Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
13 - Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In James Brundage's compendious Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, there are only two references to eunuchs, although there are considerably more references to the primary way that one becomes a eunuch, that is, castration. In ad 558 Justinian prohibited ‘castration and the making of eunuchs, an oriental practice that had begun to fall into disfavor in the Empire’. At the opposite end of Christendom and of the medieval period, Brundage reports that on March 9, 1350, an Augsburg judge ruled against nullification of a marriage because the husband, a eunuch (the word used in the text is spado), had been able to consummate the marriage. Perhaps it is not surprising that in western Christendom, the focus of Brundage's study, the texts should say so little about the condition of being a eunuch, for eunuchs, almost by definition, occupy an ambiguous position with regard to ‘law, sex, and society’, the three terms of Brundage's title. In so far as the law itself was concerned, this ambiguity is clear considering that, despite Justinian's prohibition, castration was at various times and places the punishment for males who had sex with males; for males who had sex with non-Christian women (the woman's offense was to have her nose cut off); or for rape. Regarding sex, the eunuch's ambiguity might seem a given.
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- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages , pp. 280 - 294Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013