I'm Bob Mills, and I'm a lecturer in the History of Art department at UCL. And I'm currently
working on medieval representations of sodomy. Priests in the middle ages expressed concerns
about giving the game away, about telling people about previously unheard-of practices,
and so despite those prescriptions against talking about sodomy in medieval texts, some
artists did try to find ways to visualise this sin that would otherwise be characterised
as unspeakable or unmentionable, or what was sometimes known in the period as a sin against
nature. One of the strategies at artists' disposal
was classical mythology - that was a way of rendering visible what otherwise would be
too sexually explicit for Christian audiences, so you could go back to stories from the classical
past and use them as a way of confronting obliquely, the sexual practices associated with sodomy.
The Myth of Ganymede, who was a youth who
was abducted by the God Jupiter and forced to become his cup-bearer in heaven was especially
significant in this regard. Ganymede is shown in a twelfth-century stone capital in the
Abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy, being snatched up by an eagle because Jupiter assumes the
form of an eagle in order to abduct Ganymede, while a snarling devil is standing alongside,
egging Jupiter on from the sidelines. Ganymede doesn't seem, in this particular carving,
to be very pleased about what's happening to him.
Medieval artists could also make reference, obliquely, to the practices associated with
sodomy while also alluding to other sins of the flesh - things like overeating, violence,
or inhospitality - that medieval theologians suggested had led to the disruption of Sodom
in the book of Genesis in the Bible. Here's an example also, from a manuscript
in the British Library, which is called the Egerton Genesis, which shows all these various
sins taking place within the walls of the city of Sodom.
Some late medieval paintings of hell were even more explicit, showing sodomites being
spit-roasted by devils, here roasting them over the infernal flames. Or the sinners could,
as in a fascinating scene from the west front of Lincoln Cathedral, on the twelfth-century
frieze there, they could be shown being forced by monsters to participate in acts of sodomy,
to effectively re-sodomise one-another in hell, against their will.
The Lincoln frieze carving, which I'm referring to, is now quite damaged, but a restored version
of the carving was put in place on the West front of the Cathedral in 2001, which enables
us to imagine what medieval people would have seen when they saw the carving, back in the
twelfth century. We see two, almost identical figures, probably both male, who are being
forced to have sexual relations with one-another. Their hair is being pulled, there's a monster
sitting behind them who seems to be forcing them into this act.
I became interested in this topic having worked previously on representations of punishment
in the Middle Ages, and I came across the images of spit-roasted sodomites in that context
when I was looking at afterlife imagery - specifically images of hell, as part of Last Judgement
scenes. So, it interested me because I didn't see
that anyone had really thought about these images in any great depth or detail, or thought
about them together, and thought about what's at stake in visualising something that, technically,
is meant to be unspeakable or unmentionable. There seemed to be a sort of paradox there
- on the one hand, something is unmentionable, on the other hand, it's spoken about voluminously,
and also, in certain contexts, visualised. So I wanted to understand what was actually
going on in that configuration.