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A quixotic jaunt through history!
Having woken up obscenely early via the magical powers of jetlag, I am engaged in a mildly quixotic quest to find the historical sources that claim that Richard I, Lionheart, was gay.
Progress so far: the evidence seems to be from a public confession that Richard gave in Sicily before leaving for the Crusades in the hopes of getting his troops' morale up, and for getting the Crusade sanctified. In the confession he admits to all kinds of fun and exciting sins of the debaucherous sort, supposedly up to and including sodomy. I have not yet found a copy of the confession itself, and suspect that even if I do it will turn out to be in French, since Richard never spoke English.
The first historian to claim that Richard was queer was J.H. Harvey in his 1948 book The Plantagenets, pages 33-34 of which every other source I've found cites. Unfortunately, The Plantagenets is out of print, not in the SFPL card catalog, and has snippet view only on Google Reader. Also, some review in Speculum that I could only get the first two paragraphs of on JSTOR says that it makes all its claims without having citations, which is hardly useful for my purposes.
Wikipedia's totally bullshit and unreadable passage on Richard's sexuality (which I am planning on re-writing once I've completed my quixotic quest) claims that the major "Richard was gay" scholar was Jean Flori. I've now got Flori's biography ordered on ILL and expect to have it in a couple of days--hopefully it will have what I need.
Surprisingly helpful so far has been the primary "Richard was totally not gay" scholar, John Gillingham. He's at least cited the sources I want to find, but his argument is mostly "people claim that Richard was gay because he only hung out with dudes. Based on that evidence almost every historical monarch is gay." He also points out that the description of how pretty Richard is was by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who criticized at least two other monarchs for being gay but neglected to criticize Richard. At least in the excerpt on Google Books, Gillingham doesn't seem to address the question of the Penitence. I decided not to check out the Gillingham at the library yesterday because it didn't have "homosexuality" in its index, and I think that was probably a wise decision, although I may go back for the couple of pages surrounding the Google Books excerpt.
Wish list:
- English translation of the penitence. It sounds like really fun reading.
- The Harvey, or at least pp 33-34.
(I totally roped a reference librarian at the SFPL into my quest yesterday. I think she was entertained. Side note: I want to marry the third floor of that library. Everything I want is there--biography, poetry, theatre, the GLBT Room. With the exception of fiction, I have never gone to that library on a quest and wound up on any other floor.)
(Hey, remember a week ago when I was eating subpar felafel in Akko, the lame modern city that used to be Richard's capital Acra, between a hike to see Montfort Castle and a visit to a sircar winery? That was sweet. Much less awesome than driving through the valley where Saladin wiped out the Second Crusade, but somehow charming in its banality.)
Progress so far: the evidence seems to be from a public confession that Richard gave in Sicily before leaving for the Crusades in the hopes of getting his troops' morale up, and for getting the Crusade sanctified. In the confession he admits to all kinds of fun and exciting sins of the debaucherous sort, supposedly up to and including sodomy. I have not yet found a copy of the confession itself, and suspect that even if I do it will turn out to be in French, since Richard never spoke English.
The first historian to claim that Richard was queer was J.H. Harvey in his 1948 book The Plantagenets, pages 33-34 of which every other source I've found cites. Unfortunately, The Plantagenets is out of print, not in the SFPL card catalog, and has snippet view only on Google Reader. Also, some review in Speculum that I could only get the first two paragraphs of on JSTOR says that it makes all its claims without having citations, which is hardly useful for my purposes.
Wikipedia's totally bullshit and unreadable passage on Richard's sexuality (which I am planning on re-writing once I've completed my quixotic quest) claims that the major "Richard was gay" scholar was Jean Flori. I've now got Flori's biography ordered on ILL and expect to have it in a couple of days--hopefully it will have what I need.
Surprisingly helpful so far has been the primary "Richard was totally not gay" scholar, John Gillingham. He's at least cited the sources I want to find, but his argument is mostly "people claim that Richard was gay because he only hung out with dudes. Based on that evidence almost every historical monarch is gay." He also points out that the description of how pretty Richard is was by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who criticized at least two other monarchs for being gay but neglected to criticize Richard. At least in the excerpt on Google Books, Gillingham doesn't seem to address the question of the Penitence. I decided not to check out the Gillingham at the library yesterday because it didn't have "homosexuality" in its index, and I think that was probably a wise decision, although I may go back for the couple of pages surrounding the Google Books excerpt.
Wish list:
- English translation of the penitence. It sounds like really fun reading.
- The Harvey, or at least pp 33-34.
(I totally roped a reference librarian at the SFPL into my quest yesterday. I think she was entertained. Side note: I want to marry the third floor of that library. Everything I want is there--biography, poetry, theatre, the GLBT Room. With the exception of fiction, I have never gone to that library on a quest and wound up on any other floor.)
(Hey, remember a week ago when I was eating subpar felafel in Akko, the lame modern city that used to be Richard's capital Acra, between a hike to see Montfort Castle and a visit to a sircar winery? That was sweet. Much less awesome than driving through the valley where Saladin wiped out the Second Crusade, but somehow charming in its banality.)