This beautiful book documents the Met Cloisters art exhibit of the same name, examining northern European art objects from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries in the context of medieval Christian ideas about sex, desire, and love. Edited by Melanie Holcomb, Curator at the Met, and Nancy Thebaut, Art Professor at the University of Oxford, the book concludes with a series of short essays by other contributors. Gorgeous images fill the book, providing a stunning overview of late medieval Christian representations of desire.
The volume walks its reader through the exhibition in three essays, examining ideas about desire and love. The coverage is remarkable, and footnotes refer the reader to a much larger world of scholarship on medieval love and desire. The references tend a bit towards recent work, but this is meant to be an overview, rather than comprehensive.
The first essay, by Holcomb and Thebaut together, examines “A Queer Middle Ages.” It is a welcome surprise for a medieval art exhibition guide from a major institution to start with queerness. The framing yields valuable insights as it examines manuscript images from courtly romance, illuminations depicting Christ’s vulval side wound, obscene pilgrim badges, and Christian devotional images of the Crucifixion.
The following essay, “Bodies in Flux” by Thebaut, masterfully considers medieval images and ideas of bodily transformation, such as the Queen of Sheba asking Solomon a riddle, God creating Eve, sexual images of Eve's temptation, portrayals of potentially trans saints Saint Marin(e) and Saint Wilgefortis, and depictions of Simeon Bachos (the so-called “Ethiopian eunuch” from the Acts of the Apostles). The essay smartly attends to how to consider images of desire in the late Middle Ages in the context of a period when “the policing of bodies and acts deemed ‘unnatural’ was on the rise” (28). Questions of race, the reinforcement of the gender binary, and the surveillance and punishment of sodomy (that most contradictory and capacious category) intertwine in this essay.
Holcomb’s “Medieval Erotica” chapter looks at various objects and their connection to erotic experience in the Middle Ages, including combs, belts, boxes, and writing tablets. The smart discussion of the potential erotics of delousing, writing, and giving gifts makes frequent literary allusions to support the analysis of objects. People combing each other’s hair, offering flowers, gifting belts, Richard Lionheart sharing a bed with Philip II, love letters between women, and Phyllis riding the philosopher Aristotle like a horse are all examined for their erotic possibilities.
The next chapter, “Marital and Mystical Unions,” has Holcomb and Thebaut engage with various representations of union in medieval art and literature, from men and women marrying each other to them marrying Jesus Christ. It also discusses the relative reticence of medieval artists to depict sexual intercourse. Instead, they examine depictions of “spiritual arousal” and consider how, if “[m]edieval people viewed sexual intercourse as an act of penetration,” we might seek metaphors for intercourse in acts of seemingly non-sexual penetration, including a “hunter thrusting his lance through a unicorn into the lap of a maiden” or depictions of Christ being penetrated by a lance (86, 89). I found this chapter’s boundary-pushing work particularly impressive.
Following this chapter come a series of brief essays by other contributors, each discussing a specific piece of artwork in terms of sexuality and gender. Karl Whittington considers a statue of Saint Sebastian through a beautiful analysis of queer eroticism and its complicated relationship to Sebastian’s martyrdom and his suffering. Emma Le Pouésard smartly examines a fourteenth-century ivory casket’s busy carved scenes, which portrays erotic acts both directly and in animalistic metaphors, resulting in “a riot of human and nonhuman relationships and power dynamics” (108). Bryan C. Keene looks at queer engagement with the suffering Christ, as exemplified in a fifteenth-century painting, which Keene cleverly pairs with Catherine Opie’s 2023 photographic work Vatican: Blood. In the exciting following essay, Clovis Maillet unpacks a depiction of St. Jerome in a dress as “offering one of the few existing visual depictions of a form of transfemininity in the fifteenth century” (117). Finally, Scott D. Miller’s essay hauntingly reads a pair of memento mori paintings from the late fifteenth century that show a young couple caught in an act of wooing and the sample couple after death, rotting and eaten by various creatures, in order to depict what the painter saw as “the ultimate value of courtly love and its promises” (118).
The collection does have several shortcomings. It is Eurocentric and Christian-centric, which limits its ability to represent the entire period. While the collection at times considers Christian Europeandepictions of sexuality among non-Europeans and non-Christians, it does not offer those others a place to speak. Small moments throughout the collection hint at contact between European Christians with non-Europeans and non-Christians—the prevalence of elephant ivory objects, the similarity of a cloth of honor in a painting to “Islamic weaving”—but none of these connections are pursued, and European Christians stand alone on the world stage in this book and exhibit’s portrayal of love and sex (110). The book’s discussion of race (indexed a bit reductively as “race or skin color” [141]) is also a little limited, beginning only when the discussion turns towards Black people and citing primarily white scholars and white-edited collections.
Another small area of dissatisfaction for me was how the book, at times, seemed reluctant to state that various examples of same-sex love could be romantic or sexual. The essays hedges whether Richard the Lionheart and Philip II sharing a bed and eating from the same dish due to their love or a love letter between two women where one fondly remembers “with what words of joy you caressed my little breasts” could be sexual or romantic (60). While it is certainly true people “will never know what [Richard and Philip] did in that bed” and that the letter’s “reference to kisses and caresses may refer to the deeply felt sensations of affection or to actual past acts[,]” such scholarly hesitation does not occur with any heterosexual examples (48, 61). William Burgwinkle’s excellent essay “Why It Matters That Richard Lionheart Was Queer” pushes back on such reticence to name queer desire in the past. [1] Likewise, the book’s discussion of depictions of Jesus’ union with John the Baptist is a little too quick to dismiss the possibility of medieval readers seeing them “as condoning same-sex marriage or sexual relations between men” (101). Engagement here with John Boswell’s classic Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe would have complicated and strengthened this narrative. Though Boswell has been taken to task for reading medieval “brotherhood ceremonies” as romantic or sexual, Roland Betancourt uncovered evidence showing that some Church figures thought these ceremonies promoted same-sex desire. [2] The book could be bolder here in its analysis.
Nonetheless, Spectrum of Desire shows how far medieval studies has progressed in the past few decades in terms of thinking through queer and trans studies lenses. The curators have assembled both an exciting group of art objects and an exciting group of scholars. The results are impressive, and I believe we will be thinking about—and with—this exhibit and book for many years to come.
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Notes:
1. William Burgwinkle, “Why It Matters That Richard Lionheart Was Queer,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 33, no. 3 (2024): 340-360.
2. Roland Betancourt, Byzantine intersectionality: Sexuality, gender, and race in the Middle Ages. (Princeton University Press, 2020), 123.