Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages скачать в хорошем качестве

Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages

Medieval culture was obsessed with sex: who had it with whom, how, and was it right or wrong. In medieval literature, witches brew love potions that enable unlikely pairings, fairy lovers visit young women at night, werewolves wrestle with their humanity, and gender roles flip or shift due to magical interference. 'Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages' interrogates these narratives, all of which use the supernatural to experiment with non-normative depictions of bodies, relationships, and sexual acts. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the medieval category of sins 'contra naturam' (“against nature”), which included both non-procreative sexual acts (defined at the time as sodomy) and magical practice. By bringing together magical handbooks, alchemical instruction books, religious conduct manuals, scientific treatises, canon law, and courtly romances and allegories, this seminar argues that, for medieval writers and thinkers, magic and deviant sexual and gendered behavior are inextricably linked. In this talk, Kersti Francis presents elements from 'Queer Magic'’s first chapter, which examines medieval discourse surrounding nature to demonstrate the ways in which magic functions as a licit form of heresy for authors to engage in queer imaginings of bodies, genders, and sexual acts. By examining the twelfth-century theologian Alan of Lille’s 'De planctu naturae', which explicitly links sodomy to “the magic of Venus, alongside magical handbooks including the 'Picatrix' and the 'Liber iuratus Honorii', Francis clarifies how the operative function of magic in past forms of conversations about gender, sex, and the body has been elided and forgotten, and will conclude with an overview of medieval magic’s queer legacy to expose the ways in which our modern understandings of gender and sexuality are still deeply indebted to the concept of sins 'contra naturam'. Kersti Francis is a PhD candidate in English at UCLA, working on the intersections between magic, gender, and sexuality in the Middle Ages and early English Renaissance (1100-1600). Her dissertation project, 'Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin and The Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages', uses the guiding framework of medieval understandings of nature and sins 'contra naturam' to argue that literary magic functions as a “safe” form of heresy for authors to engage in queer imaginings of bodies, genders, and sexual acts. Francis has also worked extensively on medieval histories of science, focusing on the role of alchemy in the Latin Christian West and the Dar al-Islam; on depictions of Mary Magdalene in medieval and Victorian understandings of prostitution; and on the figure of the 'meykongr' (maiden-king) in the Old Norse saga tradition. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, The National Science Foundation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, among others. (This talk was originally broadcast on the 1st March 2021)