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Sexuality, Acceptability, Risk, and Medieval Bohemia

Someone commented on my Hansry fic recently about how a good number of fics in this fandom apparently feature the sort of modern protestant homophobia emblematic of the United States. This was baffling to me.

More recently I've seen a bit of backlash against this rather normative, America-centric approach to the historical homophobia (deeply entrenched in Catholicism, mind you) that they would have been subject to back then. And, as is quite normal with the internet, naturally the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. Jokes were made and then taken seriously by others. I've now seen sentiments floating around like "oh they wouldn't have cared at all," (not on tumblr) which is wild to me.

My doctoral studies have to do with queerness in the High Middle Ages, so seeing as I've spent the last several years of my life living on archive.org, knee-deep in this research, I feel like it's my academic responsibility to correct the record some. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.

All my sources are listed in the text (in the case of art) or at the very end of the post. For those of you just interested in what all of this means for Hansry, feel free to jump down to the purple heading.

I will start by saying that the "queer medieval utopia" you're looking for didn't exist. The closest you're going to get to that is the late 11th century / early 12th century, and even then there were limits to this general social acceptability. Paris and Florence were commonly considered to be gay dens of iniquity by people outside of those places, but even that was a bit of an exaggeration.

So where does this misconception come from?

Within the Catholic landscape, the body was considered separate from the spirit. Only one's "mystic sensorium" was supposed to be involved in spiritual intercourse with Christ and each other, and the overlap of the real and the ideal was… problematic at times, a genuine threat to chastity. Physical affection was meant to not broach certain limits. Kissing was acceptable. Metaphors were acceptable. In ancient Christianity, it was normal for women to kiss other women and for men to kiss other men as part of mass in the name of exchanging the kiss of peace, the pax. The idea here was to meet with the Spirit of Christ. Ambrose likened it to "lovers who, unsatisfied with the mere enjoyment of the lips, kiss so deeply as to interchange their spirits with one another." Which is all well and good, but this leaves a lot of leeway. How much physical affection was considered acceptable?

Anselm, the closest thing we have to a gay man of this time, would write things like this, in this case a letter addressed to two biological brothers that he hoped to join him in the monastic life:

"My eyes long to see your faces most beloved; my arms stretch out to your embraces; my lips long for your kisses; whatever remains to me of life desires your company . . . . Oh, how my love burns in my marrow . . . . [In coming to Bec] you have fused my soul with yours. If you now leave me, our joint soul will be torn apart, it can never again become two."

He had never met them before, nor should this suggest that they were about to enter a sexual relationship. In fact, around this time we see quite a few such expressions of affection coming out of the monastic space. Alcuin, writing to Arno of Salzburg, felt entirely comfortable writing that his love could not be prevented, even in the face of death, from licking Arno's innermost parts, a reference here (most likely) to Christ's side wound. In another letter, Alcuin is even more overt:

"It is exquisitely sweet to remember your love and intimacy, holy father; I wish the dear moment would come when I might embrace the shoulders of your love with the arms of my longing for you. . . . with what speedy hands I would rush into your fatherly embrace, with what pressing lips I would kiss not only your eyes and ears and mouth, but each knuckle of each finger, of each toe, not once, but many, many times!"

It would be extremely easy to assume that these letters suggested more than meets the eye, but historically speaking, as far as we know, this was not the case. Because this level of affection was considered to be in line with the "Christian" thing to do between brothers (no, I'm not joking). And there were harsh punishments if you breached these limits. Bear in mind, these letters could easily be seen by others!

Moreover, it should be noted that we don't see this level of affection outside of the monastic space (though it does still come up, albeit to a much lesser extent). You can think of it as code switching, essentially. Verbiage that would be considered insanely sexual in one space would not be considered as such within a monastic context prior to the shift in the 12th century.

Some scholars suggested that the use of such language implies ignorance or naivety about how this physical affection could look to the outside world, but we do know that Anselm at one point became worried enough that he might be misunderstood that he censored himself after leaving Bec for Canterbury. Even if his inclinations were chaste, he knew they could be viewed through the lens of homosexuality.

