François·e Charmaille
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fcharmaille.bsky.social
François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social
95 followers 99 following 10 posts
Research fellow, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. They/them. Transing grammar; transing the climate.
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fcharmaille.bsky.social
Out today! Sodomy is "the sin against nature." But what is "nature"? "Heterosexuality" seems like the obvious answer, but such a term is anachronistic... Sodomy might be better understood as the disruption of the division between male and female.
A screenshot of the title and abstract of an article in The Chaucer Review. Sodomy Against the Binary with Chaucer’s Pardoner. Abstract: The Pardoner’s description in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has often been read in terms that reproduce the narrator’s binary assumptions about the division between male and female. The narrator reifies these assumptions by metaphorically representing the Pardoner as a horse. This equine metaphor draws on a minor trope in anti-sodomy writing of the later Middle Ages. By analyzing the animal trope’s appearance in the writings of Ovid, Peter Damian, Walter of Châtillon, and Alan of Lille, this article shows that a concern for the stability of the male/female binary is at the heart of these anti-sodomy writings. The rhetorical recourse to horses and other nonhuman animals as points of comparison attempts to restore a stable, natural status to the male/female binary. This attempt fails with the Pardoner, who is exactly what he appears to be: male and female yet neither at once.
June 13, 2025 at 4:14 PM
fcharmaille.bsky.social
Very pleased that my article on sodomy and the Pardoner will appear in what promises to be a rich and lively issue of The Chaucer Review.
The table of contents for the July 2025 issue of The Chaucer Review, A Journal of medieval studies & literary criticism. Articles include: The House of Fame and Its Gossip Mill by Marisa Libbon, The Poetics of Experience and Illusion: Ovidian Alter-Egos in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale by Jennifer Bryan, Translation and the Squire’s Fabulous “Traveling Icon” Narrative Venture by Liam O. Purdon, Sodomy Against the Binary with Chaucer’s Pardoner by me, Chaucer’s Troy in Early Modern Wales: Time and History in the Welsh Troelus a Chresyd by Jacqueline M. Burek.
May 30, 2025 at 10:37 AM