This book reflects on what medieval Latin authors don't say about the sex nobody had-or maybe some had-and about how they don't say it. Their silences are artfully constructed, according to a rhetorical tradition reaching back to classical practice and theory. The strategy of preterition calls attention to something scandalous precisely by claiming to pass over it. Because it gestures toward what's missing from the text itself, it epitomizes a destabilizing reliance on audience reaction that informs the whole of classical rhetoric's technology of persuasion. Medieval Latin preterition invites our growing awareness, when we attend to it closely, that silence is not single, but that silences are multiple. Their multiplicity consists not in what preterition is, but in what it does. Preterition's multiple silences enabled subversive interpretations by individuals and communities marginalized under dominant regimes of sexuality-as they still do today.

‘Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric is clear, concise, sharply argued, and persuasive, and it strikes a careful balance between theory and historicization. Townsend, to my mind, makes a strong case for preterition as a distinctively medieval queer praxis and centers the interplay between medieval author and medieval reader, rather than divining authorial intent or relying solely on modern reception. The book makes a clear intervention into the historiography of medieval queerness, but it does so in an accessible style that lends itself to use in the classroom. It will be of substantial interest to scholars of medieval queer studies, who I hope will bring it into conversation with other texts and critics.’

Tess Wingard Source: Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies