Abstract
Medieval Christianity treated castration as an especially meaningful injury, but not every medieval Christian avoided it. Despite an official prohibition of castration in Church doctrine, celibate Christian clergy might seek it out, to cure themselves of sexual desire, and, more importantly, to submit themselves more perfectly to the Divine Father. Because of castration’s cultural importance, the account of genital injury in Peter of Cornwall’s twelfth-century version of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in his Book of Revelations is surprising: there, a knight experiences terrible suffering, including a bizarre case of genital injury, but to no particular end, and with no obvious meaning. The very strangeness of Peter’s account offers a way to read castration as simply an injury like others, a “non-Phallic” castration that resists cultural values of both masculinity and the moralization of injury.
Keywords
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- 1.
Peter of Cornwall. 2013. Book of Revelations. Ed. and trans. Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
- 2.
All quotations from this story are from the Book of Revelations, 136–37. Translation is Easting and Sharpe’s, barring “uti connubio,” which they render as “enjoy sex.” Bede’s Ecclesiastical History IX.19 has “uti connubio” in the context of an attempt to convince a holy queen to consummate a marriage, and that seems to be its use here too, given Gulinus’s later reference to the knight as his “gener.”
- 3.
The history of the development of the story has been told often. For a brief and thorough account, Carol G. Zaleski. 1985. St. Patrick’s Purgatory: Pilgrimage Motifs in a Medieval Otherworld Vision. Journal of the History of Ideas 46.4: 469–70; for an extended treatment, see Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy, eds. 1988. The Medieval Pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory: Lough Derg and the European Tradition. Enniskillen: Clogher Historical Society.
- 4.
For a rare exception in modern scholarship, see Peggy McCracken and Sharon Kinoshita. 2012. Marie de France: A Critical Companion. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 167–68. For representative medieval witnesses to the Patrick’s Purgatory tradition that end with Owein’s return from Purgatory, see Matthew of Paris. 1874. Chronica Majora. Ed. Henry Richard Luard. London: Longman & Co., 203; Jacobus de Voragine. 1969. The Golden Legend. Trans. William Granger Ryan. New York: Arno Press, 192–94; Roger of Wendover. 1841. Flores Historiarum. Ed. Henry Octavius Coxe. Vol. 2. London: English Historical Society, 271; Vincent of Beauvais. 1624 / 1964–65. Speculum Historiale. Reprint, Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, XX.23, 789 (brief and skeptical); and the Middle English versions in Robert Easting, ed. 1991. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. Oxford: Early English Text Society.
- 5.
Marie de France. 1993. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: A Poem. Ed. and Trans. Michael J Curley. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. A critical consensus is forming that various works ascribed to Marie are by several distinct writers. They still might all be women, however: see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, with an appendix by Ian Short, 2020. Recovery and Loss: Women’s Writing around Marie de France. In Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages. Ed. Katheryn Kerby-Fulton, 169–190. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.
- 6.
My chapter uses “castration” to refer to the removal of either the testicles or the penis. For more nuanced treatments of terminology, see Mathew Kuefler. 1996. Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages. In Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage, 285–6. New York: Garland, and Robert L. A. Clarke, Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Fèvre’s La Vieille. In Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. Ed. Larissa Tracy, 290. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
- 7.
Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, XX.23, 789.
- 8.
Gerald of Wales. 1982. The History and Topography of Ireland. Trans. John Joseph O’Meara. London: Penguin, 61, translation slightly modified. Gerald continued adding to the work throughout his life. For the Latin of the first recension, cited above, Gerald of Wales. 1949. “Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie: Text of the First Recension.” Ed. John J. O’Meara. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 52: 137. The second recension extends its discussion by naming the site (“Purgatorium Patricii”) and admits the utility of lurid stories of infernal punishment for taming the hard necks of the Irish; Gerald of Wales. 1867. Topographia Hibernica, et Expugnatio Hibernica. Ed. James Francis Dimock. London: Longman, 82–83.
- 9.
