Sex, Latin, and Scholarship

This chapter analyses A. E. Housman’s Praefanda, a parallel for Bainbrigge’s subversive, witty, and allusive Latin. Sexuality and scholarship cannot be separated; this chapter deconstructs the popular stereotype of the divided Housman, whose romantic poetry touched on homoerotic desires, but who focused his scholarly energies on austere topics. Housman’s Latin demonstrates complex intertextuality with classical literature and neo-Latin writings on sex, and it teases his readers about his knowledge of sex and sexuality, and how that knowledge was gained; like Bainbrigge, he suggests that sexual knowledge cannot be separated from the body, and focuses on a range of sexual pleasures, many of which have been overlooked in classical scholarship. Praefanda has much in common with Housman’s homoerotic verses, but its liberated Latin also contains Housman’s most outspoken comments about sexuality ancient and modern, and offers an important challenge to conventional sexual morality.