HOMOSEXUALITY
. The exuberant homosexuality for which the ancient Gauls, like other Celts, were famed
seems to have survived or even increased during the Roman occupation but was
dampened by Christian conversion. The Germanic invasions demolished imperial and
weakened Christian authorities, and the Germans themselves seem to have practiced
pederasty but to have disapproved of effeminacy and adult passivity. Neither Franks nor
Burgundians legislated against homosexuality, but the Visigothic code of Reccesvinth
(ca. 654) stipulated castration as a penalty. Although the Franks adopted Catholic
Christianity with its morality that pilloried as the “crime against nature” all
nonreproductive forms of sexual expression, including homosexuality, the later
Merovingians, and probably their nobles, indulged their sensual appetites freely.
Considerable sexual license continued under the Carolingians (751–987). An erotic
element appears in the circle of clerics headed by Alcuin, the “friend of Charlemagne.”
Alcuin directed his feelings toward his pupils, even bestowing on one a “pet name” from
one of Virgil’s Eclogues. Walafrid Strabo’s affection for Liutger was more specifically
Christian, presaging Elizabethan love sonnets. His exiled friend Gottschalk penned a
tender poem to a young monk, probably at Reichenau.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, in the rude early castles, knights and squires, often
sleeping on pallets in the same room and depending on one another for survival, must
have formed erotic attachments, a type of situational homosexuality known to armies.
Anglo-Norman nobles were particularly reprimanded for homosexuality.
Pederastic poems were part of the renaissance of the 12th century. Marbode of Rennes
(ca. 1035–1123), master of the school of Chartres, loved a boy who loved a beautiful girl
who was herself in love with Marbode. Marbode’s disciple Baudri of Bourgueil (1046–
1130) shifted to more openly erotic poetry, with some verses extolling the moral qualities
and others the physical charms of the addressee. Hildebert of Lavardin (ca. 1055–1133)
reiterated conventional moralizing arguments against the “plague of Sodom,” implying
that homosexuality was common in his age, but another of his poems boldly denied that
male love is a sin and faulted “heaven’s council” for calling it one. Allegorical poetry
was less favorable to homosexuality. Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae (ca. 1170)
indicted humankind for inventing monstrous kinds of love and perverting Nature’s laws.
Jean de Meun’s sequel to the Roman de la Rose (ca. 1270) had Nature’s Genius liken
practitioners of nonreproductive sex to plowmen who till stony ground.
In the 11th century, with Peter Damian condemning sodomy, the church moved to
regulate private conduct. The term sodomia, which appeared at the beginning of the 13th
century, often covered bestiality, homosexual practices, and “unnatural” heterosexual
relations of all kinds. Late 11th-century theologians, who advocated the same penalty for
all three, associated what came to be called sodomy with heresy and magic. Scriptural
commentators in Anselm of Laon’s circle linked heresy and sodomy as forms of sacrilege
punishable by death.
Before 1200, southern France became a stronghold of heretical Cathars
(Albigensians). Because of their similarity to the Bogomils of Bulgaria, they came to be
stigmatized as bougres, a term that meant first heretic and then sodomite. Catholic
authorities charged them with sexual heterodoxy, claiming that unrestrained sexual
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