Medieval Asexual Resonances
By Jenna McKellips, September 2022
This list is intended to supplement queer readings of medieval texts, or medieval coursework with a queer focus. Each of the sources listed below offers different approaches to how scholars might use the insights of asexuality studies to find queer asexual resonances in medieval texts and archives.
Despite the interest in preserving premarital chastity in the religious movements of the middle ages, various social conventions still mandated reproductive futurity in ways that make undesiring sex a queer deviation from the norm. This queerness, and the asexual-coding of this queerness is succinctly summed up in the first reading on this list, Megan Arkenberg’s “‘A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood’: Galahad’s Asexuality and its Significance in ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’.” In this article, Arkenberg claims that Galahad is chaste, “not as a result of moral virtue, but as a constitutive absence of sexual desire” (3). She argues that his absence of desire can be read asexually, noting that while it allows him to pursue the holy grail, it also creates a queer turn away from the courtly norms of his own society.
Medieval forms of asexuality are also found in Gwendolyn Osterwald’s “Contradictions in the Representation of Asexuality: Fiction and Reality.” This essay reads transhistorically, finding asexual resonances in a variety of texts up to modernity. However, its first reading is of Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lai of Guigemar, and it argues that the text and its narrator seek to “cure” Guigemar of his disinterest in sex, enacting a form of violence upon him.
The potential “asexual resonances” of medieval chastity narratives are also visible in Sarah Salih’s Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England. Though Salih never directly refers to asexuality, she notes the queerness of virginity, both in its ability to skew binary readings of gender, and in the way it can be “an alternative to heterosexuality” (9). Thus, this reading has been included in the bibliography and in this list to further lend credence to the historicity of asexual readings of medieval texts.
Both Theodora Jankowski’s “Pure Resistance: Queer(y)ing Virginity in William Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’ and Margaret Cavendish’s ‘The Convent of Pleasure’” and Melissa Sanchez’s “Protestantism, Marriage, and Asexuality in Shakespeare” situate their descriptions of early modern asexuality in opposition to medieval readings of asexuality (or in Jankowski’s case, “queer virginity”). Sanchez’s article also offers a few queerly asexual readings of medieval figures, including Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe. Though asexual analyses of historical literatures and periods may seem like a newer trend in scholarship, Salih’s work on the queerness of medieval virginity, published over 20 years ago, shows a longer history of investigating nonsexuality as a form of queerness, even when the word “asexuality” is not used.
In each of these selections, disinterest in sex is read as departing from mere medieval religious chastity. Instead, characters who have no sexual interest are often read as outside of heterosexual economies, avoiding reproductive futurity and heterosexual narrative structures. We can thus use these articles and chapters to start reading more medieval texts through the critical lens of queer asexuality, to re-interpret and reconsider medieval characters who enact this form of queerness, and to open up a field of inquiry into medieval texts frequently wrongly categorized as solely upholding heteronormative and allonormative values.
