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.