Five Discourses on Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Northern France around 1200

When we think of desire in the Middle Ages we immediately recall the religious exhortation to love God and despise the flesh. My present subject is not the desire for God but the less sublime theme of sexual desire, however the two may have been linked. Sexual desire was a central intellectual concern for medieval thinkers despite their reputed aversion to the subject. It was not, for example, the trifunctional schema of modern celebrity — oratores, bellatores, laboratores — that was the earliest and most pervasive of medieval social classifications, but the trisexual division among coniugati, continentes, and virgines. In other words, the human race was fundamentally grouped according to sexual activity. As advocates of virginity, the monks were the first to pronounce on sexuality, and they formulated the terms of discourse lasting into the early Middle Ages. By 1200, however, I can find no new monastic treatise De laude virginitatis in northern France deemed worthy of transcribing because of the author's fame or the weight of its argument. Contemporary theologians were equally indifferent.