The ideal sexual state for a person to be in at this time was rooted in asceticism: chastity in the face of desire. You'd think asexuality would be a quick workaround for that, but unfortunately the lack of desire would just mean a lack of necessary effort on that person's part. Bear in mind, suffering is what's rewarded here. A gay man plagued with homosexual desires is just being tested by God. By denying himself those desires, he's rising in the ranks of holiness. A great example of this is Brother Lucas from KCD1:

According to the Rule of Pachomius, kissing boys on the lips was forbidden and punished by whipping, imprisonment, fasting, shaving, and six months of humiliation. In Fructuosus of Braga's Rule, a monk kissing or even being "too attentive to young men or boys would result in a very similar six month sentence as well as six additional months of manual labor, separated from his brethren, always under watch of at least two spiritual brothers. Never again was he allowed to enjoy private conversation or companionship with those younger than him.

"But Tam!" you might say. "This is just about monks! What about real people?"

I'm so glad you asked! Because we know that as well!

Penitentials, which were quite in vogue until around the 11th century and then again after the passing of Lateran IV in the early 13th century, were very punishing of all manner of sexuality, but especially homosexual acts, and, among them, especially oral sex. (The mouth is considered, to a certain extent, sacred. Don't ask me why, that alone is like twenty pages in my dissertation, though I could be lowballing tbh.) The Penitential of Theodore punishes it with 7 years of harsh penance and 15 years if the practice is habitual. Sometimes, however, it was "until the end of life" and considered to be the "worst evil," worse than fornication with one's mother. Harsh!

Ye olde penitentials were used as guidelines for later confession as well as those from before the 12th century. Conveniently for us, the late, great James A. Brundage came up with a fantastic chart/guide on when and how it was acceptable to have sex at all:

Did people follow this? My god, absolutely not. We wouldn't have the confessional records if this wasn't a problem in the realm of ~sin. But the guidelines were there and expected to be adhered to.

Don't get me wrong, the late 11th / early 12th century was a watershed moment in history in terms of overall acceptability of queerness, a time when Ovid and other Ovidian literature flourished. Punishments were rarely enforced. But the come-down from that era led us to a very rough landing. Lateran III kicked off the official canon ratification of outlawing homosexuality explicitly, and this, together with the outlawing of clerical marriage and the sudden flourishing of courtly love as a genre, led to a very dramatic shift in society from homosocial to heterosexual (which is, incidentally, what my dissertation is about).

The long 12th century was a red letter event in terms of history, not least because some of history's most notorious homophobes spread their ideas like wildfire. I am, of course, talking about Alain de Lille, renowned author of De planctu Naturae ("The Complaint of Nature"), which reminded everyone that homosexuality was against nature, and Peter Damian, who doesn't even deserve being commented on. The idea of homosexuality being "against nature" was far from new. The early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome condemned it pretty outrightly, and in the 13th century St. Thomas Aquinas was more than happy to further entrench the idea. Here, sodomy disrupts nature so much as to dissolve the soul.

We saw this in literature as well. Dante's Divine Comedy (early 14th c) slapped sodomites into the 7th layer of hell, but a real standout here is the Debate Between Ganymede and Helen, where the two have a very lengthy argument wherein she convinces Ganymede (often associated with homosexuality) that heterosexuality is infinitely superior to the alternative. She throws in such lovely arguments as insisting that he at least respect Nature, that he's been deceived by well-disguised filth, that he's been squandering his love between the thighs of men, and that he's been treating himself like human garbage as a result. In the end, he suddenly sees his crime for what it is, and the gods agree with him, stating that they've now also come to their senses. Sodomy is thus left behind by the gods and the choir swells in cheer at this tremendous success.

Canon law more or less exclusively had its grubby little fingers in the pies of what was and wasn't deemed acceptable in terms of sex until about the early-14th c, while afterward the government was delighted to also get involved in your bedroom activities. Particularly in the late 14th century homosexuality was increasingly legislated against, and in increasingly brutal ways at that. This wonderful and not at all problematic marriage of church and state is how we ended up with the Trials of the Knights Templar.

