Abstract
If later authors’ autographs also carry shreds of life attached to writing, reading medieval manuscripts is the most sensual of literary experiences.1 It begins with the noise of the cover opening, depending on how tight and in what (boards, leather, velvet) the volume is bound, and with the dry sound of leather leaves touching each other. Light diffuses in opaque, milky, soft vellum but glances off stiffer, buttery parchment. The pigments capture and imprison the light, but even a hairline of gold sharply ricochets it back. Larger pools of gold, especially on raised ground, have a hypnotic quality, like shimmering heat waves. The slope of the ground is almost imperceptible to the fingertips, but the eye recognizes it as a miniature landscape. There is a vanity in it, like in a tournure that puffs out the croup, or a padded brassière, or a codpiece. There is also a soft irregularity, as in a dollop of cream—although the ground is usually tinted red with minium, giving the somewhat translucent gold its characteristic warmth. In comparison, gold applied directly to the page as dust or leaf looks somehow modern, like a house with a flat roof. Plants, seeds, slugs, trellises are painted directly over the gold ground, wasting swaths of it, except for a brief period after the gilder applied it and before the painter got his hands on it, a period confined to the workshop. Painful, obvious waste of gold, paid but inaccessible, ostentatiously invisible like a cult object. Next to the excesses of gilt, the nervures in pastel grays, pinks, and malachite greens seem almost disap-pointing.
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Notes
Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scholar Press, 1984).
Robert Mills. “Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me! Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13:1 (2001).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 140, quoted by Mills, “‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’,” n. 13, p. 6.
The citations are from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 151–91.
Judith M. Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9:1–2 (January/April 2000), n. 27, p. 11 [1–24].
David Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,” Representations 63 (1998), pp. 93–120.
Anna Clark, “Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7:1 (1996), p. 27 [23–50].
Max Schweigel, Über die Chanson d’Esclar-monde, die Chanson de Clarisse et Florent und die Chanson d’Yde et Olive, drei Fortsetzungen des Chanson von Huon de Bordeaux, Ausgaben und Abhandlungen 83 (Marburg: Elwert, 1889).
Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 3.
The earliest recorded case (1405), concerning Laurence and Jehanne of Bleury, is cited by Joan Cadden, Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 224
Jacqueline Murray, “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 191–222, esp. p. 202.
Francesca Canadé Sautman, “Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-Class Culture in France, 1880–1930,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant? Ragan, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 177–92.
For instance, Kathleen M. Blumreich. “Lesbian Desire in the Old French Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 7:2 (1997), pp. 47–62.
Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. xviii. See also Dinshaw, Getting Medieval.
Works frequently cited in discussions of cross-dressing in a medievalist perspective include: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
Kathleen Biddick, “Gender, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” Speculum 68:2 (April 1993), pp. 389–413
Sabrina P. Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1996)
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Keith Busby, “‘Plus acesmez qu’une popine’: Male Cross-Dressing in Medieval French Narrative,” in Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 45–59. Michelle Szkilnik. “The Grammar of the Sexes in Medieval French Romance,” in Gender Transgressions, pp. 61–88.
Douin de Lavesne, Trubert: Fabliau du XIIIe siècle, ed. Guy Raynaud de Lage (Geneva: Droz, 1974).
Quoting Ambroise Paré, Des monstres et prodiges (Genève: Droz, 1971), p. 30.
Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross-Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996).
Marjorie B. Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Szkilnik quotes Michèle Perret, “Travesties et transsexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine,” Romance Notes (1985), pp. 25–35
Christiane Marchello-Nizia, “Une utopie homosexuelle au quatorzième siècle: l’île sans femmes d’Agriano,” Stanford French Review 14:1–2 (Spring—Fall 1990).
Elizabeth?. Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts (Yale: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 159.
Szkilnik, “The Grammar of the Sexes,” n. 41, p. 84. Concerning the treatment of female transvestitism during an earlier period, Szkilnik refers the reader to Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, trans. L.G. Cochrane (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 113 and 149.
For instance, continental Wace manuscripts are bound with romances, while Anglo-Normans combine them with chronicles, implying a different functioning of the same text. See Jean Blacker, “Will the Real Brut Please Stand Up? Wace’s Roman de Brut in Anglo-Norman and Continental Manu-scripts,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Textual Studies 9 (1996), pp. 175–86.
D.C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 69.
