Robert Mills's generously illustrated new monograph is a welcome addition both to medieval studies and to gender and sexuality studies (including queer, transgender and feminist theory). Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study that brings together art history and literary analysis in order to explore ‘the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture, on the one hand, and those categories we today call “gender” and “sexuality” on the other’ (p. 11). Mills's use of inverted commas in this quotation deliberately foregrounds the potential pitfalls of applying modern terminology to, and of adopting a modern perspective on, medieval images and texts, yet Mills makes a thoughtful and compelling case for self‐consciously and reflectively adopting what are often termed ‘strategic anachronisms’ in order to make sense of human desires in the more distant past. In interpreting the apparently invisible or unspeakable, Mills allows speculative readings to sit alongside careful historical contextualization, as evidenced in his starting point, a nuanced and adroit exploration of a remarkable miniature of St Jerome tricked into wearing a woman's dress found in the sumptuous early fifteenth‐century Belle Heures of Jean de Berry. Mills observes that medieval viewers of this image of Jerome's accidental cross‐dressing and gender inversion would understand the saint's reputation for chastity to be under attack, but they would not necessarily make a connection between effeminacy and sodomy or homoerotic desire. Nevertheless, as Mills goes on to suggest, Jean de Berry was himself subject to scandalous rumours, and so ‘although sodomy is not an explicit frame of reference . . . its deployment as a term of insult and abuse might have informed the ways in which the miniature was received’.

中文翻译：

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在中世纪看到鸡奸。作者：罗伯特·米尔斯 芝加哥大学出版社。2015. xiii + 398pp。41.50 英镑。

罗伯特·米尔斯 (Robert Mills) 慷慨插图的新专着是对中世纪研究以及性别和性研究（包括酷儿、跨性别和女权主义理论）的欢迎补充。Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages 是一项跨学科研究，将艺术史和文学分析结合起来，一方面探索鸡奸与中世纪文化中视觉和可见性主题之间的关系，以及我们今天称之为“性别”的那些类别。 ”和“性”对立”（第 11 页）。米尔斯在这段引文中使用引号故意突出了将现代术语应用于中世纪图像和文本并采用现代视角的潜在陷阱，然而，米尔斯提出了一个深思熟虑且令人信服的案例，他有意识地、反思地采用了通常被称为“战略不合时宜”的方法，以便理解更遥远过去的人类欲望。在解释明显不可见或不可言说的事物时，米尔斯允许推测性解读与仔细的历史背景化并存，正如他的出发点所证明的那样，他对圣杰罗姆的显着缩影进行了细致入微的巧妙探索，被骗穿着 15 世纪初发现的华丽女装。让·德·贝里 (Jean de Berry) 的世纪佳丽时计。米尔斯观察到，中世纪的观众看到杰罗姆偶然变装和性别倒转的形象时，会理解这位圣人的贞洁声誉受到攻击，但他们不一定会将女性气质与鸡奸或同性恋欲望联系起来。尽管如此，正如米尔斯继续暗示的那样，让·德贝里本人也受到可耻的谣言的影响，因此“尽管鸡奸不是一个明确的参考框架”。. . 将其作为侮辱和虐待的术语进行部署可能会影响收到缩影的方式”。