Queer Intimacies in Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius

Abstract

Scholars have long seen the Liber confortatorius (c. 1080-2)—England’s earliest known work of spiritual instruction for an anchoress—as a site of potentially transgressive sexual desire. Written by the eleventh-century Benedictine monk Goscelin of Saint-Bertin for his English-born student, Eve, after she became a recluse at Angers, the Liber takes the form of an extended letter that attempts to recreate their former intimacy. Goscelin’s passionate language has led scholars to debate the nature of their relationship: was theirs a chaste spiritual friendship, or an illicit (and perhaps even pedophilic) sexual affair? Our essay attempts to move beyond these well-entrenched biographical debates by historicizing the Liber as the product of a tense, transitional period in Benedictine monasticism: the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when increasingly rigid reform ideologies that emphasized the dangers of earthly attachments clashed with revived ideals of Ciceronian friendship that viewed human bonds as instrumental to salvation. The Liber reflects these anxieties over human attachments in its persistent depictions of the dangers of male-female sexuality—in particular, in Goscelin’s stories of female saints threatened with rape.

But the Liber does not discount all human relationships: indeed, throughout his letter, Goscelin is preoccupied with envisioning earthly bonds that can be at once erotic and “holy, chaste, and blessed.” In an effort to resolve the risks posed by heteroaffectivity, he turns to what we will call “queer intimacies”—“queer” in the double sense that scholars have urged us to use this term, for the bonds he imagines are at once strikingly unusual and strikingly homoerotic. As Goscelin envisions alternate forms of earthly union, he explores the possibilities of the bonds between mother and daughter, between nuns, between conjoined same-sex twins, and between cross-dressed martyrs. For Goscelin, it is these queer intimacies alone that hold the potential to be both holy and erotic. Ultimately, by highlighting the Liber confortatorius’s overlooked obsession with same-sex intimacies, we demonstrate how images of queer union could paradoxically be used to rethink the contested and uncertain role of heteroaffectivity in medieval monasticism.