John Richardson. 1727. The Great Folly, Superstition, and Idolatry of Pilgrimages in Ireland. Dublin: J. Hyde, 9.
- 10.
Tom Peete Cross. 1952. Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 488.
- 11.
John Lindow. 1983. Swedish Legends and Folktales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 105–7; H. R. Ellis Davidson. 1988. Roles of the Northern Goddess. New York: Routledge, 26; Reimund Kvideland and Henning K Sehmsdorf, eds. 1988. Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 217. Most of these records have been collected by modern folklorists since the nineteenth century. For similar Estonian and Russian accounts, see Torsten Martin Gustaf Löfstedt. 1993. Russian Legends about Forest Spirits in the Context of Northern European Mythology. PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 162–65.
- 12.
For detailed treatments of this figure, Susan Carter. 2003. Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. The Chaucer Review 37. 4: 329–45, and Amy C. Eichhorn-Mulligan. 2006. The Anatomy of Power and the Miracle of Kingship: The Female Body of Sovereignty in a Medieval Irish Kingship Tale. Speculum 81.4: 1014–54.
- 13.
Consider, for example, the story of Gerald of Aurillac’s temptation for a beautiful girl, cured only when the girl miraculously appears “deformed” to Gerald’s sight; cited in Jacqueline Murray. 2005. “The Law of Sin That Is in My Members”: The Problem of Male Embodiment. In Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih, 13–14. New York: Routledge.
- 14.
See the table of hanging punishments in Martha Himmelfarb. 1983. Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 87.
- 15.
For a description of the pilgrimage features of the main line of the tradition, Carol G. Zaleski. 1985. St. Patrick’s Purgatory: Pilgrimage Motifs in a Medieval Otherworld Vision. Journal of the History of Ideas 46.4: 467–85; for the requisite cleansing before entering the purgatory, see G. Waterhouse. 1933. Another Early German Account of St. Patrick’s Purgatory. Hermathena 23.48: 115, which ends, unlike the main line of the tradition, with a short exemplum in which a rich man is demonically immolated in life for refusing to believe in Purgatory.
- 16.
For classic engagements with castration anxiety: foundationally, Sigmund Freud. 1961. Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. In Standard Edition. Vol. XIX. Trans. James Strachey, 172–79. London: Hogarth Press; for the cultural, rather than physical/biological significance of the phallus, Jacques Lacan. 2006. The Signification of the Phallus. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, 575–84. New York: Norton; and for a necessary skeptical synthesis, Elizabeth Grosz. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge, 67–74. For a clear example of a psychoanalytic engagement with castration anxiety in cultural studies, see Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard. 1993. After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Cornell University Press, 57—“the melancholic relation to the phallus is…the only relation to the phallus, which is defined precisely by the inability of any subject, male or female, to possess it without being dis-possessed by it”—or, similarly, Judith Butler. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 85. For an important insistence that the psychoanalytic emphasis on the “phallus” should not ignore the importance of actual penises in self-conception, see Jordan Osserman. 2017. Is the Phallus Uncut? On the Role of Anatomy in Lacanian Subjectivization. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4.3–4: 497–517.
- 17.
For forced tonsuring among the Merovingians, see Robert Mills. 2005. The Signification of Tonsure. In Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages. Ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, 109–26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- 18.
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. 1995. The Romance of the Rose. Trans. Charles Dahlberg, 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 329.
- 19.
Cultural studies of medieval castration can be found in Susan Tuchel. 1998. Kastration im Mittelalter. Düsseldorf: Droste; Tracy, Castration; and Laurence Moulinier-Brogi. 2011. La Castration dans l’occident médiéval. In Corps Outragés, Corps Ravagés de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge. Ed. Lydie Bodiou and Véronique Mehl, 189–216. Turnhout: Brepols, 189–216. For a global framework, Kathryn M. Ringrose. 2007. Eunuchs in Historical Perspective. History Compass 5. 2: 495–506. For early modern and Enlightenment Europe, Katherine Crawford. 2016. Desiring Castrates, or How to Create Disabled Social Subjects. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.2: 59–90. For studies of castrates and the repair of masculinity, see Juanita Feros Ruys. 2006. “Ut Sexu Sic Animo”: The Resolution of Sex and Gender in the ‘Planctus’ of Abelard. Medium Aevum 75.1: 6, which reaffirms Martin Irvine. 1997. Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculization. In Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 87–106. New York: Garland. In the same volume, see as well Bonnie Wheeler. Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession. 107–28. Also see Tracy. Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration, in Tracy, Castration and Culture, 12–19.
