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theses

ETD doctoral

My research considers how early medieval authors used representations of sexuality to produce English understandings of race and nation. While medievalists have written a great deal about how sexual practices, particularly sex between men, were used to form individual sexual identities, scholars have paid far less attention to how English authors used such practices to catalogue and classify people into larger group identities, such as races or nations. I argue that both clerical and secular authors adopted sexual moralization for nationalist purposes, often pressing into service literary genres initially formed outside of England, such as elegy, penitential literature, theology, biography, and riddles. English authors martialed the “foreignness” of texts and genres from Irish, Welsh, Byzantine, Northern European, and Continental sources to license their own designations of sexual practices as markers of racial identity that indicated where one fell on the imagined hierarchy running from sinner to saved. Consequently, sexual practice became a shorthand for designating who deserved to be included in the English nation—a category commensurate with being saved—and who needed to be cast out. In a period where British, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, and Danish forces staged competing claims to the British Isles, authors sorted out these claims by fabricating a race called “Anglo-Saxon” out of the various invading tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes and then framing the Anglo-Saxon race as coterminous with the English nation. Using sexual practice as a marker of this race made the race divinely sanctioned and moral; race was an essential trait – yet one located in the condition of the soul rather than in the color of the body.

ETD_8854

doi:10.7282/T3902784

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Erik Ian Wade

The author owns the copyright to this work.