From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe

Abstract

The co-editors of From Beasts to Souls locate their project at the intersection of work on sexuality and gender, on the one hand, and critical animal studies on the other (4–6). They are right to observe that few medievalists have addressed those fields together, at least until the past few years. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken also note a lacuna in the cultural materials that might interest scholars in both fields: in medieval art and literature, hybrids and shape-shifters maintain “binary gender assignments,” while ambiguous or camouflaged gender appears only in human characters (2–4). In contrast, write the editors, “the current volume seeks to raise the issues of species and gender in tandem” (3). Its limited success in that enterprise—the only shortcoming of this fine collection—may result in part from the archival gap. The eight contributors focus steadily on one of the terms, “gender,” taking “embodiment” to mean human embodiment; only two, McCracken and Elizabeth Robertson, give sustained attention also to the “beasts” of the main title. The editors themselves seem to struggle to bring beasts, souls, gender, and embodiment into mutually illuminating relationships, as evidenced by the unwieldy concatenation that ends the introduction: “In fact, these medieval models suggest that it is by moving beyond the human and beyond predictable configurations of human bodies that we can begin to imagine new configurations of gender, whether in the form of gendered bodies, desires, and intimate practices, as gendered souls, or in terms of gendered spaces, institutions, and the social behaviors within them” (11). Perhaps an afterword could have synthesized those incipient imaginings.But coherence is hardly the only desideratum for edited collections, and contributors to From Beasts to Souls shed new light on many topics within its capacious statement of purpose. Indeed, one of the most provocative chapters, the first, enlarges the book's scope even further, beyond organic gender and embodiment. In “The Sex Life of Stone,” Jeffrey J. Cohen observes that “classical and medieval stone lore … teem[s] with unexpected narratives in which stone plays an agential role” (28)—even a desiring role, since gems need organic matter on which to exercise their vertu, just as humanity needs metabolic minerals and memorializing stone. Cohen suggests that this “impulse toward assemblage making and intensification is already erotic,” though hardly heteronormative (31). Acknowledging our mutual desire can permit communication with our lithic partners despite our vastly different timescales, Cohen concludes. So, too, his essay unsettles petrified assumptions while providing few perceptible links with its successors.Many such links appear in Peggy McCracken's “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy.” In revelatory readings of texts from three linguistic traditions, McCracken argues that cross-species nursing is a distinctly somatic form of “becoming-animal,” a term that she borrows from Deleuze and Guattari and defines as “not metamorphosis but relationality” (46). No less important, the Old French Crusade Cycle and a tale from the Decameron resist that relation even while disclosing it. The third text, an excerpt from a twelfth-century “philosophical tale composed in Arabic in twelfth-century Andalusia” (55), suggests another form of becoming-animal: the young protagonist is not only suckled by a doe but also instructed by animals, eventually learning through grief that his foster mother's soul survived her body. Thus cross-species nursing initiates an interchange that enlarges a human child's nature rather than distorting it.Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner's “The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien's Chevalier au lion” completes the book's first section, “Intimate Relations.” Here the intimate relation is principally human and heterosexual, but Bruckner sees other connections “hid[den] away … in the obscurities of romance” (83). In particular, the “signature image” of Chrétien's narrative (64), in which Yvain rescues a lion entrapped by a dragon, adumbrates Laudine's hold on her knightly husband.Both essays under the second heading, “Embodied Souls,” use gender to elucidate and deepen a crux in early Christian thought: the form of souls after death. In “Rubber Soul: Theology, Hagiography, and the Spirit World of the High Middle Ages,” Dyan Elliott explores the ways in which theologians and hagiographers—particularly Gnostic, Cathar, and Beguine writers—regarded the posthumous identity of the soul. Overlapping, as she acknowledges, with the work of Carolyn Walker Bynum, Elliott builds a strong case that “although the soul was supposed to be devoid of sex, hagiography created a supernatural landscape in which body gradually drained into soul” (90). The essay conveys wide and deep expertise with exemplary clarity and occasional wit. “Hagiography,” Elliott writes, created “an irresistible continuity of [earthly and posthumous] identity that accommodated not just specific individuals but even their circle of friends. Who wouldn't want to be part of Thomas of Cantimpré's eternal Facebook?” (112).