- 20.
For an exemplary complication, see the study of the complexities of gender and anatomy in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France and Italy in Leah DeVun. 2015. Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of Surgery. Osiris 30: 17–37. Two important books appeared too late in the production of this chapter for it to benefit from them: Roland Betancourt. 2020. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, and Leah DeVun. 2021. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press.
- 21.
The last twenty years have produced many studies of the masculinity of medieval celibate Christian clergy. In the introduction to her anthology Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Clare Lees established the field’s methodology by emphasizing the “multifaceted dynamic of male experience” that operated dialectically, rather than as a static hierarchy, in relationship to femininity (xx). More recently, Ruth Mazo Karras. 2008. Thomas Aquinas’s Chastity Belt: Clerical Masculinity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives. In Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe. Ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz, 52–67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, argues that the “heroic chastity” (57) of clerics was a genre of masculinity rather than, as R. W. Swanson claims, a third gender; in the same volume, Jacqueline Murray extends this discussion of the clerical sex/gender continuum in “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?”, 34–51. For specific attention to the twelfth century and castration, see Jennifer D. Thibodeaux. 2015. The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066–1300. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 33–35.
- 22.
Augustine. 1950. The City of God. Trans. Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, XIV.23, 470.
- 23.
Ibid., XIV.24, 473.
- 24.
Ibid., XIV.24, 473.
- 25.
Ibid., XIV.23, 471.
- 26.
From his Gemma Ecclesiastica, quoted in Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest, 1, and discussed at more length in 36–37.
- 27.
Murray, “Male Embodiment,” 17. Murray discusses this aspect at more length, concentrating on Abelard, in “Mystical Castration: Some Reflections on Peter Abelard, Hugh of Lincoln, and Sexual Control,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999), 76–80.
- 28.
Kenneth Gouwens. 2015. Emasculation as Empowerment: Lessons of Beaver Lore for Two Italian Humanists. European Review of History/Revue Européene d’histoire 22, no. 4: 536–62.
- 29.
Jacques-Paul Migne, ed. 1844. Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 217 vols. Paris. 178:372B [hereafter PL].
- 30.
PL 178:207A. For the English, Betty Radice, trans. 1974. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. New York: Penguin, 148.
- 31.
Wheeler, “Castration and Confession,” in Cohen and Wheeler, Becoming Male, 111.
- 32.
Quoted in Murray, “One Flesh,” 43.
- 33.
PL 175:669A, cited in Sean Eisen Murphy. 2004. The Letter of the Law: Abelard, Moses, and the Problem of Being a Eunuch. Journal of Medieval History 30: 177.
- 34.
Medievalist studies of women’s bodies, sexual desire, and holiness are happily common. A classic is Caroline Walker Bynum. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- 35.
I quote from the Vulgate translation, because this translation would have been the form of the Bible most commonly read by the forms of Christianity this chapter discusses; the English translation is the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate.
- 36.
Jack Collins, “Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity,” in Tracy, Castration and Culture, 73–86.
- 37.
See the Vetus Latina Database, available through Brepols.
- 38.
For the history of the exegesis of this verse and canon law on castration, Collins, “Castration as Symbol and Practice”; Daniel F. Caner. 1997. The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity. Vigiliae Christianae 51.4: 396–415; and Murphy, “Problem of Being a Eunuch,” 168–69.
- 39.
Eusebius. 1989. The History of the Church. Trans. Andrew Louth and G. A. Williamson. London: Penguin, 186.
