Virgins and Eunuchs in Abelard's Historia Calamitatum

"In truth that which had happened to me 
so completely removes all suspicion of this iniquity among all men that those who wish to have their women kept under close guard employ eunuchs for that purpose"

Peter Abelard
Historia Calamitatum

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In 2014, I composed a series of mini-essays entitled

Scars of the Pardoner on Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales

discussing the issue of surgery and the biopolitics of sex.

Here I return to the matter with some new insights.

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Eunuchs and the Post-Sexual

A medieval genealogy of castrate operations can be traced through the scar tissue on the skin, showing that the violence of laying hands on another is systematic to the cultural work of sharp machines.[i] Since Classical medicine, surgery operated by coding certain bodies as “parts” (that which is discarded), while coding others as “wholes” (that which is preserved).[ii] By the 14th century, the post-op castrate body had collected a range of cultural practices and meanings that owe much to Peter Abelard's Historia Calamitatum.[iii] In the Historia, Abelard considers his castration by political opponents who laid hands on him on the grounds of punishing a criminal.[iv] In Roman and Byzantine empires, eunuchs were constructed mostly of a slave class.[v] While castrates slaves did not form an evident part of French and English culture, records show castration as a punishment for a host of crimes.[vi] This punitive act sustained associations with those subject to another's will, whose liberties and body are curtailed. [vii]

In regards to sexual and reproductive freedoms, the enslaved or criminal eunuch was regarded as a post-op, post-sexual body. In his Historia, Abelard considers his castration as just such an end to a certain kind of sexual and social agency. "What path lay open to me thereafter?” asks Abelard, “How could I ever again hold up my head among men, when every finger should be pointed at me in scorn, every tongue speak my blistering shame, and when I should be a monstrous spectacle to all eyes?"[viii] Abelard struggles to see how he will productively operate in society at all after his castration. The shift into becoming post-sexual is in a very real sense an end to his life as a normative male. Physically and socially made "eunuchus qui castratus est," Abelard is exempted from key masculine activities, marked by the scars on his skin as an exemplary body. [ix]

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Eunuchs and the Trans-Sexual

The physical and social effect of sharp-machines as readable on the skin cannot be underestimated. Abelard's new life fits in associations for a post-sexual life.[x] To be a post-sexual castrate was in a sense to no longer exist within the commerce of community life. You become a non-entity. Abelard considers the implications of Leviticus and Deuteronomy for eunuchs, "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord."[xi] The life of a castrate is supposed to be sexually, spiritually and socially over, even while he still lives. 

While it begins as a site of negativity and lack, Abelard uses the operations of his body and words to reclaim the fragments of his post-op life as distinctly productive. "Scarcely had I recovered from my wound,” recollects Abelard, "when clerics sought me … They bade me care diligently for the talent which God had committed to my keeping, since surely He would demand it back from me with interest."[xii] The proposition at hand became that castration was not an end to life, but an entrance into "eunuchus non Dei," providing unique "talents" and social value to castrates co-operating with the mechanisms that formed them. Rather than surrender his body as a passive object of social discourse, Abelard claims power over tools that touch and enfold him. "Therein above all,” writes Abelard, “should I perceive how it was the hand of God that had touched me, when I should devote my life to the study of letters in freedom from the snares of the flesh."[xiii] Identifying with the liminal operations of skin, Abelard turns the exit from a life supposedly fixed in nature into an entrance to an exemplary spirituality.[xiv] He pushes back against the snares of knife and flesh that made him operate in a trans-sexual position between genders, flesh and spirit, part and whole. The machine that lays hands on him is no longer the violent arm of justice but the empowering touch of Christus Medicus.

