Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Abstract

In this important volume, Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt bring together scholarship that rethinks, in creatively productive ways, how gender figures in medieval representations of sainthood and sanctity. While, for the past several decades, gender and sexuality have featured importantly in medievalist work on Christianity, only recently have scholars begun to consider how contemporary trans studies—with its attention to gender transition and genders that escape or exceed the male/female binary—can illuminate medieval texts, experiences, and histories. Spencer-Hall and Gutt here provide a capacious space for such work, and the resulting collection will facilitate further exciting exploration.The editors’ co-written introduction calls attention to the current ambivalent situation of trans people, with some significant rights and recognition having been won in the midst of ongoing legal and governmental efforts to curtail trans existence. In doing so, they emphasize that trans medievalist work is not simply a matter of academic concern; it might serve, too, as a correction to historical narratives that construct gender nonconformity as primarily a (post)modern phenomenon. Through the production of new histories of gender, scholarship can help provide trans and genderqueer people a stronger sense of their own long-lived presence in the world. (The volume includes an extremely valuable appendix of “trans and genderqueer studies terminology, language, and usage.”)A number of essays in the volume take up the saintly lives of people who, assigned female gender at birth, ended up living as men, often within monasteries. These so-called transvestite saints have garnered a large body of scholarly work, and the essays here, as a group, rethink that scholarship, whose centering of cross-dressing often presents the transition from female to male gender as a matter of disguise or deception. In her essay, M. W. Bychowski responds directly to this earlier work—not by rejecting it but by critiquing, reworking, and moving beyond it. Examining the Life of the monk St. Marinos, assigned female at birth, Bychowski turns to Magnus Hirschfeld’s groundbreaking Transvestites (1910) to highlight Hirschfeld’s reading of Marinos’s “transvestitism” “as a distinct and authentic state of being” (247). On the model of theologies of imago Dei and imitatio Christi, Bychowski proposes that narratives like this enact “imago transvesti and imitatio transvesti” (250), with the imago transvesti understood as manifesting the divine image imprinted in the soul of the trans person and the saint’s withdrawal from the world and imitatio Christi as an authentic embrace (imitatio transvesti) of the transgender process allowing the soul’s self-expression.Several other essays take up lives similar to Marinos’s. Martha G. Newman revisits her earlier work on Engelhard of Langheim’s account of Joseph of Schönau, a Cistercian monk who, in Engelhard’s words “was a woman although no one knew it” (44). Clearly, such a description depends upon the gender binary, but Newman rethinks her earlier acceptance of this “gender essentialism” (45), turning from an analysis of Joseph’s life as one of cross-dressing and disguise to consider how the account might (complicatedly) represent both a trans man “realiz[ing] his identity” (49) and “a gender fluidity in which Joseph miraculously changes from male to female at death” (53).Vanessa Wright and Amy V. Ogden both consider the Old French Vie de sainte Eufrosine, which also considers the life of someone assigned female gender at birth who enters a monastery, taking a gender ambiguous name, Esmarade. Ogden treats the earliest text of the Old French poem (ca. 1200), examining the ways in which figures who comment on the poem’s central action—Eufrosine’s father and the poet-narrator—employ discourses coded both masculine and feminine. Such crossings of the gender binary, Ogden argues, contribute to the poem’s representation of “the human soul’s highest nature as genderless” (208), modeling for readers a “queer love” beyond the gender binary that “exceed[s] the boundaries of individual worldly relationships” (217). Wright turns to three later Parisian manuscripts in which the Old French life appears, examining visual representations of Eufrosine/Esmarade by the Mauberge and Fauvel Masters. The miniatures deploy gendered features in not always consistent ways, emphasizing the saint’s incorporation into their monastic community, but also a difference from their brother monks. The saint appears sometimes as a eunuch, an identity claimed by Esmerade in the poetic text, but sometimes in ways that emphasize assigned female gender.Blake Gutt also takes up Old French material in his reading of Tristan de Nanteuil, examining the poem’s representation of the figure of Blanchandin·e, parent of St. Gilles. Blanchandin·e’s body is both trans, transformed from female to male, and disabled, impaired by the loss of an arm, later miraculously restored. Gutt uses trans and crip theory to develop a persuasive reading of how transgender embodiment and bodily impairment come together in the poem as the sacred manifests itself within a complexly queer network of social relations. As Gutt argues, the poem reveals “transgender embodiment . . . not as a dereliction of divine order . . . but rather as a radiant expression