers get to play at being marginal and subversive, without ever having actually done anything other than that which seemed natural, it redefines the literary landscape. Like Perceval at his chess board competing against an invisible opponent, we feel what it is to confront an autonomous social force that claims to play by the rules, even when those rules are always of its own making. 3 Such a scenario is particularly satisfying to scholars. What other period offers such fertile ground for the investigation of power and language, duplicity as the very essence of speech, heteroglossia as norm? I suppose many would spring to mind, at least in political terms; but when we add to the mix sex as an essential marker of culpability, then we have found

The Cult of Gay Relics and Queer Medievalism in 1980s Sydney

Past & Present, 2024

This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.

The Reproach of Sodomy in the Deposition of Edward II of England and Its Repercussions in the Historiography of the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Norman Domeier, Christian Mühling (eds.), Homosexualität am Hof: Praktiken und Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis heute, 2020

The English royal court of the early fourteenth century offers interesting perspectives for analysis if we approach it from a political-cultural angle, integrating the sexual dimension. From the beginning of his reign, indeed, Edward II of England (1307–1327) opted for a government by favourites. During the first six years of his reign, Piers Gaveston, a nobleman from Aquitaine, dominated the government from 1307–1312. Five years after his murder in June 1312 by the discontented barons, he was replaced by an English nobleman, Hugh Despenser the Younger, who was executed in 1326, after which the king was deposed and finally assassinated in 1327, in his prison at Berkeley. In order to stigmatise the closeness of the king’s relations with his favourites, the narratives of the chroniclers use a homoerotic style, which seems to suggest, at first sight, that the criticism of the court focusses on homosexual desire. However, this style of writing is in fact a mixture of two discourses: one on sodomy and the other on love (with physical implications) as well as friendship of the king. The first is linked to the crime of heresy, which is unforgivable for a crowned head. The second is a discourse of loyalty and solidarity. While the ambivalence of homoerotic language always hints at sodomy, this type of discourse indicates another level of illegitimacy which is rather political than sexual, and more important for political conflict. The problem exposed is not so much related to the behaviour of the king itself, but to the fact that the favourite gains a degree of political influence that is deemed excessive by the other noblemen at the royal court.