@fcharmaille.bsky.social
Research fellow, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. They/them. Transing grammar; transing the climate.
This has everything to do with horses' bones, and with the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Read about it in The Chaucer Review.
muse.jhu.edu/article/961888
A screenshot of the title and abstract of an article in The Chaucer Review. Sodomy Against the Binary with Chaucer’s Pardoner. Abstract: The Pardoner’s description in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has often been read in terms that reproduce the narrator’s binary assumptions about the division between male and female. The narrator reifies these assumptions by metaphorically representing the Pardoner as a horse. This equine metaphor draws on a minor trope in anti-sodomy writing of the later Middle Ages. By analyzing the animal trope’s appearance in the writings of Ovid, Peter Damian, Walter of Châtillon, and Alan of Lille, this article shows that a concern for the stability of the male/female binary is at the heart of these anti-sodomy writings. The rhetorical recourse to horses and other nonhuman animals as points of comparison attempts to restore a stable, natural status to the male/female binary. This attempt fails with the Pardoner, who is exactly what he appears to be: male and female yet neither at once.
Out today! Sodomy is "the sin against nature." But what is "nature"? "Heterosexuality" seems like the obvious answer, but such a term is anachronistic... Sodomy might be better understood as the disruption of the division between male and female.
13.06.2025 16:13 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
The table of contents for the July 2025 issue of The Chaucer Review, A Journal of medieval studies & literary criticism. Articles include: The House of Fame and Its Gossip Mill by Marisa Libbon, The Poetics of Experience and Illusion: Ovidian Alter-Egos in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale by Jennifer Bryan, Translation and the Squire’s Fabulous “Traveling Icon” Narrative Venture by Liam O. Purdon, Sodomy Against the Binary with Chaucer’s Pardoner by me, Chaucer’s Troy in Early Modern Wales: Time and History in the Welsh Troelus a Chresyd by Jacqueline M. Burek.
Very pleased that my article on sodomy and the Pardoner will appear in what promises to be a rich and lively issue of The Chaucer Review.
30.05.2025 10:37 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Yes! This is a great way of putting it.
12.05.2025 16:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Also enjoyed how some of what you were saying, especially in the context of historic ideas of gender, overlapped with this Tumblr post, but like, with an actual academic basis. an-ruraiocht.tumblr.com/post/7790442...
09.05.2025 11:15 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0No worries, I'm so glad you could make it, and will welcome your thoughts whenever you are able to formulate them
09.05.2025 11:02 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Friday 2 May, 5pm, in Cambridge: I will be speaking at the ASNC Research Seminar, about The Contingent Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are generative, are worth engaging with, because they are inessential. I'm very excited to share this work.
GR04 in the Faculty of English.
🥳 It’s publication day! 🥳
IMPOSSIBLE RECOVERY is now available to buy and online via institutional access.
Read more about the book and buy a copy at 20% off with code CUP20: cup.columbia.edu/book/impossi...
Or access online: www.degruyter.com/document/doi...
Writers over the course of the Middle Ages interpreted the classical myth of Tiresias's sex change as an allegory for the cycle of the seasons. This led to the emergence of a strange notion: that the seasons have genders, that the climate is trans.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Were there medieval medical theories of intersex? Was there a distinction between sex and gender? How were humors related to sex/gender? What does it do to a woman if she has too much greenness in her body?
I wrote about it in Exemplaria, and it's Open Access.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Since I've recently joined I may as well share some of my previous work.
What kind of political work do we perform by claiming people in the premodern past were "gay"? How can an encounter with the past transform us? I wrote about it in Diacritics. muse.jhu.edu/article/845151
Very happy to see The Languages of Queer History, now online!
notchesblog.com/category/phi...
