#mignons

Image: Henri III of France, (r:1574-1589), engraving by William Roger, c 1602.

Curatorial Concept: Monarchs with ‘queer’ or unconventional tastes, and their impact.

(Note: Many of these terms had and still have negative connotations. Although this should be expected because the sixteenth century was a very homophobic time and neither Henri III nor the mignons were very popular, you have been warned that some of these terms are potentially triggering/offensive.)

Bougeron: Negative. "The word no longer exists in modern French, but, since the suffix 'on' often functions in Franch as an intensifier of a root noun, in Renaissance French 'bougeron' seems to have meant something like what in modern terms we might call a 'superbugger.'" ("Bugger" in both Renaissance and modern French is "bougre.") "The word seems to have functioned as a way for commentators either to make a real distinction (say, between a 'average' or 'run-of-the-mill' 'bugger' and a hyper or obsessed one) or simply to underscore their disgust through exaggeration" (p. 137).

Effeminate/Effeminé: Negative. "Did not automatically connote homosexuality, but instead had a diversity of meaning it lacks today. For instance, the term sometimes designated a kind of hyper or helpless male heterosexuality, a usage that, of course, no longer exists" (p. 132).

Fraisé/Fraizé: Literally means "wearing a ruff (fraise)" or "one who wears a ruff," depending on whether it is used as an adjective or a noun. Cady mistranslates it as "poofs" in a poem quoted on p. 141, although the endnote (p. 153n73) indicates that "fraizés" is the word used. I think that this mistranslation would greatly offend the numerous hyper-heterosexual Manly Men™ who also wore ruffs like Henri de Guise and the future Henri IV.

Ganymede: Negative? Gay man, especially "the younger (and putatively passive) partner in a male homosexual relationship or act" (p. 139).

Masculine love: Positive. "A prominent Renaissance language for a male homosexual orientation [given] the Renaissance's practice of using the noun 'love' as a term of desire in a male-female context only" (p. 124).

Posséder: "In its strict dictionary sense, 'posséder' might be translated as 'dominate,' but L'Estoile seems to want the word's suggestion of romantic 'possession' as well, a 'possession' usually characteristic only of what we would now call an orientation" (p. 131).

Sodomy: Very negative. Used in the period to refer to "a general unlawfulness," but already had the specific sexual connotations that it does today (p. 135).

Young man: Translation of "jeune fils" (p. 148n9). Cady notes that this term "usually did not designate actual age-asymmetrical situations but [was] meant to symbolize male beauty in general, as 'girl' in heterosexual literature has often been a metonym for 'female'" (p. 126).

You may remember the post I made last month where I dissected an essay by Joseph Cady from the book Desire and Discipline to build a glossary of terms used to refer to same-sex male relationships in the 16th century. This is an addendum to that post, with some further information about said terms, this time extracted from another essay by Cady from another anthology. (Again, a warning that this post deals with matters of homophobia, since we are discussing the sexual terminology of a time period when most people were homophobic.)

Amour viril: The French equivalent of the term "masculine love." Cady writes, "In one of [the libels collected in Pierre de L'Estoile's journal], a verse dialogue of January 1579 by an unidentified member of the upper house of Paris Parliament attacking the king's inauguration of the Order of the Knights of the Holy Spirit from among his followers, one of the speakers calls the sexuality between the king and his male entourage 'l'amour viril,' or 'masculine love'" (26).

Lover: Did not mean "friend" as some scholars claim (not to mention some other less scholarly sources, such as the footnotes to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in my tenth-grade English textbook). "One common way in which homophobic critics deny the homosexual content of earlier texts is to claim that earlier ages often blurred the distinction between sexuality and non-sexual attachment and correspondingly used the language of eroticism simply to express friendship. Perhaps the greatest focus of this particular brand of critical denial has been Shakespeare in the Sonnets...Bacon's distinction between 'masculine love' and 'friendship' [in his New Atlantis] clearly gives the lie to such claims and suggests that the Renaissance was quite aware of a difference between eroticism and friendship" (36n16).

Sodomy: Had three different definitions, distinguished by context. "Any sexuality (heterosexual or homosexual) that could not be biologically procreative; homosexuality only; and, occasionally, bestiality." (34n5).

Also, a longer quote from Cady's essay on the usage of the term "masculine love" before the alleged "invention" of homosexuality in the nineteenth century:

"Important as 'masculine love' was in the Renaissance sexual vocabulary, according to my research on earlier homosexuality it was but one of several public languages for a distinct homosexuality/distinct homosexuals that existed in the eras before new-inventionism says homosexuality was 'invented.' [The same data also show, incidentally, that the life of 'masculine love' extended well beyond the Renaissance--there are, for instance, Herder's 1787 discussion of 'the masculine love of the Greeks' ('die männliche Liebe der Griechen, 540); Whitman's cognate 'manly love' in his 1860 Calamus poems (127); the prevalence of the term throughout John Addington Symond's work, especially in his 1889-93 Memoirs (e.g., 'All my poems were composed upon the subject of masculine love,' 165); and E. M. Forster's 1914 description of the relationship between Maurice and Alec as 'masculine love' in Maurice (221).] Typically used concurrently in the same period or culture and sometimes even within the same text, these several languages constitute what I would call the characteristically 'variegated' pattern into which the denotation of homosexuality fell in earlier ages...All the different kinds of possible languages for homosexuality that I defined in starting could be found in this variegated earlier pattern, as exemplified in the L'Estoile Mémoires-Journaux materials that I mentioned above, where typically pre-modern terms like 'the art of...Ganymede,' 'sodomy,' and 'masculine love' are all used contemporaneously to denote what we would now call 'male homosexuality'/'homosexuality.' "The presence of these languages does not of course mean that earlier homosexuality can be understood in all the same ways as twentieth-century homosexuality. But they clearly show that one key shift in recent Western sexual history has not been from the 'non-existence' to the 'existence' of homosexuality. Rather, among the most significant developments in the homosexual situation over that time...were moves from more 'local' or tacit acknowledgements of homosexuality and homosexuals to more universal and frank admissions of their existence (jumps of this kind occurred in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and a shift from a more affective, descriptive, variegated language for homosexuality/homosexuals to a more 'scientistic,' non-visual, monolithic terminology for them (this was consolidated in the turn from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries)" (28-29).

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