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: the Physician's Surgery (4/5)

"Is ther no grace, 
is ther no remedye?"

The Physician's Tale

Geoffrey Chaucer

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While progressive narratives are useful to provide forward thrust to medieval tales of the past, numerous figures challenge the surgical approach to the body and to history. Persisting only through fragments, Chaucer’s the Canterbury Tales presents the tensions between periodizing change and finding continuity through personal and social violence. Chaucer posed such a challenge in the exchange between the Physician and Pardoner when in Fragment VI, the two speakers enter into a dialectical exchange on surgical violence and the ethics of partitioning lives so that others may progress into the future. By attending to how the progressive surgical thesis of the Physician is countered by the Pardoner’s recollection of divided bodies, taking responsibility for our genealogically ties to medieval surgical approaches to the body and stand in solidarity with the scars of those who persist today as fragments, inextricable from the operations of sharp machines.

The Physician’s proceeds by providing a Tale from the classical authorities from which he derives his medical knowledge and thesis: if you have a problem, cut it out. “The Physician’s tale” concerns the management of gender divides in society and the laying on of hands on women’s bodies in order to alter and/or protect its wholesomeness. It is a tale of the life of Virginia, the only child and heir to a Greek knight, Virginus, is expected to be sold into marriage and to reproduce future heirs for her father’s line. Suddenly, Virginia’s body is threatened with rape, enslavement, and losing its virginity, all of which in the medieval imagination is tantamount to a sex-change operation due to the associated shifts in physical and social status. Tensions violently resolve as Virginus takes a blade to his daughter’s neck, demonstrating that if the integrity of a woman’s body or a patriarch’s ownership of it is disturbed, one solution is to cut it to pieces.

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Virginia, defined by her quintessentially pre-sex status, evidences the ongoing securitization of a lord’s possession of men and women’s genetic lines, a system chastity and eunuchs enforced, allowing lords like Virginus to not have to “think about gender.” The Physician’s Tale goes on at length describing the form of Virginia’s body, “lilie whit” “reed” as “a rose” without the stain of sex or surgery, to contrast the violent penetrations of her body to come.[i] At this moment, Virginia’s body does not need correction because of her chastity she is already effectively fixed. “In hire,” tells the Physician, “ne lakked no condicioun.”[ii] The Physician’s language regularly evidences the intermeshing of medical and religious terminology for sterility, emphasizing that she was whole both in body and in spirit, “As wel in goost as body chast was she, / For which she floured in virginitee / With alle humylitee and abstinence.”[iii] Virginia’s virginity neither challenges the integrity of her body nor the gender politics in her community.

Once Virginia’s pre-sex state has been established, the introduction of gender politics signals the beginning of the division of her physically and socially whole body. Apius claims he can “make hire with hir body synne,” with or without consent, signaling that as soon as his scheme is introduced, Virginia’s body begins to break from Virginus.[iv] By becoming sexualized, Virginia disturbs the naturalized borders of her virginity, an operative that at any point might turn to or be taken to Apius. “For whoso dooth, a traitour is,” warns the Physician of sex, establishing sexually active woman as a betrayal against the physical and social body, “Of alle tresons sovereyn pestilence.”[v] Drawing on medical and legal language, uncontrolled sex is a disease and damnation because it is a “sovereign” crime; the legal consequence of infidelity by and with a sovereign being held as treason against a King’s lordship, the consequence for which was dismemberment.

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If the pre-op virgin state is not secure and sexual operations must be considered, then the solution of patriarchs, like the Physician, is to divide the body once and for all into a post-op state where it can no longer threaten the naturalized order of gender. The escalation of Apius from a potential rapist to enslaver propels operations of laying hands on women, resonating the slippage between the violence securing a virgin “doghter” or a castrated “thral,” by demonstrating the possibility that any body may be taken by force.[vi] “Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce,” instructs the Physician on managing gender politics, warning that “by youre necligence in chastisynge, / That they ne perisse.”[vii] If sexuality introduces a disease that may already end in division and death, then extreme operation, such as the surgical construction of eunuchs or the murder of a daughter, to secure health and the surveillance of gender barriers in an estate may be pardoned.

Once the legal dispossession of his daughter (and her pre-sex body) is immanent, Virginus works to secure her soul by dividing it from her flesh. Confessing that such surgery should only be performed in dire circumstances, Virginus coerces Virginia to accept his decision to foreclosing of her future. “O gemme of chastitee, in pacience / Take thou thy deeth, for this is my sentence,” he entreats her, “dyen with a swerd or with a knyf.”[viii] At first, Virginia responds as she would to a doctor, begging “Is ther no grace, is ther no remedye?”[ix] Accepting his judgment, she internalizes her division between father and master, virgin and sex slave, operator and operated, in a state “constituting something less than agency.” Virginia is only able to affect surgical access to her body with a prayer, “his swerd he wolde smyte softe.”[x] Making herself an fragmented body for the sake of her kingdom, the last we see of Virginia is her severed head in the hands of her father as he return to the courts, “to the juge he gan it to presente.”[xi]

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Becoming a part rather than a whole, the narrative contest over Virginia body might be said to end with the haunting image of her severed head, but a trans-operative approach to the story follows the continuing affects of her fragments on other bodies. Witnessing the still bleeding wounds of Virginia’s cut up flesh, the crowds turn against the other operatives in the disruptive Tale: they lay hands on Apius, the would be rapist, “caste hym in a prisoun right anon, / Ther as he slow himself;” while Apius’s servant, Claudius, “was demed for to hange upon a tree;” and Virginius for his role in the violence was severed from the community and exiled.[xii] While the dismemberment of Virginia evidently causes the cutting off of further lives, it must be stressed that bodies were already divided by the barriers that governed sex that segregated bodies from Tale’s start. In other words, when the operations of gender are so inscribed in the divisions of society, the scars of violence are not absolved simply by removing the technology of the knife.

A proponent of a surgical approach to bodies and history, the Physician’s Tale supposes that the flurry of operations its end cuts off any loose ends of the story, yet leaves readers in the ruins of division, questioning, what we do with unresolved remains. When the Physician concluded, the Host begins to swear like a mad man, "Harrow!" quod he, “by nayles and by blood! / This was a fals cherl and a fals justise.”[xiii] Calling out the names of bodily fragments, the Host turns to the Pardoner and the assorted body parts her carries to help wash away the stain of the Physician’s bloody Tale. Scholars have noted that the Pardoner’s reply, “It shal be doon…by Seint Ronyon!” plays on a pun for testicles. This references the Pardoner’s supposed status as a “gelding,” and signals that far from giving comic relief to pardon the violence of division, his recollection of broken bodies will not let the scars of any part of such operations be readily forgotten. [xiv]

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Part 1: A Physician's Tale

Part 2: A History of Castration

Part 3: The Trans-Operative
Part 5: The Pardoner's Scars

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[i] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 32-33.

[ii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 41.

[iii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 45.

[iv] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 138.

[v] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 91.

[vi] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 187-189.

[vii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 198-199.

[viii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 217.

[ix] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 236.

[x] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 252.

[xi] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 256.

[xii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 267-273.

[xiii] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 288-289.

[xiv] Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 691.

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