Robert Mills is a reader in medieval art at
University College London. He is the author of Suspended Animation:
Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture and coeditor of
Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory. He lives
in London.
""Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" is an ambitious reexamination
of the categories of sexuality and gender and the implications of
the multiple ways in which they are linked both in the Middle Ages
and today. This book single-handedly brings the discourse to a new
level of maturity. This extremely stimulating meditation on the
role of the visual in meditating about sodomy as a set of acts,
ideas, and emotions overflows with productive rethinking; further,
it models and encourages what has been too often lacking in this
field, subtlety of thought and tolerance of ambiguity. Mills
addresses directly and thoughtfully the challenges of working in a
discourse the very terms of which are unstable in the present and
makes his own brilliant and significant contribution. Mills's study
makes an extremely substantive and highly timely contribution to a
major field within both medieval studies and contemporary
discourse."--Pamela Sheingorn, Baruch College and the Graduate
Center, City University of New York, Emerita
"Mills's "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" is a tour de force of
erudition, critical insight, and balanced judgment. Not since John
Boswell's "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality" has a
single scholar working in gender and sexuality studies taken on
such a vast array of data, genres, and languages and treated it
with such wisdom and care. Mills is uniquely suited to the task: an
art historian, a literary scholar, and a theoretical wizard, he
combines like no one else in these three fields of expertise
materials that he sees as complementary and essential to one
another. The result is a re-visioning of medieval material in the
light of twenty-first century thinking and the interaction between
the visual and the textual."--William Burgwinkle, University of
Cambridge
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