Queer Love in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages by Anna Kłosowska (review)

Abstract

ANNA KLOSOWSKA, Queer Love in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 195. ISBN: 1-4039-6342-8. $69.95. If I were to begin by saying that perhaps only Anna Klosowska entirely understands this book, I would not really intend this remark to be read as a negative. It is true that this is a very difficult book that requires a great deal of attention. Not only are the arguments quite dense and complicated, but transitions and associations come thick and fast, and, while frequently brilliant connections are being made, a reader's momentary lapse of attention can result in a complete loss of the thread of the argument or even a major shift of the topic. On a deeper level, however, my opening comment is meant to point to the personal nature of this book. Klosowska may not be the subject of the book, but she is deeply implicated in her text and her texts in intimate and not always explicit ways. Her Introduction with the ambitious title, 'History of Desire, Desire for History: The Queer Cryptology Project,' situates Klosowska's study in the context of contemporary theories, primarily (but not exclusively) psychoanalytic and essentially queer. With both autobiographical and scholarly examination, she recounts how her conception of her project took a decisively different turn with the changing insights of recent queer theory, particularly in the work of Stephen Jaeger (Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility) and Judith Bennett ('Lesbian-Like and the Social History of Lesbianisms,' Journal of the History of Sexuality 9:1-2 [January/April 2000], 1-24). The chapter ends with a review of the attempts of several studies (Halperin, Frantzen, Lochrie and Dinshaw as well as Foucault, Sedgwick and Bray) to identify and recover pre-nineteenth-century sexual identities. Klosowska concludes with a recognition of the difficulty of the project and the necessary fluidity of its boundaries, but finds in these uncertainties the essence of the discipline, as she defines queer theory as 'a dialogue that allows for the confrontation between multiple points of departure, conclusions, and radically different models, resulting in a tempering and refining of theoretical positions' (19). In her first chapter, 'Grail Narratives: Castration as a Thematic Site,' KJosowska makes extensive use of Lacan's concept of the 'point de capiton,' a quaint domestic metaphor making use of the points on a quilt where patches join and threads intermingle creating an intersection where any point in the node can redirect attention in a number of directions. KJosowska stresses this point as an intersection of two themes, specifically castration and queer concerns. In this chapter, she reads the Grail narrative through Raoul de Prcsles's fourteenth-century commentary on Augustine's City of God. Her confrontation of unlikely texts enables a profound and complex reading of the relation of castration to queer theory and the Grail. Her rich and rewarding analysis, while admittedly not always easy to follow, provides dazzling insights buttressed by an array of scholarship and a thorough familiarity with primary texts, ancient, medieval and modern. Chapter 2, 'Dissection and Desire: Cross-Dressing and the Fashioning of Lesbian Identity,' continues the rapid-fire brilliance of the previous chapter and, continuing the previous procedure of bringing neglected texts to light, examines lucidly and richly, such cross-dressing texts as Fions et Lyriope, Aferaugis de Portlesguez, Yde et Olive and the somewhat more familiar texts, Claris et Laris and Valentin et Orson. …