Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century

The New Middle Ages

by Richard E. Zeikowitz

Richard E. Zeikowitz explores various discourses of male same-sex desire in diverse 14th century chivalric texts and describes the sociopolitical forces motivating those discourses. He attempts to dethrone traditional heteronormative views by drawing attention to culturally normative "queer" desire. Zeikowitz articulates possible homoeroticized interactions in chivalric texts, such as Charny's Book of Chivalry, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Troilus and Criseyde. He also examines how intimate male bonds are rendered as dangerous attachments in chronicle narratives of the reigns of Edward II and Richard II.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Medieval

227 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2003

Reviews

[Willow · Rating 2 out of 5]

The second part (chapters 6 and 7) were informative, even if they didn’t provide anything really new and although I could predict all of the examples that were used. (Edward II, Richard II, the Knights Templar, etc.) - this is probably due to the paucity of sources. The first part, though - does anyone really need to sit through ~100 pages of literary and psychoanalysis to arrive at the conclusion that sometimes, stories and actions that weren’t intended to be queer in the first place can be interpreted as queer by some people? Any gay person could have told you that if you asked. The author is very reluctant to state that anything or anyone in the Middle Ages was queer, which is admirably restrained (and much more credible to my eyes than to declare any particular seven-hundred-year-old book or person gay- we just don’t know for sure! We can only present the evidence). Unfortunately, it also made almost all the ‘conclusions’ reached in this book appear painfully obvious.

[Karl Steel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really disappointing. Like so many books in The New Middle Ages Series, it reads like a dissertation. Wonder why? Had it been allowed to percolate for a few more years, it perhaps would have entangled itself in necessary and exciting questions like: what counts as 'eros'? why do we want to have books like these? Without that necessary meta-critical practice, Zeikowitz often looks as though he's really stretching. It might have looked beyond the usual set of Middle English texts (with a bit of the Vulgate cycle mixed in) and towards, say the sex metaphors at the end of Hartmann von Aue's Erec or towards the---can't remember it now--the romance in which a lord banishes all women from his castle to form an exclusively male group of warriors and lovers. He also might have considered samesex sexuality among women...