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Eunuchs and the Pre-Sexual

The double-bind of social expectations may be considered the double-edge blade that at once carves out lives and demands that they grab the blade in order to replicate those divides as a tool of the system. Upon further reflection on the power and position afforded to him by his castration, Abelard begins to assert himself as a medium for controlling the sexual formation of others. Abelard writes, "In truth, that which had happened to me so completely removes all suspicion of this iniquity [lust] among all men that those who wish to have their women kept under close guard employ eunuchs for that purpose.” [xv] Abelard plays upon an etymological as well as social genealogy of "the eunuch" as guardians of women and marriage bed. “[E]unuch derives from the ancient Greek,” writes Gary Taylor in his Abbreviated History of Castration, from words “meaning ‘bed,’ especially ‘marriage bed’” and “to hold, keep, guard.”[xvi]

In medieval as well as modern contexts, the decision to co-operate with sharp-machines are not made with unfettered free will, but represent a form of contingent personal resistance to a system from which a body cannot extricate itself. Voiced in the description of Reimer and Abelard lives, the post-sexual castrate and pre-sexual girls and boys often find themselves sharing the same spaces physically and socially. Abelard writes, "Such men, in truth, are enabled to have far more importance and intimacy among modest and upright women by the fact that they are free from any suspicion of lust."[xvii] This opens up a point of empathy and co-operation between sexually managed lives. Embracing the power of operations that are nonetheless forced on participants represents a point of resistance for these supposedly secured bodies, allowing them to potentially reclaim socially erased pleasures and agency over bodies repeatedly stolen from them by sharp-machines of diverse forms: medical studies, laws, knives, and each other’s genitals. 

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More on medieval castration

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[i] “Emasculated men, usually described incorrectly as eunuchs, can now be found among transvestites, transsexuals, and other members of various sects … Some who consider themselves transsexuals in the West, although they have actually become castrati, extol this operation as a liberation.” Piotr O. Scholz. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. John A Broadwin and Shelley L Frisch trans. (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999). 3, 234.

[ii] Taylor, Gary. Castration: an Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. (New York: Routledge, 2000). 56. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286. Also cited in Tracy, Larissa. “A History of Calamities: the Culture of Castration.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. 5.

[iii] For Latin see: Abelard, Peter. "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. Ed. T. McLaughlin. By J. T. Muckle. Vol. XVIII. N.p.: n.p., 1956. N. pag. Print. For English translation see: Abelard, Peter. "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Henry A. Bellows. Fordham University, Jan. 1999. Web.

[iv] Because older laws dictated that rape, infidelity, or sodomy could be punishable by death, the alternative of castration was seen as a merciful development. Numerous scholars discuss both the use and resistance to the punitive use of castration in European law. See: Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 287-289; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 19-28; Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body,” 96-99; Bremmer Jr, Rolf H. “The Children He Never Had; the Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. 108-130; Taylor, Gary. Castration,52-55.

[v] Adopting by Byzantium from the Greco-Romance, when various Muslim states claimed the region, the practice of utilizing eunuch servants were adopted and spread throughout conquests in Asia and Eastern Europe. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,198. Tougher, Shaun. The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society. (N.Y.: Routledge, 2008). 60-65, 119.

[vi] Peter Abelard’s castration has been the topic of numerous articles and chapters. Irvine, Martin. “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinization.” 87-106; Wheeler, Bonnie. “Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession.” 107-128; Ferroul, Yves. “Abelard’s Blissful Castration.” 129-150. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler ed. (N.Y.: Gardland Publishing, Inc., 2000); Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 9-19; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 11; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 246-255; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 289-290.

[vii] The job of enslaving and surgically producing eunuch servants, however, largely fell to Christians, particularly in monasteries, who collected, castrated, and sold eunuchs. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,198-199. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 284-290.

[viii] “Qua mihi ulterius via pateret! qua fronte in publicum prodirem, omnium digitis demonstrandus, omnium linguis corrodendus, omnibus monstruosum spectaculum futurus.” For Latin see: Abelard, Peter. "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. Ed. T. McLaughlin. By J. T. Muckle. Vol. XVIII. N.p.: n.p., 1956. N. pag. Print. For English translation see: Abelard, Peter. "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Henry A. Bellows. Fordham University, Jan. 1999.

[ix] The work of these operations on and through these slaves moved around the Mediterranean encouraging the spread not only physical surgery but social practices aimed to erase old sexual, national, and religious identities. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 203-214, 232. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 280; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 60-67, 119.

[x] Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 160-164. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-286. Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 12-13.

[xi] “Non intrabit eunuchus, atritis vel amputatis testiculis, et absciso veretro ecclesiam Dei." For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Bellows.

[xii] “Vix autem de vulnere adhuc convalue, cum ad me eonfluentes clerici tam ab abbate nostro quam a me... attendens quod mihi fuerat a Domino talentum commissum, ab ipso esse cum usuris exigendum.” For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Bellows.

