Bodies of Spirit and Bodies of Flesh: The Significance of the Sexual Practices Attributed to Heretics in the Eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries

Authors

  • Michael Barbezat ARC Fellow Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1500) University of Western Australia (UWA)

Abstract

This article examines the ways that the sexual morphology attributed to certain groups of medieval heretics illustrated what learned authorities took to be essential elements of their character. This character was spiritually inert and self-consuming. The orthodox body was a union of many members brought about through the spiritual power of caritas, which promised both a spiritual as well as an eventual material redemption. Those outside this orthodox social body and institutional Church were joined together in one fallen body that distinguished itself through gross carnality and the absence of a redeeming spiritual unity. This supposed spiritual deficiency was reflected in the sexual acts attributed to heretics that emphasized their spiritual infertility, through homosexual intercourse and the literal cannibalism of the fruits of heterosexual intercourse, often taking the place of the spiritual communion between believers and the Christian God. The inversion at the heart of heretics’ identity reflected how they had turned away from the spiritual unity of God and believer for an eternal immersion in a fallen understanding and love of matter.

Author Biography

  • Michael Barbezat, ARC Fellow Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1500) University of Western Australia (UWA)
    I am an historian of medieval European intellectual, religious, and cultural history. I received my Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in November 2013.

    My work focuses on connections between religious ideologies and conceptions of society, geography, violence, and identity in the Middle Ages. In particular, I am fascinated by how the boundaries drawn between spaces, ideas, and states structure individual experience. My work to date has interrogated the relationships between matter and spirit, reality and the imagination, language and meaning, and the historian and the past. My current work explores the ways that ideas of Hell, Purgatory and the Apocalypse influenced medieval conceptions of the experience of minority groups.

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Published

2016-09-12

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 3 (2016)

Section

Studies