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
11 - Eunuchs of the Grail
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
The medieval quest for the Holy Grail could only be achieved by a very special man. He should be a virgin, utterly pure, and, according to certain of the early versions of the Grail legend, have a rather unusual gender profile: he may (in short) be castrated. The contextual correspondence between the representations of Perceval's ‘virgin gender’ in the early Grail cycles and the ‘spiritual eunuchs’ of the early Christian ascetic movement coalesce in sexual wounds. In both of these social contexts, perfect purity is valorized as a transformative grace which renders humans angelic; in both contexts the cultivation of purity represents direct action by the individual to mitigate the effects of the fall and loss of Eden which precipitated humanity into sexual desire. The literary milieu in which the Grail cycles took shape was infused with the idealization of virginity which characterized early Christian society, and immersed in hagiographic narratives which extolled the virtues of virgins. But one particularly pertinent dynamic linked the two environments: both dissect masculinity, teasing out a type of manhood in which sexual purity could be expressed. In medieval Europe, the eleventh-century Gregorian reforms required celibacy of the priesthood, and saw the development of the concept of virginity as a philosophical ideal as well as a religious principle. Both of these factors prompted a renewed interest in conceptualizing a ‘non-sexual’ man.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages , pp. 229 - 254Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013