Medieval Sexuality Life Documentary: Homosexuality, Luxuria, and Textual Abuse скачать в хорошем качестве

Medieval Sexuality Life Documentary: Homosexuality, Luxuria, and Textual Abuse

Welcome to All of History! To begin means, title, at least, and you that title to sexuality first: Constructing sexuality is the kind of thing that must be constructed; that the medieval, if they had such a thing, had to construct it for themselves; that we have to (re)construct their constructions; that we reconstruct what they constructed as a "sexuality", our word, not theirs; that our word "sexuality" is itself endlessly under construction somewhere between "sex" and "gender" or "pleasure" and "power" or "fate" and "identity"; and that we construct their sexuality as "medieval," itself a term of construction, of contempt and nostalgia. Next the dangerous puns in my title, where "textual abuse" calls up "sexual abuse" and is linked to "homosexuality." Constructions of medieval homosexuality regularly contain allegations of textual abuse. There are allegations that medieval texts are abused to authorize continued repression of lesbians and gays, then counter-allegations that revisionist scholars try to distort the plain meaning of authoritative theological texts so as to condone homosexual activity. The term "homosexuality" itself often seems an abusive construction when applied to medieval texts and, indeed, an essentially abusive term, so far as it records juridico-medical efforts to punish or cure adults who have erotic relations with adults of the same genital configuration. Textual abuse as prelude to sexual abuse. But then many medieval texts regard genital relations between members of the same sex as an abuse of the natures of the sexed bodies and the unsexual persons inhabiting them. I trust that you are losing your way. I think that we have to begin by losing our way in order to discover the conflicts of motives and the surplus of stories that beset us whenever we approach these topics. Conflicting motives of historical accuracy, political advocacy, personal enunciation. Surplus stories of misreading corrected, repressions overcome, sufferings redeemed. The motives and stories cannot be reconciled or reduced in advance. We can begin only by displaying the conflicts and enacting the stories. I know no better way to do this than by attending self-consciously to how we see or fail to see the very different multiplicities of motives and surpluses of stories in the medieval texts before us. In what follows, I propose to attend to a trio of terms in a microscopic network of medieval texts. These are the terms luxuria, vitium sodomiticum, and peccatum contra naturam; the texts are some passages by Thomas Aquinas and his principal interlocutors. I will not translate those terms, although I will transliterate the last two as "sodomitic vice" and "sin against nature." Luxuria, the root term, cannot even be transliterated. We have reasons for thinking that the terms are referentially and genetically connected to some terms that we use, such as "homosexual activity" or "sodomy." I mean, we have reasons for thinking that the writers of these medieval texts would have used the term vitium sodomiticum to refer to actions or events that we would call "homosexual," and we have historical narratives that lead us to believe that their application of terms became remote ancestors to ours. I hope to show that these reasons mislead us. 00:00 Context 03:47 Luxuria and Unnatural Vice 13:45 Carnal, Bestial, Unnameable Vice 26:45 Oscillating Categories and Moral Teaching #history #allofhistory #historychannel #documentary