[xiii] “ob hoc maxime dominica manu me nunc tactum esse cognoscerem, quo liberius a carnalibus illecebris” For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Bellows.

[xiv] Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body,” 87-106; Wheeler, “Origenary Fantasies,” 107-128; Ferroul, “Abelard’s Blissful Castration,” 129-150; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 9-19; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 11; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 246-255; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 289-290.

[xv] “Adeo namque res ista omnem huius turpitudinis suspitionem apud omnes removet, ut quicunque mulieres observare diligentius student, eis eunuchos adhibeant.” For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Bellows. Note: Eunuchs became, as Abelard writes, supposed safe-keepers that bordered off women and wealth of the lords possessions, managing servants, the estate, armies and Churches.. See: Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 54-82. Taylor, Castration, 32-39. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-292. Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 4-9. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 200-209.

[xvi] Taylor, Gary. Castration, 33; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 6. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 232.

[xvii] “Tales quippe semper apud verecundas et honestas feminas tanto amplius dignitatis et familiaritatis adepti sunt quanto longius ab hac absistebant suspitione.” For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." Medieval Sourcebook. Trans. Bellows.

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Scars of the Pardoner: Recollecting Fragment VI (5/5)

"I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond 
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie"

The Pardoner's Tale

Geoffrey Chaucer

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Conversations about medieval gender appear drawn to touch upon the Pardoner, adding to the sense that he is oversexed, yet following on the work of queer readings of Carolyn Dinshaw, Glenn Burger, and Will Stockton, I argue that it is the the text’s ability to sustain so many different readings and operate across so many genres of embodiment (eunuchs, queers, hermaphrodites, etc.), that announces its trans-operative mode of treacherously relating across existing barriers of identification and historical context.[1] This willingness to operate across dividing lines is an integral aspect in how the Pardoner frames the cut up bodies in his Prologue and Tale, recollecting the persistent political danger of parts. Unlike the Physician, who hardly thinks of his own contingency and saving his own skin, the Pardoner is weary, however, admitting that his pardons and relics, “my body to warente.”[2] The critical work of recollection is not merely salvaging the past but rebuilding a continuum that allows operatives a new lease on the future.

This ontological indeterminacy is a part of the riddle the Pardoner establishes with his relics in his prologue when he tells the pilgrims that “any woman…that hath ymaked hir housbonde cokewold,” to stand back because “Swich folk shal have no power ne no grace / To offren to my relikes in this place.”[3] Scholars have noted this as a mode of shaming or making fun of the sexually inconstant, yet it also marks those who, like Pardoner, may be insatiably promiscuous in their associations.[4] Indeed, his relics, like his Tale, may do no good for those unrestricted by conventional barriers of sex, because they may not need the lessons that the Pardoner offers: if you have a problem, let it scar. By bringing the discarded from a forgotten site of burial to the social status of relics, scarred fragments of the body and society are allowed new life giving associations.[5]

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While progressive thought eschews part for the sake of the whole, the Pardoner’s approach to relics shifts cultural values to consider alternative modes of wholeness. Taking the case of one relic, “a sholder-boon / which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep,” which otherwise might have been discarded as trash and forgotten (like other Jewish bodies expelled from England), the Pardoner promises that if this bone is put in a well, first it has the power to make “hool anon” an animal whose body plagued by a “worm.”[6] Furermore, it will make “hool” a body covered in “pokkes,” “scabbe,” or a “soore,” and if a master is willing drink the water himself, “His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie.”[7] Taken literally, this inverts the Physician’s drive towards division by using fragmented bodies to return other bodies to wholeness. Metaphorically, the bone redefines to wholes in their own right. This alternative would not deny the violent history of scarred bodies but multiply the number and forms of lives for the divided, segregated, and forgotten 

While scholars have emphasize the Pardoner’s double speak in his prologue where he admits questions over the sincerity of his pardons and relics, after the Tale when he again defines them as relics, the relics have again shifted and the pilgrims seem to generally go along with the change.[8] This shows both the reconstructive power of narrative and the indeterminacy of body parts. “Pigges bones” can be constructed to be effectively indistinguishable from a saint’s bone when encased as a relic.[9] The insistence on lie/truth, real/unreal distinctions depends on the ahistorical belief that things properly remain what they are, animals stay animals, humans are human, just as women are women and men are men; or else falls into progressive binaries that assert the final shift between natural and manufactured bodies.[10] This dynamic artifice is not the nullification in meaning but the trans-operative inconstancy of the body and social significance.

