Queer theory tends to focus on modern texts, perhaps because of the philosopher Michel Foucault’s (in)famous declaration that in the West, ‘homosexuality’, as an identity, is a nineteenth-century invention. If we accept Foucault’s premise, then what might queerness look like in the long medieval period, before the emergence of this form of identity? In this seminar, we will discover that sexuality in the premodern period is an unstable concept, which most often emerges as it intersects in unexpected ways with other categories, including racial, national, religious, class, and gender identities.

We will make this discovery by reading a variety of texts dating from the tenth to fifteenth centuries that crisscross genres, in prose or poetry, including Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s version of St. Pelagius martyrdom, the thirteenth-century romance Silence, portions of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe for example. By studying a wide range of literary texts, we will see that ‘queering’ texts can serve as a deconstructive tool, enriching our understanding of early literature. In turn, depictions of premodern sexualities challenge us to reexamine some of our own, along with queer theory and gender studies’, assumptions about sexuality, gender, and history.