ABSTRACT
The European Middle Ages – as that era over against which Western modernity has most insistently constructed itself – is always already queer, imagined as primitive, exotic, dangerous, chaotic. At the same time, and contradictorily, we conceive this outmoded era as a time of stability and conservatism, dominated by an all-powerful Church and a rigidly hierarchical sociopolitical system antithetical to modernity and its characteristic values of ‘democracy’, ‘secularity’ and ‘progress’. This too makes the era, from a modern perspective, queer, if in ways dissonant with contemporary uses of the term to suggest sexualities challenging to settled norms and dominant ideologies. The question for a queer medieval studies then becomes how to bring queer theory to bear on an era that is already, in popular but also often in academic imaginings, doubly and contradictorily queer? 1
