The Sodomitic Lions of Granada

Abstract

EV E N B E F O R E T H E A P P E A R A N C E in 1980 of John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, scholars had shown some interest in the presence of “homoeroticism” in medieval Spain.1 Their attention centered on erotic themes found in Jewish and Muslim poetry associated with the tenth-century urban culture of Andalusia, the Muslim south of Spain. According to many scholars, during Andalusia’s “golden age” adherents to the three monotheist religions—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—lived tolerantly together in convivencia.2 Moreover, according to Boswell, Andalusia was a particularly good example of what was common throughout early medieval Europe and lost only in the High Middle Ages— a society that tolerated homosexuality and gay people. Though erotic poetry provides a particularly rich lode for those wishing to study same-sex phenomena in medieval Spain, other kinds of evidence have also survived—sculptural as well as textual. Sculpture embodying sexual motifs was more abundant in the Christian Romanesque north during the eleventh and twelfth centuries than at any period in Islamic Spain, presumably because portraying the human body was proscribed by Islam. Still, in 1982 Norman Roth brilliantly linked the sculpture on one of the Islamic ablutional basins discovered by archaeologists near Cordoba