Late Foucault and Guenevere: The Questionable History of Medieval Sexuality

The study of medieval sexuality challenges historical narratives in two ways. On the one hand, it takes as its object sexuality, which is often thought to stand completely outside history: not a grand narrative but a biological given. On the other hand, the academic history of sexuality cannot escape its close association with Foucault, a thinker who challenged grand narratives at the beginning of his career by theorizing historical discontinuities and who argued, late in his career, that what we understand by sexuality simply did not exist before the eighteenth century. And yet, when Foucault wrote his volume on ancient Greece, he began by looking for the “actions or acts that we call ‘sexual.'” Despite his postmodern theory, he too seems unable to get by without a modern understanding of what counts as sexual. In a couple of late interviews, however, Foucault begins to push the boundaries, raising questions about the erotics of friendship and of social hierarchies. He did not live to pursue these questions, but they suggest the challenge facing historians of medieval sexuality: can we bracket what “we call sexual” long enough to discover a domain of medieval discourses, institutions, and practices that has its own medieval logic? In this talk I will explore the extent to which historians of medieval “sexuality” have managed to identify such a domain. I will focus on two questions. First, what can be learned from studies of those medieval phenomena that seem least like modern sexuality: virginity, friendship, courtly love, religious enclosure. Second, is there any reason to think these constitute a single medieval field worthy of study, or are they only united by their relation to modern sexuality?