This partridge is no longer seen as fully male because it has adopted a receptive (hence ‘submissive’) position. During intercourse, the partridges ‘forget their sex’, and the ‘losing’ bird adopts a ‘female’ role. Firstly, medieval people regarded sex between men as a transgression of gender roles. This passage demonstrates two important things. The males fight over their choice of mate, and believe they can use the losers for sex in place of the females.” For one male mounts another and in their reckless lust they forget their sex. “The partridge is a cunning and unclean bird. One of the most curious examples is that of the partridge. They illustrate what moral values medieval people ascribed to particular sexual behaviours and forms of gender presentation. Animals are used as models of good or bad behaviour and the audience is instructed to learn moral lessons from their examples.
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In content and purpose, however, they share more common ground with Aesop’s Fables than with the Encyclopedia Britannica. They were made up of individual entries on a variety of animals with each entry containing a variety of information often accompanied by an illustration and have thus been likened to modern encyclopaedias. These topics merit their own separate discussions.īestiary manuscripts are among the most famous and colourful of medieval sources. For the sake of brevity, this post will focus specifically on the depiction of ‘gay’ men its conclusions cannot necessarily be applied in the same way to the experiences of other groups under the LGBT banner such as lesbians or transgender individuals. Although there was not a clear conception of homosexual identity in the same way that there is today, men who had sex with other men were persecuted and condemned. The study of sexuality and LGBT history in the Middle Ages requires one to engage with how medieval people understood sex and gender on their own terms. The terms ‘homosexuality’ or ‘heterosexuality’ did not appear until the nineteenth century, and no-one in fifteenth-century England would have referred to themselves or others as ‘straight’, ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ or ‘transgender’. Of course, there is a need to be wary of anachronism. In fact, some of the most exciting research in medieval scholarship since the 1980s has been done on unearthing the ‘secret history’ of diverse medieval sexualities. LGBT identities are generally regarded as a ‘modern’ phenomenon, something that simply did not exist in this premodern world.
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The stereotype of medieval life involves hyper-masculine knights fighting each other for the affection of damsels, according to a code of chivalry that set strict boundaries for relations between the sexes. There is a tendency in popular histories and in the teaching of the subject at school to assume that the Middle Ages were an inherently heterosexual era. His research interests include issues of historical sexuality, the latin bestiary, and medieval travel writing. By Tim Wingard – is a graduate of the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies.