Cross-Dressing and Female Same-Sex Marriage in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

Abstract

The title of Jacqueline Murray’s essay “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible,” in Bullough and Brundage’s Handbook of Medieval Sexuality is revealing of the status of the medieval lesbian in contemporary scholarship.1 In this essay, Jacqueline Murray decries the fact that the medieval Western lesbian has been regularly elided in most literary criticism first under the rubric “homosexual” in mainstream woman history, and under the rubric “woman” in studies of medieval homosexuality which have focused almost exclusively on male homosexuality. She observes: “Of all groups within medieval society lesbians are the most marginalized and least visible” (191).