Queer Acceptance in the Middle Ages and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

Although the romantic ideal of a white knight with his fair lady might have been born during the middle ages, heterosexuality was not the only notion of existence explored during the time. Despite the overwhelmingly Catholic influence of the medieval period, there is a strong queer history to be understood and illuminated about the middle ages. As in all ages before and since, queer people were born, queer desire ignited, and queer literature was written, all while under the unflinchingly heterocentric rule of the Catholic church. While these queer stories were carefully constructed to be covert due to their illegality—making them hard to distinguish from other more “acceptable” literature at the time—their existence helps illustrate a view of the middle ages that includes more diverse narratives than one would originally expect to encounter. Even though homophobia certainly had its place in the societal makeup of the middle ages, not all portrayals of queer characters and themes were negative or harmful. After studying homoeroticism in literature throughout the middle ages, David Clark concluded that, ““[a] range of attitudes to same-sex acts are available in this period, from unambiguous condemnation and an anxiety to eradicate them to tolerant amusement and even ignorance that they were sinful” (Kuefler). In this essay I will look at positive queer portrayals from literature, Catholicism, and cultural norms of the time in order to explore the way queer ideas were accepted and even sometimes celebrated during this period.

One of the most glaring examples of queer desire explored through a piece of literature during the middle ages is the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The same sex attraction explored in the poem is practically overt, prominently featuring the titular, male characters exchanging multiple kisses throughout the poem some while Bertalik is himself and some while in disguise as The Green Knight. The kisses appear casual in nature, such as when Sir Gawain has finished pledging his purity to the lord and finishes by holding “out his arms and hugged the lord and kissed him in the comelist way he could” (233). This kiss goes unmentioned by the other characters, there is no shock or outrage to follow and in the next scene they eat and lounge together casually. Other kisses between the men occur when saying goodbye, “they slowed and they stood and they spoke softly, and with parting kisses the party dispersed” (227) or when Gawain must transfer the kisses he won from a woman to Bertalik in number and kind. These three kissing scenes illustrate how “affectionate embraces between late-medieval noblemen–even erotically charges ones–are culturally normative” (Zeikowitz) or in other words, accepted.

Because of the cultural power the Catholic church had over the people of the middle ages, there are aspects of queer history that are practically impossible to separate from catholicism itself. For example, because so much of the writing from the time came from religious men such as priests and other clergy men writing that has now been deemed queer literature originated in pieces originally on the topic of christianity of biblical characters. The “biblical love between David and Jonathan” written about in poems by Baudri de Bourgueil, his mentor Marbod of Rennes, and others has even been called gay “slang” of the era because it was a common reference that demonstrated shared interest in same-sex love (Kuefler). This illustrates how deeply the Catholic church was rooted in the cultural exchanges of this time, as even the gay slang of the era was derived from biblical texts. The fact that such a slang could have even existed alludes to “evidence for what might be called a gay subculture, defined as a network of such persons, conscious of their common difference from the majority and mutually influencing their own and others’ perceptions of the nature of their distinctiveness” (Kuefler).

Another way that queer acceptance can be seen in the middle ages is in the way gender nonconformity was present both within the Catholic church and elsewhere. An important example of this gender nonconformity can be see in illustrations of Jesus behaving in womanly ways. During the middle ages Jesus was often used as an image of a feminine version of God, used to connect women to the Catholic church that was otherwise much more male dominated in clergy and imagery. Jesus can be seen in medieval illustrations doing a number of traditionally motherly or at least feminine activities, such as “a woman nursing the soul at her breasts, drying its tears, punishing its petty mischeif-making, giving birth to it in agony and travail” which were considered “part of a growing tendency to speak of the devine in homey images and to emphasize its approachability” (Bynum). The idea that Jesus was able to be portrayed in effeminate ways is evidence that gender nonconformity was acceptable at least to a certain extent, especially considering the sacred way Jesus was seen as a model human of God on earth for all other catholics to emulate. If men were meant to emulate Jesus and Jesus was capable of demonstrating traditionally female gendered attitudes and activities, this opened a door to men acting in gender nonconforming ways. Outside of the catholic church, cross dressing was also seen in “popular activities like carnival and theater” (Bynum) as pictured in my first post.

Works Cited

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. University of California Press, 1982.

Kuefler, Mathew. “Homoeroticism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Acts, Identities, Cultures Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, by John Boswell.” American Historical Review, vol. 123, no. 4, Oct. 2018, pp. 1246–1266. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/ahr/rhy023.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. “Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes.” College English, vol. 65, no. 1, 2002, p. 67., doi:10.2307/3250731.