Robert Mills. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages

Robert Mills’s new book is a brilliant and timely study of a topic that has recently been of enormous interest to scholars, yet is too often dealt with piecemeal, either in case studies or short articles, or in larger studies that focus on only one facet of what Mills aims to examine much more broadly. The book challenges the most foundational terms and concepts that scholars have used to discuss sexual desire and the body in the premodern world, and looks across numerous media—treatises, poems, painting, sculpture, prints—at the places where attitudes toward medieval “sodomy” become visible. Mills’s interdisciplinary approach reflects his own scholarly background; he received his doctorate in art history but then taught in an English department at King’s College London for a decade, and is thus a sensitive reader of both texts and images, moving between them effortlessly within each chapter. The book is difficult to summarize, and this short review will not attempt to outline each chapter, exploring instead a few critical aspects of Mills’s subject matter and methodology

Art · Art history · Curriculum · Homosexuality · Library science · Middle Ages · Painting · Sculpture · Sociology · Sodomy · Subject (documents · Subject matter · Visual arts · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• Medieval intersex in theory, practice, and representation

  Open Access•Karl Whittington•postmedieval a journal of…•2018

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