Phillips Kim M - Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History

Introduction: Sex before Sexuality

A woman bends over a man in a woodland glen. She is elegantly dressed in a low-cut rose-coloured gown, tight around her high breasts and narrow waist, then falling in fullness over a swelling belly. Her golden hair is fashionably dressed with a pointed kerchief. She gazes to the horizon as her right hand grasps the reclining man behind his back and her left reaches boldly under his raised tunic to fondle his naked thigh, or something higher up. We notice two troubled older men at the right of the scene, one raising his eyes and gesturing with dismay. The ladys right knee is raised to the young mans chest, pinning him to the ground. As he attempts to rise we see that his hands are bound behind his back. He is a handsome youth with fleshy lips and thick curling hair and his rich blue tunic is lined with fur. At first glance he might be thought to be rising to meet the embrace of the lady, gazing at her with abandoned desire, but at last one notices the bloody object he has spat at her face his own tongue and the bloody trail issuing from his mouth.

This scene from the Limbourg brothers early fifteenth-century masterpiece, the Belles Heures , made for Jean de France, Duc de Berry (13401416), illuminates the story of St Paul the Hermit. Its accompanying text briefly tells the story: Saint Paul, the first hermit, under the vehement persecution of Decius, saw a certain Christian bound to a pleasurable place ( inter amena ligatus ), and caressed by an impure woman. Whereupon he bit off his tongue and spat in her face. To escape the anguish of temptation he [Paul] fled from Rome.

St Paul the Hermit (not to be confused with St Paul the Apostle) is a minor figure in Christian hagiography and reasons for including his life in the Belles Heures are unclear. Most likely it gains a place simply to provide a vivid moment between the image cycles from the lives of the better-known figures St Jerome (who wrote Pauls hagiography) and St Anthony (who succeeded Paul as a pioneer among Christian hermits and is likely the second of the two older observers in the image in question). The books owner, the Duc de Berry, younger brother of King Charles V (d. 1382) and uncle of Charles VI (d. 1422), was an important political figure of his day but is now mainly remembered for his lavish patronage of the arts. His sexual interests and preferences have also been subject to recent scholarly interest. Some art historians have suggested, taking their cues from hints in medieval texts, that he might have been homosexual. Michael Camille has argued instead that his desire for bodies should be seen in relationship to his connoisseurship of images and things. Living in an age when, as we will document at length in the present book, homosexuality, heterosexuality and the other sexual categories familiar to us did not yet exist and women, youths and children were available for the possession of more powerful men, Jean took delight in the faces and bodies of lower-ranking androgynous young males in a manner congruent with the pleasure he took in the books and objets made for him by the greatest artists of his day. This pleasure, moreover, could sit happily alongside his apparent taste for very young or lower-class women.

What lessons or pleasures might the scene of St Paul the Hermit Sees a Christian Tempted have offered its owner? As a medieval Christian, Jean may have read it straight: that is, as an illustration of the temptations of the flesh and the virtues of carnal renunciation. All sexual response was understood in Jeans day and for several preceding centuries to be tainted to some extent with sin. The seductive femme fatale was a recurrent trope of Christian literature on sin figured most prominently in the first woman, Eve, and her role in the fall of humankind and the seductive woman of this scene could be sister to the dancing girls seen tormenting the daydreaming St Jerome a few folios earlier. The youths bleeding tongue is, by implication, a form of ejaculation. Another reading could pick up on Jeans apparently homoerotic inclinations (even if these were not his sole sexual tastes) and see amusing connotations in the handsome youths violent rejection of the temptress.