1. Even among medievalists, the writings of Peter Damian are not well known.
Two of the best short general discussions of his life and work are Owen F. Blum, "The Monitor of
the Popes: St. Peter Damian," Studi Gregoriani 2 (1947), 459-76, and Lester K. Little,
"The Personal Development of Peter Damian," in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages:
Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. William C. Jordan, Bruce McNab, and Teofilo F.
Ruiz (Princeton, 1976), pp. 317-41.
2. Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus, in PL 145: 159-90, at col.
161B. The translation is that of Pierre J. Payer, Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century
Treatise against Clerical Homosexual Practices (Ontario, 1982), p. 27. Subsequent references
to both the Latin text and the translation will be cited parenthetically in the text.
3. Damian allegorizes the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to make this point during
his discussion in Chapter Five of the Liber Gomorrhianus. See PL 145:
164D-166C, esp. col. 165D.
4. See, for example, Payer, Book of Gomorrah, pp. 13-22; J. J. Ryan,
Saint Peter Damiani and his Canonical Sources: A Preliminary Study in the Antecedents of the
Gregorian Reform (Toronto, 1956); and J. Leclerq, Saint Pierre Damien, ermite et homme
d'Eglise (Rome, 1960), pp. 70-73.
5. The phrase is that of Payer, Book of Gomorrah, p. 19.
6. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to
Foucault (Oxford, 1991), p. 33. Dollimore terms this process "transgressive reinscription."
7. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, pp. 111-12.
page
73
8. The translated excerpts from Chrysostom in John Boswell, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), pp. 359-63, illustrate this point nicely.
9. For examples of this belief in various medieval authorities both before and after
Damian, see Boswell, Christianity, pp. 156-57, 277. Even viciously homophobic
authorities such as Alan of Lille and Peter Cantor, who concentrated on homosexual sodomy,
frequently saw excess as the precipitating issue. While for them homosexual excess and desire
were also unnatural, they understood such desire as being part of a gradation that included
heterosexual desire as well. Hence, their distinction was not as absolute as Damian's. For Alan,
see Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a
Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 47; for Peter Cantor, see the
excerpt in
Boswell, Christianity, p. 375.
10. Boswell, Christianity, p. 178, n. 33, discusses this canon and points out
its original ambiguity. For its later uses as a document contra homosexual activity, see D.
S. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London, 1955), pp. 86-89.
11. There seems to be no understanding of a homosexual (or a heterosexual)
subjectivity in Damian's work nor in similar medieval texts. For a fuller account, see my
Sodomy, Silence, and Social Control in Medieval Narrative (forthcoming).
12. An excellent introductory discussion of this binaristic thought may be found in
Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism
and Medieval Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, England, 1990), pp. 7-9,
47-53.
13. For this reason the somatic representation of the body politic in medieval texts
such as John of Salisbury's Policratus is a masculine one.
14. Damian quotes Leviticus 20:13 to emphasize this point (col. 162D; p. 33).
15. See the translation in Boswell, Christianity, p. 361.
16. On the problematic of early "biology" as it relates to sex and gender in the
premodern period, see the fascinating study by Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and
Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). On the anxiety over vaginal/anal
conflation in the Middle Ages, see my Sodomy, Silence, and Social Control.
17. Lee Edelman, "Decking Out: Performing Identities," in Inside/ Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (London: 1990), pp. 99-125 at 105.
18. These epigrams and their translations are found in the Latin-English
Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, trans. and ed. Thomas Stehling (New
York, 1984), pp. 6-7.
19. For a fuller discussion of the theoretical issues underlying these points, see
Judith Butler's remarkable study Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London, 1990).
