Medieval Barbie Dolls: Femme Figures in Ascetic Collections

Abstract

Many lesbian analyses of medieval texts are founded in the fact that the mystics’ poems and other texts follow the conventions of courtly poetry and replace erotic fantasies with love of God.¹ I analyze a complementary issue from a queer point of view: the addition of courtly images of women that reconfigure and subvert pious texts. These images are queer in many ways: as a possibly sexually charged repertoire of attractive female figures in volumes likely destined for women readers and as objects of fantasies centered on female clothes and female bodies. In this context, collecting, especially collecting images, suggests a queer kind of love. “To love an image is something very close to loving a sexual partner who is absolutely and strictly prohibited”: this quote, borrowed from Maurizio Bettini, explains the commonplace classical representation of unethical monsters (“lawless tyrants” such as Brutus and Caligula) as collectors perversely lusting after the objects in their possession, literally getting off on paintings and statues, but also, conversely, treating people as undifferentiated sex objects with no dignity or rights. Bettini’s quote is reprised in Michael Camille’s analysis of Jean duc de Berry (1340–1416) as a collector of sexual objects: nudes, young men of lower classes, preadolescent wives.² Bettini and Camille inspire my perverse reading of ascetic collections as repertories of women’s queer desires.