Bromance in the Middle Ages: The impact of sodomy on the development of male-male friendships in medieval literature

Richard Severe, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation makes a connection between sodomy and male-male friendships—two social issues that many scholars have approached separately in critical discussions about medieval masculinity and sexuality. I argue that the social and historical fear of sodomy impacted the ways in which male-male friendships were represented in popular medieval literature. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this project combines literary analysis, queer and gender theory, and historical research. I begin by exploring the fear of sodomy through critical examination of historical texts written during the mid-eleventh century, a period of intense social reform. I then extend the recent critical discussions on sexual identity and male friendship by analyzing models of friendship in two popular treatises, Cicero's De amicitia (44 B.C.E.) and Aelred's De spirituali amicitia (c.1147). I argue that Aelred's treatise, written during a period when the Church sought to reform the sexual practices of the clergy, builds on the Ciceronian model and demonstrates how close male friendships in the monastery could exist as long as certain protocols were observed that presumably precluded the possibility of sodomitical acts. I contend that the seminal works of Aelred and Cicero influenced multiple models of friendship seen in popular medieval texts, in which relationships between men are mediated in order to address the potential for homoerotic desire. These triangulated models of friendship are best demonstrated in stories such as the Old French version of Ami et Amile, an anonymous thirteenth-century tale of close male friendship in which the relationship between Ami and Amile is mediated by the Divine, violence and women; Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century narrative, Troilus and Criseyde, where the relationship between Troilus and Pandarus is mediated by the ideals of courtly love; and lastly, Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which uses the Pentecostal Oath as a means for maintaining friendships between knights in the chivalric community.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Armstrong, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Medieval literature|Social research|GLBT Studies|Gender studies

COinS