“Rubber Soul” makes only incidental reference to nonhuman bodies. In contrast, a nonhuman creature plays an essential role in Elizabeth Robertson's “Kissing the Worm: Sex and Gender in the Afterlife and the Poetic Posthuman in the Late Middle English ‘A Disputacion Betwyx the Body and Wormes.’” As Robertson observes, this “disputacion” varies the traditional soul/body debate in that the female soul speaks through her body to external beings. The worms are “agents of Christian education” (129); they are also coded as male, even phallic. Robertson's subtle and powerful readings, particularly the memorable suggestion that “sex belongs to death and gender to heaven” (145), rest on both the text and the striking illuminations in the sole extant manuscript. Carefully crafted in rhyme royal, the “disputacion” itself is gendered, she concludes: it shares with its female speaker an earthly fragility that “opens up a pathway to salvation” (150).All three essays in the final section, “Institutional Effects,” concern cross-species hybrids. The connection between institutions and hybrids is articulated in the section's middle chapter: drawing from Robert Young's Colonial Desire, E. Jane Burns defines hybridity as “a cultural formation exhibiting a seemingly impossible simultaneity of sameness and difference” (203). Opening the section, Noah D. Guynn argues in “Hybridity, Ethics, and Gender in Two Old French Werewolf Tales” that cross-species hybrids can subserve the interrogation of cultural formations—in particular, patriarchal ideology. Guynn writes little about the werewolves themselves; for Marie de France and the author of Melion, he argues, lycanthropy is a “lens through which to observe the evasiveness of moral, ontological, or epistemological certainty” (180).A hybrid creature is central rather than instrumental in Burns's essay, “A Snake-Tailed Woman: Hybridity and Dynasty in the Roman du Mélusine.” Burns makes a compelling case that the Mélusine of Jean d'Arras's Roman is doubly hybrid: both serpent and woman in the Saturday baths that she has forbidden her husband to witness, and a beneficent, civilizing woman on the other days (203). The romance thus answers one large question motivating the collection: “What happens to gender when we move beyond human bodies?” (187). But Burns actually defines two possible outcomes of that move: the iconic treachery of the Eve/serpent hybrids that are often taken as Mélusine's determining antecedents (191–202), and the Mélusine of the Roman, a fully capable subject inhabiting a “body in process” (203). In support of that second alternative, Burns turns to the actions that constitute the bulk of the romance: the expansion of Lusignan hegemony achieved by Mélusine's ten sons under her skilled direction. With her “bodily expansion,” the woman–serpent is both icon and agent of a territorial claim projected to expand beyond known limits (210–11).Ann Marie Rasmussen's “Moving Beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges” closes the book with a limit case of gendered embodiment: disembodied sexual organs. The essay begins with arresting photographs and descriptions of “small, mass-produced, inexpensive pins of wandering penises and vulvas” (226). Setting aside questions about the material and social context of these objects—to be addressed, presumably, in a forthcoming book (265)—Rasmussen reads them as emblems of “gendered sexualities” (226). Contrary to modern stereotypes, the images afford mobility and activity equally to vulva and penis. In many, one or more women do “something ordinary, something not overtly sexual, with a detached, autonomous penis,” actions to which Rasmussen applies Judith Halberstam's term “female masculinity” (228). Regarding the detached penises, Rasmussen considers allusions to punitive castration and castration anxiety but argues that these representations of “cut masculinity” suggest a view of reproduction and the female body “that is not hostile or eroticized, that may even be humorous and positive” (239–41). With good reason, she concludes that the badges should lead us to “reconfigure the limits of gender in the late medieval world” (242).I am less certain about Rasmussen's additional claim that “gender in the badges … requires us to reassess the limits of our conceptual assumptions about embodied creatures” (242). Although some of the organs have wings, tails, or fur, Rasmussen does not consider them as cross-species hybrids or nonhuman avatars. And surely, few readers would ask her to add such a consideration to this rich and provocative essay. In the end, From Beasts to Souls is important not just for presenting some first-rate scholarship but also for inviting us to ask why it has been difficult to “raise the issues of species and gender in tandem” (3).