See Michel-André Bossy, “Cyclical Composition in Guiraut Riquier’s Book of Poems,” Speculum 66:2 (April 1991), pp. 277–93
“Gender and Com-pilational Patterns in Troubadour Lyric: The Case of Manuscript N,” with Nancy A. Jones, French Forum 21:3 (September 1996), pp. 261–80, among others.
Christopher de Hamel, Cutting up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit (Charlottesville, Va.: Book Arts Press, 1996).
Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385 (London: New York: H. Miller Publishers; Oxford University Press, 1986)
Christopher de Hamel, Syon Abbey, The Library of Bridgettine Nuns and Their Peregrinations after the Reformation (London: Roxburghe Club, 1991), p. 100.
Syon Abbey “Cistercian collectarius decorated in Germany in the fifteenth century,” in Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
In his work on German nuns, Jeffrey Hamburger also mentions several interesting examples, including the “popup” books cited above. See Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of A Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
I borrow this comparison from Angela Jane Weisl, “‘Quiting’ Eve: Violence Against Women in the Canterbury Tales,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (University Presses of Florida: 1998), pp. 115–36.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Judith Fetterly, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature,” in The Resisting Reader, 1977, rpt. In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn W. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 492–501. Quoted by Jane Chance, “Gender Subversion,” pp. 167, 172, 187.
François Villon, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. André Mary and Daniel Poirion (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
Karma Lochrie, “Desiring Foucault,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (Winter 1997): 9.
Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. pp. 14–24.
John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994).
David M. Halperin has traced the evolution and influence of Foucault in his work, most recently in How to Do the History of Homosexuality. In France, the evolution of Foucault s thought is the subject of work by Didier Eribon, most recently in Réflexions sur la question gay. Their approaches are different on many counts, including disciplinary issues (one functions in the context of American scholarship, the other is an essay). See also Michael Lucey’s comments in a preview of his translation of Eribon: Didier Eribon, “Michel Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality,” foreword and trans. Michael Lucey, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7:1 (2001), pp. 31–86, at p. 32, translator’s foreword. See also Sautman and Sheingorn, Same Sex Love and Desire, p. 6, who refer to Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 1–54, and to James O’Higgins, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” trans. James O’Higgins, Salmagundi 58:59 (Fall 1982-Winter 1983), pp. 10–24.
Simon Gaunt, “Straight Minds/’Queer’Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1:4 (1995), pp. 439–57.
Simon Gaunt, “From Epic to Romance: Gender and Sexuality in the Roman d’Eneas,” Romanic Review 83:1 (January 1992), pp. 1–27.
See the work of Robert L.A. Clark for the miracle play version (Miracle de la fille d’ung roy), including Robert L.A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama,” New Literary History 28:2 (1997), pp. 319–44. Robert Clark also directed me to Dianne Watt s articles on the adaptations of Yde et Olive, including on the Middle English Yde et Olive, part of The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux of John Bourchier, 2nd Baron Berners (1466/67–1533). See Dianne Watt, “Read My Lips: Clip-pyng and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. and intro. Anna Livia and Kira Hall, fwd. Edward Finegan, pp. 167–77
Diane Watt, “Behaving Like a Man? Incest, Lesbian Desire, and Gender Play in Yde et Olive and Its Adaptations,” Comparative Literature 50:4 (Fall 1998), pp. 265–85. Robert L.A. Clark. “A Heroines Sexual Itinerary: Incest, Transvestitism, and Same-Sex Marriage in Yde et Olive,” in Gender Transgressions, pp. 89–105.
Pierre Guiraud, Dictionnaire des Etymologies Obscures (Paris: Payot, 1982), pp. 58, 71, 93, 129. All lexical examples and translations are based on Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), and Godefroi, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècles (Paris: Librairie des Sciences et des Arts, 1936–38).
Marjorie B. Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Kathryn Gravdal, “Confessing Incest: Legal Erasures and Literary Celebrations in Medieval France,” Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995): 290 [280–295].
For instance, Angelica Rieger responds to Pierre Bec’s statement that Bietris’s canto may be a lesbian love song, by stating that it represents “the conventional, colloquial tone that was required by good manners between women”: “Was Bieris de Romans Lesbian? Women’s Relations with each other in the world of the troubadours.” In William Paden, ed., The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 73–94, at p. 91. Cited in Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard, and Sarah White, The Voice of the Trobairitz (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), p. 153. I thank William Paden for this reference.
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© 2005 Anna Kłosowska
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Kłosowska, A. (2005). Dissection and Desire: Cross-Dressing and the Fashioning of Lesbian Identity. In: Queer Love in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08810-9_3
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