Chaucer's Queer Nation. By Glenn Burger. Medieval Cultures, 34. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xxvi + 264. $28.

Queering Medieval Genres. By Tison Pugh. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. x + 226. $69.95.

For many years now it has been customary for scholars to question the applicability of the concept of homosexuality to the Middle Ages, especially in its modern, identitarian incarnations. But until recently the wisdom of reading heterosexuality backward into the period was far less likely to be challenged. queer medievalism, even in its most historicist moments, has tended to sustain this trend. Critics training their long queer gazes on the Middle Ages (myself included) have been in the habit of isolating the disruptive "queernesses" of a text or image with reference to a cultural norm or regulatory ideal that is, in the last analysis, heterosexual. Moreover this heterosexuality is often reassuringly familiar: a "normative" sexuality, inscribed by patriarchal gender binaries, that sounds disarmingly similar to its modern counterparts. In their efforts to cling to the heterosexual side of the homo/hetero equation, it is as if medievalists have been unwilling or unable to countenance other standards against which queer deviations can be measured. Yet there appears to be some light at the end of the tunnel. In recent publications, for instance, Karma Lochrie and James A. Schultz have both mounted vigorous assaults on the idea of a transhistorical heterosexuality that, they submit, colonizes the past; indeed Lochrie's argument in Heterosyncrasies (2005) is that the very idea of a "normal" sexuality would have been alien in the Middle Ages and that attempts to identify a medieval heteronormativity obscure the role that gender deviance, in particular, played in the period's configurations of "unnatural" sex acts and desires.

Robert Mills
King's College London