ABSTRACT
In a celebrated series of essays and monographs, Michael Camille sought to dismantle the authority of iconography as an interpretative strategy that had dominated medievalist art history since the nineteenth century. Camille’s work may be understood as an extension of a sexual-aesthetic tradition in medieval studies in which queer scholars found their sexual, moral, and ethical subjectivity to be “normalized” within a chaotic and “queer” Middle Ages. As Camille described it in 1994, his early imagistic sexuality was formed principally from the images in the books he signed out of his local library. Camille’s interest in the marginal and queer is one strand – albeit a deeply subjective one of a broadly socialist agenda within much of his work. Typical of the greatest medievalists, the rhetorical power of Camille’s writing drew from the author’s typological identification with the Middle Ages as a mirror of sorts of the modern present, a period of radical subjectivity, and social, aesthetic, and sexual play.
