Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery

Abstract

It has been roughly 20 years since historian John Boswell dubbed St Aelred the ‘gay’ abbot of Rievaulx.¹ While this naming may be located in a very particular time and place, over the past decade a considerable amount of work on the abbot has been produced. More recently, Brian Patrick McGuire has written a lengthy essay on the awareness of same-sex desire in Aelred, as well as a biography of the saint.² In 1844, a lengthy study of Aelred of Rievaulx by John Dobree Dalgairns appeared in Newman’s Lives of the English Saints. Dalgairns was a colleague of the future cardinal at Littlemore, Newman’s pseudomedieval, quasi-monastic community of friends. Littlemore was organized in the early 1840s, shortly after religious houses first reappeared in the post-Reformation Church of England. Dalgairns was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 29 September 1845 by Father Dominic the Passionist. The same clergyman converted Newman on 9 October of that year. Dalgairns later became a priest and a member of Newman’s Birmingham Oratory. In his biography of Aelred, Dalgairns emphasizes the abbot’s devoted friendships, his charity, kindness and compassion. St Aelred is important in considering the place of men in Anglo- and Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Throughout this period and well into the twentieth century, many monks and abbots have adopted this name in religious life. In this essay, I wish to argue that an awareness of same-sex desire was present in Victorian historiography of medieval monasticism and in the practice of community foundation. The monastery in nineteenth-century England — particularly as it is seen in relation to models from the earlier Church — may be deemed a queer space.