Queer Community in the Middle Ages @ Leeds IMC 2023
The notion of an emergent medieval ‘gay subculture’ remains one of the most highly contested claims of John Boswell’s 1981 magnum opus Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. In the decades since its publication, research on medieval queerness has tended to emphasise the individual over the collective whether in terms of identity, experience and as constructed discursive subjects. Despite this, landmark studies such as those by Michael Rocke, Carolyn Dinshaw and Kadin Henningsen have demonstrated some of the ways in which medieval people built networks of companionship and mutual support grounded in a shared experience of living outside of their societies’ norms of gender and sexuality.