- 40.
For these stories, see Murray, “Male Embodiment,” 15.
- 41.
Guibert of Nogent. 1996. A Monk’s Confession. Trans. Paul J. Archambault. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 204. For further context, Ryan D. Giles. 2010. The Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim: Hagiographic Visions of Castration in the Liber Sancti Jacobi and Milagros de Nuestra Señora. Neophilologus 94: 439–50.
- 42.
Caner, “Self-Castration,” 411; Giles, “Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim,” 443. For further treatment, Jacqueline Murray. 2019. The Battle for Chastity: Miraculous Castration and the Quelling of Desire in the Middle Ages. Journal of the History of Sexuality. 28.1: 96–116.
- 43.
PL 77:165C.
- 44.
Ross Balzaretti. 2010. Sexuality in Late Lombard Italy, C. 700–800 AD. In Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook. Ed. April Harper and Caroline Proctor. New York: Routledge, 23.
- 45.
Cited in Giles, “Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim,” 444.
- 46.
Murray, “Mystical Castration,” 84.
- 47.
Caesarius of Heisterbach. 1933. Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach. Ed. Alfons Hilka. Bonn: Hanstein, 75.
- 48.
See the discussion Ivo of Chartres (Decretum, PL 161:523D–524A, and Panormia, PL 161:1143C) in Murphy, “Problem of Being a Eunuch,” 168.69.
- 49.
For the early Middle Ages, see, for example, the detailed lists of injuries in codes collected in Katherine Fischer Drew, trans. 1973. The Lombard Laws. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, none of which concern castration; similarly, see Katherine Fischer Drew, trans. 1949. The Burgundian Code. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. For Early Medieval England, see Jay Paul Gates. 2013. The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject. In Tracy, Castration and Culture, 132. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, which observes “there is no evidence that castration was a particular concern for the Anglo-Saxons nor that they experienced any particular castration anxieties, as was the case in subsequent eras.” For a representative account of changes over time in the secular law of Early Medieval England, Lisi Oliver. 2014. Genital Mutilation in Medieval Germanic Law. In Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. Ed. Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafiorti, 48–73. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. See also Rolf H. Bremmer, “The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law,” in Tracy, Castration and Culture, 108–30 (rare, but sometimes inflicted in pre-conversion era, and much later, used to punish bestiality, criminalized with increasing severity from the twelfth century onwards); for castration as the Visigothic punishment of sodomy, Karl Zeumer, ed. 1902. Liber iudiciorum, sive Lex Visigothorum, MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum I.III.5.7, 165. Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani; Samuel Parsons Scott, trans. 1910. The Visigothic Code. Boston: Boston Book Company, 111, is a standard English translation. And for a later medieval illustration of a castration punishment, the Coutemes de Toulouse, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 9187 32v, digitized online on the Gallica website.
- 50.
Katja Weidner. 2020. Erzählen im Zwischenraum: Narratologische Konfigurationen immanenter Jenseitsräume im 12. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter, whose brief reading of Peter of Cornwall’s purgatory takes it as “zweifellos parodistisch” [undoubtedly parodic].
- 51.
Carol Zaleski. 1988. Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 51.
- 52.
Jacqueline A. Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling. 2010. Before and After Theory: Seeing Through the Body in Early Medieval England. Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1. 3: 349–51; Thomas of Cantimpré. 2008. The Collected Saints’ Lives. Trans. Barbara Newman. Turnhout: Brepols, 205.
- 53.
Karl Hempe, ed. 1897. Eine ungedruckte Vision aus karolingischer Zeit. Neues Archiv 22: 629.
- 54.
Peter of Cornwall, Book of Revelations, 209, 211.
- 55.
Anna Kłosowska. 2005. Queer Love in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 35.
- 56.
Maggie Nelson. 2012. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 95.
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Steel, K. (2021). Nothing to Lose: Logsex and Genital Injury in Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. In: Hsu, K.L., Schur, D., Sowers, B.P. (eds) The Body Unbound. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65806-9_9
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