This short, rich book is the inaugural volume in CUP’s new Cultures of Latin series. It focuses on the rhetorical strategy of preterition, defined here as “calling attention to something scandalous precisely by claiming to pass over it” (1). This device neatly draws together the book’s key concepts of non-normative sexuality, rhetoric, and silence: preterition gestures at non-normative sexuality through its use of meaningful omission. The book’s introduction, “The Subversive Silences of Medieval Latin Rhetoric,” begins by arguing for an expanded concept of preterition which goes beyond the definitions found in classical and medieval rhetorical theory. As Townsend shows, these definitions depend on a predictable, collusive audience response in order to be understood in the way that the orator intends. The book is interested in thinking instead about what happens when this sense of a cohesive reception breaks down, as texts move through time and into the hands of readers who understand their silences differently. In the course of a valuable review of scholarship, the book situates its interventions within longstanding debates in queer studies around identity, social construction, and temporality. Townsend characterizes his reading practice as a deliberate, personal “eisegesis” (17) of the book’s textual objects, on the one hand; on the other, he insists that the possibility of doing so is generated by the texts’ own “subversive silences” (17). Not signaled here, but increasingly important as the book progresses, is the idea of a textual unconscious, which complicates this model in interesting, and perhaps underexplored, ways. At the heart of the book’s work is the question of where textual meaning resides in the text-reader relationship, and how theorizing this relationship can shed new light on practices of queer reading.
Chapter 1, “Passing Over Queerness: Sexual Heterodoxy in Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis,” discusses a twelfth-century poem which, as Townsend points out (19-21), has received less critical attention than might be warranted, given the large number of copies, and its widespread use and adaptation across a range of European vernaculars. The chapter proposes that “the poem’s strategies of preterition both reenforce readers’ active knowledge of ostentatiously omitted material and stimulate their curiosity to know more” (21). It also considers the text’s commentary tradition, focusing on a range of manuscript glosses which help us understand “how sexual heterodoxy is passed over in the Alexander tradition” (21). The chapter takes a while to arrive at the advertised discussion of sexual heterodoxy: it begins with a general account of the poem’s use of preterition, its attitude toward Alexander himself, and the use of preterition within the poem’s narrative in its ekphrasis of the shield of Darius. Townsend draws on a range of glosses in his discussion of the latter two topics in order to develop further the book’s expanded concept of preterition, incorporating “the intertextual competencies of readerly communities” (29). These moments of reception are read as responses to the poem’s “active enticement...that the reader should attend to what remains unsaid, as though that unspoken supplement were integral to the work’s meaning” (29). The chapter continues to consider intertextuality with reference to the wider Alexander tradition; the Alexandreis is “haunted” by the unspoken presence of the “other versions that it excluded” (31). At this point, the discussion of sexual heterodoxy begins; first, with the poem’s brief and elliptical mention of Alexander’s parentage, a story of “adultery and illegitimate birth” as well as “supernatural deception” (33). Townsend attends here to the complex dynamics of readerly expectation and knowledge of the broader Alexander tradition, as witnessed in the commentaries and other widely circulated Alexander narratives, in order to understand the force of Walter’s omission of any direct narration of the circumstances of Alexander’s birth. This story “haunts the Alexandreis with the specter of illegitimacy outside the order of nature” (35); so too does an elliptical reference to the eunuch Bagoas, highly abbreviated in comparison to the poem’s principal source for this section (Curtius Rufus), which describes a sexual relationship between Alexander and Bagoas (36). A few other source relationships along similar lines are considered. The evocative qualities of Walter’s elliptical references lead Townsend to doubt the poem’s stated “laudatory agenda” (40): the Alexandreis, “even as it ostensibly suppresses the sexual queerness of its subject, conjures up the specter of that queerness by calling attention to what it passes over” (41). Queerness is more than an “occasional content,” but a fundamental component of the poem’s “narrative mode” (41).
Chapter 2, “Reticence and Desire in the Devotional Works of Aelred of Rievaulx,” turns to a writer who has received a great deal of attention in queer medieval studies. The chapter discusses a range of Aelred’s spiritual treatises (the Speculum caritatis, De institutione inclusarum, De spiritali amicitia, and De Iesu puero duodenni), as well as Walter Daniel’s near-contemporary Vita Aelredi. These texts’ strategies of preterition “raise unresolved, and ultimately unresolvable questions about Aelred’s own erotic disposition” (42). Aelred’s writings have provoked “surprisingly acrimonious debates” (43) around these questions, and the chapter gives a useful account of them. Townsend argues that attending to Aelred’s use of preterition can offer a new approach to these debates, focused not on decidable questions of identity or desire, but instead on the ways in which Aelred “enables an ambiguous field of possible response” which “effects a rhetorical manipulation of his reader” (45). Aelred’s “penchant for allusive nondisclosure” (55) emerges through a series of close readings, including a passage from the Speculum caritatis which mentions lust in the course of a discussion of the soul’s affections. Townsend identifies a paradoxical quality in this passage’s use of preterition, since it is shortly followed by vivid descriptions of the youthful Aelred’s own “early immersion in moral peril” (59). An analysis of the tensions between articulation and silence in these moments leads to a discussion of Roman satire--which ruthlessly discloses what would otherwise be hidden--as a possible influence on Aelred’s vivid descriptions of vice, and as a device which functions as preterition’s contrary. The chapter concludes by analyzing the Speculum’s famous digression on the death of Aelred’s monastic brother Simon, read here as “a consummation of Aelred’s strategy...an assertion of the centrality of homosocial affect between individuals as a working out of charity in monastic life” (67), and thus as a way of legitimating intense devotional language which might otherwise be unsettling. Nonetheless, Townsend argues, these strategies fail in the end to fully dispel ambiguity. Read in this way, Aelred’s rhetoric destabilizes the terms of scholarly debates about his sexuality: identity emerges “not as a prediscursive essence to be discovered, but as an oscillation between reticence and the recognition of affective possibility” (68).
