Introduction: Narrating Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Texts

Abstract

This collection seeks to explore the relation between sexuality and cosmology in a variety of literary texts from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. The range is wide and yet it shows that medieval authors, whether lay or religious, Christian or Jewish, are grappling with the same sets of questions about sexuality: How does it conform to or reproduce world order? How might it disrupt that order? Does it bring people closer to the divine, or does it distance them? For all of the authors, the answers lie in their models of body and cosmos and how they work together. For many medieval authors, sexuality is the ultimate expression of embodiment, which is somewhat ambiguous in the works discussed here. This ambiguity is tied to conflicted views on the human creation in imago Dei. On the one hand, the body reflects divine creativity and craftsmanship while most often the soul or the intellect show true resemblance to the divine. On the other hand, God does not have a body, so that embodiment is an index of the radical separation between human and divine. Similarly, medieval monotheists believed that both body and cosmos were divinely created according to the same model, so that the human being is created in imago mundi as well as in imago Dei. Body and cosmos therefore operate according to the same model, as a marker of connection to the divine, and as a marker of difference; sex expresses embodiment, and its depiction probes the relations among body, cosmos, and the divine.