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This reconstruction is not done without dangers of treachery, however, as the Pardoner makes clear in his Tale. The Pardoner bills the lesson of his Tale as being on greed and false-witness, but a close examination testifies that the treachery underlying it may come, as for the Pardoner, from being hyper-relational. In the Tale, three friends sit drinking when they overhear a bell signaling a passing funeral procession. The party finds out that the departed was their friend, an “old felawe,” and his killer is none other than “Deeth.”[11] The theme of forgotten division is already evident by the loss of this who had long sat among them, whose passing they had hardly noticed. The community seeks to rectify this absence by swearing together, “we thre been al ones… bicomen otheres brother, / And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth.”[12] Soon after they encounter an old man, who literally seeks death (to die), who directs them to a bag of gold if they wish to find death. After a series of betrayals for the gold, all of them end up killing one another.

The premise that one can “kill death” may be the humor the Host demanded, but is the tale also responds to the Physicians Tale of cut-throat solutions by begging the question: isn’t the work of a surgeon another attempt to conquer mortality through bloody knife work? If operations save the futurity of the whole by sacrificing the part, who gets to determine who is the whole and who is the part? In the final bloody scene, each man is effectively equal in moral and social value, but each determines they he must be most deserving of the futurity the gold would provide and all their lives are cut off. In short, as in the Physicians Tale, violence is what happens when one too quickly attempts to reestablish a sense of collective wholeness without taking head the actual and potential divisions in a community. The trans-operative body is never fixed but in a constant state of alliance and betrayal as it cuts across all manner of social barriers and compacts.

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After the Tale has concluded, the effectiveness of the Pardoner’s narrative skills recaptures the attraction of his fellow pilgrims as he calls them, “Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun, And mekely receyveth my pardoun.”[13] Not everyone, however, are open the responsibilities and treacherous implications of claiming the power of parts. When called on to be the first to be to first to “kisse the relikes,” the Host shrinks back. “Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech, And swere it were a relyk of a seint,” he claims, “Though it were with thy fundement depeint!”[14] The Host is not willing to associate with trans-operatives on their own reconstructed terms. Instead, the Host reasserts his privilege as a normative male authority to lay hands on the Pardoner. “I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond / In stide of relikes or of seintuarie,” threatens the Host, “Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; / They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!”[15] In calling for further violent operations on the Pardoner, invoking a history of castration that the Pardoner may already be tied, the Host rejects the lessons of his scars.

The story told from the wound can be hard to hear, notes Arthur Frank.[16] For this progressive male authority, there is not turning divided bodies into relics. Cutting up bodies turns them into shit and marks them for decomposition in the past. Yet the trans-operative is nothing without his social relations and the Knight, who perhaps better hears the lesson of Pardoner’s scars, comes to his aid and reestablishes peace in the community. Yet as the pilgrims move on, they carry the scars of actual and potential divisions with them. These operations mark the weight of violent times on the body of eunuchs, slaves, women, the disabled, transsexuals, and other operatives whose bodies are forgotten or erased from history, demanding that we recollect their fragments and stories so that we never foreclose the possibilities that come from “thinking too much about gender.”

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Part 1: A Physician's Tale

Part 2: A History of Castration

Part 3: The Trans-Operative
Part 4: The Physician's Surgery

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[1] The Pardoner’s Tale produces an extensive bibliography of fascinating scholarship. In particular, this reading has been greatly influenced by Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory; Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. London: Duke University Press, 1999; Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2003; and Stockton, Will. Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2011. 
[2] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 338. 
[3] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 381-384. 
[4] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 102-139. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 121-136; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 140-156; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 
[5] For an excellent historical examination of relics see: Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. N.Y. Zone Books, 2011. 
[6] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 350-357. 
[7] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 358-365. 
[8] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 63-80; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 133-136; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 114-156; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 
[9] Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 700. 
[10] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 74-75; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 127-133; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 119-159; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 
[11] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 670-678. 
[12] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 692-701. 
[13] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 925-926. 
[14] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 946-950. 
[15] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 952-955. 
[16] Arthur Frank. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 101. 

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