Alumni Engagement Events
Boswell Lecture: Our (Gay) Corner of Paradise: Boswell's Aelred of Rievaulx and Queer Worldmaking
Bio: James Staples '10 is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford. He is broadly interested in medieval contemplative texts and their literary parallels, and the ways that such texts intersect with political identity. Studying the Middle Ages through the lenses of queer theory, posthumanism, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race theory, he demonstrates the disorienting value of reading the past and the present together. He’s written articles related to these topics, published in various journals, including Romanic Review and Exemplaria, and he’s currently developing a book project on the Pearl-Poet.
Abstract: "Our (Gay) Corner of Paradise: John Boswell’s Aelred of Rievaulx and Queer Worldmaking"
I must make an embarrassing confession: I believe in John Boswell’s medieval gay subculture. Part of me will always believe in it, despite scholarship’s dismissal of it as anachronistic or essentialist. As a queer child in an evangelical household, I needed Boswell’s gay subculture to imagine the possibility of my own future. Following theories of minoritarian melancholia (whereby one ambivalently holds onto a reality that society rejects) I recognize my scholarship—devoted to queer futurity—as a negotiation of my ambivalent feelings around childhood shame, the ecstasy I discovered in Boswell’s text, and my present embarrassment at such ecstasy. My scholarship thus seeks to perform a reality in which Boswell’s gay subculture could exist, contributing to the invention of a more expansive future.
Boswell himself made a similar life-changing discovery: Reading Douglass Roby’s accounts of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx, Boswell found not only a historical tolerance of homosexuality but also proof of its dignity. The backlash he received from stating that Aelred was unquestionably gay crushed Boswell. Yet by melancholically holding onto Aelred’s gay identity, Boswell forever altered reality: Beyond the effects in Aelred studies (almost every study now addresses the saint’s sexuality), Boswell’s Aelred challenged and inspired other queer trailblazers, from Michel Foucault to Derek Jarman, to reevaluate their relationship to the past and present to imagine different futures.
In this talk, I seek to recuperate Boswell’s Aelred, returning to Aelred’s engagement with his own sexuality, a melancholic engagement that Aelred refers to as “meditatio,” and which he considers central to his innovative meditations on the life of Christ to speculate about a future paradise. Considering Aelred and working outward, to Boswell, to Boswell’s readers, to myself, I reveal how minoritarian melancholia contributes to an inventive negotiation of past and present to discover a future of more expansive possibilities.
Sponsored by: Boswell Initiative; H.R. Tyler Department of History; Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies Program