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Gender, Sodomy, Friendship, and the Medieval Anchorhold

Context and contribution: The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (formerly Mystics Quarterly) chiefly publishes peer-reviewed essays on mystical and devotional texts, especially but not exclusively of the Western Middle Ages. The article was published in the inaugural issue of the journal in its new, expanded form.

Research imperative and process: This article confronts the relative lack of attention paid by medievalists to friendship between women, and the possibility that it might possess an erotic component. Focusing on a thirteenth-century devotional handbook, which was designed originally as reading matter for female solitaries, the article traces discourses of friendship in the text; shows how these discourses are occasionally susceptible to the kinds of anxiety associated with male fellowship (notably regarding sodomy); and uncovers a language of specifically female same-sex eroticism. The argument is situated within recent historiographic debates concerning the significance of female amity in medieval and early modern Europe.