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

SEMINAR SERIES
Ideology, Society, and Medieval Religion: Impositions and Negotiations

In this talk, Kersti Francis (UCLA) will examine the ways in which magic functions as a licit form of heresy for late medieval 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 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.

This seminar will not be recorded. 

Seminar Series details: 

In recent decades, medievalists have studied the ways in which people interacted with the institutional structures, practices, and theological orthodoxies of the Church, including issues such as popular belief, the lived experiences of monks and other members of religious orders, and litigation in the ecclesiastical courts.

Less well understood is how doctrine and theology shaped the behaviours and beliefs of the laity, or the middling members of a religious order or institution. We are interested in thinking about the ways in which ideology was implicated in the lives and actions of ordinary people, and the outcomes of that. How did religious ideologies influence the structuring of power relations within communities? How did individuals within religious communities internalise, personalise and negotiate the rules of their order? How did lay people contribute to the functioning of the system of ecclesiastical law? This seminar series aims to think about these questions and others, by showcasing the work of an interdisciplinary array of medievalists specialising in different religions, geographic locations, time periods, and source materials. 

Image: Detail of a medallion with monks being seduced, Harley MS 1527, f. 96v