Let's say you're King Philip IV. The people have been revolting, you're running low on funds, you owe the Templars as it is, and you have a penchant for pogroms. You want money and land. What do you do? Well, naturally you write a letter to the pope about how you have all these horrible suspicions about these people you employ and who have come to your aid quite often!

Boy, oh boy! Wasn't that a fun time for them. Before, they'd been well-respected and well-off, supported by the king, with zero doubt in their respectability. Naturally, it all came tumbling down with that letter. Because the investigation was ready to find them at fault for something no matter what, under pain of torture of course. There's a particularly striking letter from a father to his daughter, written during the Bamberg witch trials (much later), wherein he explained that, after a particularly rough torture session, the executioner pulled him aside and told him this: "Sir, I beg you, for God's sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to; and, even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not even if you were an earl, but one torture will follow after another until you say you are a witch. Not before that will they let you go, as you may see by all their trials, for one is just like another."

Were the Templars recreationally homosexual? Maybe. For their sake, I sure hope so, because then they might have at least had some fun before going out. But either way, they were arrested, their territory, funds, and belongings seized, were convicted of heresy, sodomy, and black magic, and eventually burned at the stake. Two men were later burned at the stake as relapsed heretics after saying that they'd only confessed under duress and were actually innocent.

It even led to fun art like this one in 1350:

De Longuyon, Jacques. Voeux du Paon Manuscript. 1350. Morgan Library and Museum, New York. G.24 fol. 70r.

It was also around this time also that homosexuality was increasingly associated not only with heresy, but also with bestiality, suggesting that this crime against nature was effectively also a crossing of special boundaries (species-based, not extraordinary). In line with this, while homage to one's liege used to be sworn with a kiss on the lips (!!), over the course of the 14th century that was summarily done away with as well in a change that quite frankly swept across Europe (and we all wept).

In 1327, Edward II, who had a few boyfriends, was supposedly murdered by having a red hot poker shoved up his rectum. Even if this didn't happen, the chroniclers wanted us to believe it, and knowing what we do about Edward's sexual proclivities, it seems like this was a Statement if nothing else.

Where Bologna used to punish homosexuality with a fine, after the late 13th century the punishment was death by burning. The Portuguese, meanwhile, castrated convicted homosexuals and then, three days later, had them hanged by the feet until dead. In Siena, death by hanging was also the answer, but in this case, it was hanging by the dick until dead (not kidding). A particularly horrifying case was this one, happening just six years after when KCD canon takes place:

Which reminds us that this was most likely an issue that very much associated the clergy (known to be corrupt, especially around this time!). You'll recall the little comments made about this in the game, like Godwin casually committing heresy in front of the whole crew. "Do you think you need a priest for God to hear you?" Well geez, Godwin, according to the Catholic Church, you sure as shit fucking do! What a fantastic and not at all risky thing to say!

(Sidenote, this one is particularly upsetting to me personally in a fandom context because, not only is Augsburg not far from Bohemia, it really reminds me of the many associations between Hans and a caged bird.)

All of which isn't to say that sodomy didn't take place. Boy did it fucking ever. A great example of this comes from out of Switzerland, where, in 1475, a priest reportedly told his lover that "if everybody who committed [the act of sodomy] was burnt at the stake, not even fifty men would survive in Basel." ("Vnd solt man alle die so das tuend verbrennen, es bliben nit funffzig mannen jn Basel.") So, 1% of Basel. This is almost certainly a massive fucking exaggeration that this man pulled out of his ass in order to convince his partner that sodomy is fine, actually, but it does tell us something about the perception, if not the actual prevalence of sodomy in urban centers. (So, you know, if anyone needs to justify that Jadder have fucked at least once, if not more… when in Kuttenberg...)

It should be noted that Basel was very lax in terms of punishing homosexuality, but that was by and large not the most common outcome, as homosexuality was generally associated with divine punishment (I'm sure you've heard that drivel yourself before even in the modern day). Hilariously, it was the generally held belief that if someone learned of "the vice against nature" they'd naturally want to do it, and so priests were advised never to talk about it, even to preach.