Chapter 3, “The Deadly Play of Speech and Silence in Apollonius of Tyre,” focuses on a very different kind of “illicit sexuality” from the previous chapter, “not homoerotic attraction but coercive heterosexual incest” (73), which risks equivocating between two senses of “illicit” (i.e., what was illicit then, and what is still illicit now). Although the chapter does take care to buffer this somewhat uncomfortable shift (73), a further exploration of these tensions might have been useful, especially given the book’s sustained interest in juxtaposing different historical moments of reception. Nonetheless, the importance of Townsend’s expanded model of preterition to the Historia Apollonii, a late antique prose romance, is clear: the text engages in “relentless circumlocutions around the unstated reality of incest” (73). The Historia survives in several recensions, and Townsend reads these comparatively, attending to dynamics of omission and articulation in their treatments of the story. As the chapter shows, the story revolves around a set of unspoken, and indeed unspeakable, events which nevertheless demand articulation. The most important example of this tendency is the riddle posed by Antiochus to his daughter’s suitors as a condition of her marriage, which Townsend reads in a Lacanian mode as a “self-defeating command,” with Antiochus “a traitor to the Law of the Father” in several senses (77). The riddle’s grammatical undecidability also contributes to the unspeakable nature of its solution: it “mimes the incestuous disarticulation of the familial relationships on which the patriarchal order depends” (80). Building upon the work of Elizabeth Archibald, Townsend reads the later recension RB as an “early eisegetic response to the broader interpretive gap of RA,” and thus as a response to what Archibald has described as the “specter of incest” that haunts the text’s later episodes (82). The text’s various “interpretive puzzles” can be understood in terms of “the unspoken sexual irregularity at the heart of the story” (85); like a dream, the story represses its latent content, and thus forms itself with reference to preterition. Using psychoanalytic dream theory, Townsend reads the Historia’s “illogical turns” as metonyms for Antiochus’s crime, which cannot be fully left behind even after its direct narrative consequences have been resolved. The specter of incest also haunts Apollonius’s reunion with his own daughter Tarsia, considered here with reference to the versions of Gower and Shakespeare as well as the Latin Historia. The chapter concludes by reading these unspoken filiations as “dreamlike gestures to a repressed endogamous eroticism deeper...and far less clearly defined than the manifest incest that sets its plot in motion” (93).
Chapter 4, “Hiding What Must Be Hidden: Skirting the Scandal of the Amazon Subject”, returns to the Alexandreis, this time focused entirely on a passage in which the queen of the Amazons visits Alexander. The passage’s “preteritive strategies...destabilize normatively gendered heterosexual relations by creating a space for alternative possibilities” (95). As in previous chapters, the reading productively engages questions of perspective and reception, initially around the poem’s description of the Amazon practice of mastectomy. This is brought into dialogue with lines (discussed previously in Chapter 1) which briefly describe the eunuch Bagoas. The destabilizing implication of this comparison, which theAlexandreis avoids drawing out directly, is that “social empowerment and castration threaten to approach one another to an unsettling, if not terrifying, degree” (101); the bodily markers of “empowerment...and abjection” (100) are thus socially contingent, not natural. The incomplete descriptions of Amazonian social practice and organization invite readerly imagination, and in this sense “carry the seeds of utopian speculations” (105): preterition’s gaps make space for “perverse responses sprung from perversely resistant hermeneutic affiliations” (105). Townsend considers one such strategy--that of “reading like an Amazon” (106). This mode of resistant reading creates the possibility of imagining connections with other readers, which are not directly sanctioned by the text, but which are nevertheless made possible by its preteritive rhetorical strategies. For this reason, “readings which transgress the normative categories of a text’s original cultural matrix are prepared and enabled by the texts themselves” (109). Queer reading takes up this opportunity through acts of resistant imagination, which suggest the possibility of new futures.
This is an insightful book, full of finely textured close readings, and which provides a valuable contribution to conversations in medieval queer studies. It demonstrates convincingly that medievalists interested in the queer potential of the past should think more about rhetoric and omission, and its expanded concept of preterition will be a valuable point of reference for future scholarship. There is one notable absence: the book does not mention queer opacity, illegibility, or negativity, which feels like a missed opportunity given its sustained exploration of other, quite different, forms of silence and resistance. But this is a small critique of a book which is well worth the time of any medievalist interested in queer studies, rhetorical theory, or medieval Latin literature.