of God’s will” (240).The volume considers, in addition to narratives like these, the lives of primarily female-identified saints who challenge gendered norms. As Caitlyn McLoughlin shows in her essay on John Capgrave’s Life of St. Katherine, the female saint’s refusal of marriage and childbearing “trades a normative conception of feminine power . . . for a genderqueer power” (76). While Capgrave’s poem is in many ways conventional, McLoughlin intriguingly suggests that its foregrounding of the complex process of its own production involves “a genderqueer textual birth” (72). Like Capgrave’s Katherine, Juana de la Cruz inhabits her assigned female gender, but queerly. Kevin C. A. Elphick investigates Juana’s Vida and her theology for their complex expressions of gender fluidity and liminality. God initially forms Juana in utero as male, but after the Virgin Mary’s intervention makes her female, preserving her Adam’s apple to signify her “divine re-gendering” (95). Taking on the male role of preaching, Juana also develops a complex, paradoxical theology of gender fluidity, “depict[ing] God the Father and God the Son as each pregnant with the other,” “transcend[ing] all human boundaries and categories” (102).Juana’s thought meshes well with a broader gender queerness within medieval theology, as Sophie Sexon’s essay on Christ’s wounds suggests. Sexon rethinks earlier formulations focused on the feminization of Christ and specifically his side wound, elaborating an understanding of Christ’s body instead as nonbinary, incorporating feminine, masculine, and agender potentialities. Sexon reads devotional objects like birthing girdles and Books of Hours that enabled devotees’ close contact as mobilizing identifications with a nonbinary Christ and as nonbinary persons. As in other essays in the volume (e.g., Ogden’s and Bychowski’s), Sexon here importantly thinks beyond the space of representation toward that of reception, where medieval nonbinary, transgender, and genderqueer subjects might reflect on gender through their close encounters with representations.Two essays in the volume depart from the focus on Western European Christendom to consider other sacred traditions. Felix Szabo discusses Niketas David’s Byzantine Life of the eunuch saint Patriarch Ignatios, considering how the hagiographer deals with the challenges of representing eunuchs, whose gender and sexuality were often treated as lacking in self-control, outside true masculinity. Szabo shows how Niketas makes a case for Ignatios as demonstrating a saintly chastity not simply granted him by virtue of his castration but achieved through “sexual self-restraint” (122), alongside a “spiritual virility” that allows him ultimately to be exempted from the category of eunuch and credited with being “anēr” (a noncastrated man) (125), “spiritually fertile” and “a manly athlete of Christ” (127). Lee Colwill discusses the earliest material in the volume, archeological evidence from four burial sites in Late Iron Age Scandinavia associated with the pre-Christian magical practice of seiðr. These burials sometimes bring together around a single person objects from differently gendered social realms. Or a body determined archeologically to be female might be buried with objects coded as male, suggesting someone whom we might characterize as a trans man. These seiðr graves suggest, Colwill argues, “a gender system that was more complicated than a simple male/female binary” (193).In the volume’s final essay, Mathilde van Dijk provides an effective epilogue, noting a number of the thematic threads crossing back and forth across the essays and seeing these as contributing in important ways to the development of hagiographical, gender, and historical studies—especially furthering historical work that intervenes in the politics of the present. As the editors suggest, and as van Dijk reemphasizes, this volume serves as a “call to arms” (30, 269) in response to the vexed politics confronting trans and genderqueer subjects in our own place and time.All the varied scholarship collected here is excellent, and the volume as a whole mounts a persuasive and invigorating argument about the importance of attending to trans and genderqueer texts and experiences in the Middle Ages. Of course, the volume is narrowly focused, as the editors themselves emphasize: “We . . . recognize that there are significant intersections of identity that are not substantively addressed in this collection. These include queer sexualities; racial and geographic diversity (almost all of the sources addressed are Western European, and all assume whiteness as default); disability; and class” (28). They propose future decolonizing work that “might examine Western Christian notions of trans identity, exceptionality and sanctity alongside non-Western models of ‘exceptional’ and/or holy trans identities, for example the hijras of the Indian subcontinent, and indigenous North American Two-Spirit individuals” (28–29). I would add, too, that, comparative medievalist work—for instance, on Islam and Judaism—would be welcome. Then generalizations like this thought-provoking one from Spencer-Hall and Gutt’s introduction—“Critics’ juxtaposition of queerness and sanctity articulates the evident, yet heretofore unspeakable, truth: not only did queer medieval people exist, but medieval religion was fundamentally queer” (25)—would become all the more bracing and instructive.