So then, what does this mean for Hansry and co?

It means that this was at worst very much a fucking crime that you could very much be convicted for, in brutal fucking fashion at times, and at best the quiet part that you don't say out loud. But even then, it was fucking risky. Riskier if you're a member of the clergy (do recall how worried Brother Lucas was about his secret getting out, despite having never committed the sin himself), but risky even if you're not. All you have to do to see this reflected in canon is to look at Barnaby, the herbalist/hermit. As he explained it, he turned down a girl, she complained to her brother, and "he put two and two together":

Remember how I said that homosexuality was increasingly associated with bestiality? I find Barnaby's word choice fascinating here. Animals like him.

Of course, he beat them up and thus... uh, was able to survive:

Not that it didn't massively affect his quality of life. There's a reason he's a hermit! After all, he was unwelcome no matter where he went, no doubt because the brother and his friends ensured that this knowledge spread:

You might say, oh, it's different among the nobility! And to a certain extent, you're correct. Talking to the scribe in Troskowitz, he at one point gets to a part in the story about George the Lion of Wartenberg where he says this:

And then later, at the banquet where Hans loses his mind from jealousy, it comes up quite a lot in the conversation with Black Bartosch. First, he brings up Florian of Lomnitz:

And then, of course, we get the legendary conversation that follows, where the comment about Florian's sexuality makes Henry question Bartosch about his own:

It's soooo subtle. So, so easy to turn to plausible deniability. If anyone questions it, you can easily argue that your intentions were entirely chaste. And Henry can ignore it or even outright respond with a claim of heterosexuality:

But he can't question it like he can with the scribe:

Where the scribe then brushes it off as nothing and refuses to elaborate:

Even here this is a case of IYKTYK, like homosexuality is a club and in order to enter you have to know what's up. Because if you don't know and have to be informed, that presents a risk, namely that of suspicion being cast on you. Why do you know this information? What were you doing at this sodomitical devil's sacrament?

Honestly, at least among the nobility I'd liken it a bit to prohibition, but on a much less... widespread level. Oh, and literally everyone and anyone could be a cop. You could get away with it until you were caught. The risk was just a lot more pronounced. Even with Edward II the consequence of the very accurate rumors surrounding his sex life was public denunciation and possibly a poker up his ass. And if you're a noble involved with a commoner, multiply the risk exponentially, which is unfortunately relevant for both Hansry and Jamuel. If it really was as casually acceptable as some people claim it to have been (again, not on tumblr, I'm not here to stir up drama), I think Henry wouldn't have necessarily pushed Hans away, nor do I think they would have been as careful in their end-game conversation about what they do and don't say.

If anyone has any questions on this, tangentially-related topics, my sources, or literally anything else, by all means feel free to ask. I have the resources at my fingertips and the research very much at the forefront of my mind and will for the foreseeable future. On request, I've also added a list of further reading after my list of sources if anyone is curious to learn more of this for themselves.

Sources used:

Abraham, Erin V. Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society: Childhood, Sexuality, and Violence in the Early Penitentials, Amsterdam University Press, 2021

Anselm. The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Translated by Walter Fröhlich, Cistercian Publications, 1990.

Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 1965.

Major, J. Russell. “‘Bastard Feudalism’ and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 17, no. 3, 1987, pp. 509–35. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/204609.

Mills, Robert. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 2015

Moore, R. I. The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe. Profile Books, 2014.

Murray, Jacqueline, and Konrad Eisenbichler, editors. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West. University of Toronto Press, 1996.

Perella, Nicolas J. The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes. University of California Press, 1969.

Puff, Helmut. “Localizing Sodomy: The ‘Priest and Sodomite’ in Pre-Reformation Germany and Switzerland.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 165–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704215.

Puff, Helmut. Lust, Angst Und Provokation: Homosexualität in Der Gesellschaft. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993.

Southern, R.W., Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Stehling, Thomas. Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship. Garland Pub, 1984.