UCLA

Medieval culture, like modernity, was obsessed with sex: who has it with whom, how, and is it right or wrong. Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural, 1150-1650, interrogates medieval narratives that use the supernatural to experiment with non- normative depictions of bodies, relationships, and sexual acts. By bringing together magical handbooks, alchemical instruction books, religious conduct manuals, scientific treatises, canon law, and courtly romances and allegories, my project demonstrates that, for medieval writers and thinkers, magic and deviant sexual and gendered behavior are inextricably linked. Queer Magic uses the guiding framework of medieval natural philosophy and sins contra naturam to argue literary magic functions as a licit form of heresy for authors to engage in queer imaginings of bodies, genders, and sexual acts. This project, in other words, clarifies how the operative function of magic in past and current forms of conversations about gender, sex, and the body has been forgotten. My analysis reveals that for premodern writers and thinkers, literary depictions of magic functioned as a heuristic for grappling the boundaries of naturalness. These depictions contribute concretely, I reveal, to premodern understandings of fictionality.