| dc.description.abstract | In the past thirty years, scholarly attention on Anglo-Saxon references to Sodom has largely centred on the role same-sex desire played in the Anglo-Saxon definition of the Sodomites’ sins. This focus has led to limited attention on mentions of Sodom’s sins in Anglo-Latin sources that cannot be used to reconstruct the role same-sex desire played in this definition. Consequently, studies often analyse fragments of texts for clues about the role of same-sex acts in the author’s interpretation of Sodom’s sins. This can lead to an interpretation of the text that, although perhaps valid when applied to the particular fragment, loses credibility when viewed in light of the text as a whole. To address this issue this thesis explores how Anglo-Saxon authors, writing in Latin between 600 and 800, used Sodom’s story to transmit rules and regulations about appropriate gendered and sexual behaviour, instead of focussing on what Anglo-Saxons believed the Sodomites did to deserve punishment.
Anglo-Saxon authors followed two main educational approaches when using Sodom, both inspired by the Church Fathers. The first was through an allegorical interpretation of Lot’s flight from Sodom via Zoar to the mountains (Gen. 19:15-29). These historical places were used as markers against which someone’s spiritual development could be measured. Bede was the first to explicitly frame this allegory as a tool to teach the proper handling of illicit sexual desires. He also emphasized the contagious nature of Sodom’s vices and introduced gendered language: returning to Sodom signified ‘feminine frailty’ unsuitable for the vir perfectus. Alcuin uses an interpretation comparable to Bede’s but compared spiritual regression to a decline from vir perfectus to a less perfect state of adolescentia. Although Aldhelm did not explicitly use the Sodom allegory, the prose version of his De Virginitate similarly used Sodom’s story to warn against spiritual regression from heavenly contemplation to earthly desires.
The second approach was constructing a sinful dynamic around Sodom’s demise. This dynamic, already described by the Church Fathers, involved the Sodomites falling prey to luxuria (excessive desire) due to their wealth, leading to excessive libido and, ultimately, to the attempted rape of the angels, which resulted in the Sodomites’ divine punishment. Contrary to the Church Fathers Bede, expecting his audience to associate a particularly heinous sin with the Sodomites without needing to explain it, used this expectation to dissuade them from committing more ‘common’ sins relating to luxuria by claiming that these other sins also led to Sodom’s downfall. Other Anglo-Saxon authors used a similar strategy by including relatively minor sins in the early stages of the sinful dynamic, suggesting that similar sins ultimately led to Sodom’s demise. The educational potential of this dynamic is evident in Boniface’s Enigmata and Aldhelm’s Carmen De Virginitate, where excessive drinking is portrayed as the start of a sinful trajectory leading to a fate like that of Sodom. Boniface’s letters from around 747 illustrate the dynamic’s corrective potential, in which he warned the king of Mercia that failing to regulate earthly desires would lead to moral depravity, loss of spiritual and military power, and ultimately destruction by enemies or divine wrath. The punitive potential of the dynamic is suggested in a shift in language between Anglo-Saxon and Irish penitentials. While Irish penitentials used Sodom as a biblical simile to describe certain sinners as fornicating ‘like the Sodomites’, Anglo-Saxon penitentials began labelling them ‘Sodomites’. Like a thief committed theft, a sodomite committed a certain sin. Sodom’s sinful dynamic, therefore, provided a language to talk about and create a group of sinners which before did not exist. | |
