The silence of the silenced is filled by the speech of those who have it and the fact of the silence is forgotten.
—Catharine MacKinnon
SAME-SEX SEXUAL PRACTICES between women in the medieval West were perceived to be a sin “against nature, that is, against the order of nature, which created women’s genitals for the use of men, and conversely, and not so women could cohabit with women.”1 If this is how Peter Abelard (d. 1142) glossed Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans (Rom. 1:26), he was only reiterating what church fathers had been claiming and echoing the difficulties they had in imagining the very possibility of lesbian sexuality. In fact, Anastasius (d. 518), bishop of Antioch, is said to have asserted: “Clearly [the women] do not mount each other but, rather, offer themselves to the men.”2 Despite repeated attempts to negate their possibility and existence, same-sex practices between women must have persisted since, centuries later, medieval manuals of penance address the question of how to deal with such “vile affections.”3 Jean Gerson, the fifteenth-century rector of the University of Paris, describes this lustful act as one in which “women have each other by detestable and horrible means which should not be named or written.”4 This silencing strategy which dictated that female lesbian practices be neither named nor committed to writing seems to have enjoyed especial appeal among jurists in the following centuries. Indeed, one hundred years later, in his gloss of Spain’s law code, the Siete Partidas (1256), Gregory Lopez alludes to the sin “against nature” as “the silent sin” (peccatum mutum).5 Similarly, a sixteenth-century jurist, Germain Colladon, recommended that descriptions of such crimes, requiring the death penalty, should not be read aloud publicly, lest they incite other women to imitate them: “A crime so horrible and against nature is so detestable and because of the horror of it, it cannot be named.”6 This denied, unnamed, unnamable, and silenced sin that must have been common enough in the European Middle Ages to warrant such pronouncements from theologians and legal scholars alike and that at times merited the death penalty has led until very recently to a general neglect of medieval female homosexuality among contemporary critics.7
The disavowal of female same-sex activity by medieval (male) legal authorities goes hand in hand with the prevailing negative attitudes toward women in the Middle Ages, the contradictory notions regarding their sexuality in general, including heterosexuality. After all, “natural sex” was limited to a narrow range of acceptable behaviors, as Karma Lochrie reminds us: “sex in the proper vessels with the proper instruments in the proper positions with the appropriate procreative intentions in orderly ways and during times that are not otherwise excluded.”8 These views, based on Aristotle’s male-centered model which considered a woman to be an “accidental deviation,” a failed male fetus, were recuperated by the Christian church fathers (Augustine, Jerome, Tertulian, and others), who emphasized celibacy and persistently associated sexuality with the Fall, and woman with sin. In this worldview, male and female homosexuality was nothing but a “human distortion of divine order.”9
Ironically, the invention of the category “sodomy” in the middle of the twelfth century only served to exclude female homosexuality from public discourse and thus to silence it even further.10 Even though sodomy was defined as both a male and a female sin, few theologians actually concerned themselves with female homosexuality.11 Theological discourses regularly focused on men more than they did on women because their primary goal was the control of clerics and their sexual misconduct: Peter Damian’s virulent pamphlet against sodomy contained in his Book of Gomorrah (ca. 1048–54), which does not discuss women, is a case in point.
Similarly, medieval medicine and medieval science both paid relatively little attention to homosexuality (male or female) in the Middle Ages. After all, according to the dominant clerical teachings of the period, same-sex relations between women could only be perceived as trivial because women were passive “by nature,” played a secondary role in sexuality and reproduction, and were thus at some level not fully sexual. In addition, such relations were overlooked because of the prevailing Western phallocentric view of human sexuality, because “no sperm were spilled,” and because sexuality between women did not pose a threat to lineage through the production of illegitimate heirs.12 Contemporary scholarship seems to have followed Peter Damian’s footsteps or medieval theological and scientific perspectives and maintained the primacy of male homosexuality over female alternative sexual practices.13
The scholarly neglect of medieval lesbianism has been so profound that in her biography of a sixteenth-century Italian nun, Judith Brown observed: “In light of the knowledge that Europeans had about the possibility of lesbian sexuality, their neglect of the subject in law, theology, and literature suggests an almost active willingness to disbelieve.”14 Her view has been echoed more recently by Jacqueline Murray in a 1996 essay tellingly entitled “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible.” In this article, Murray describes the status of the medieval (Western) lesbian in contemporary scholarship, observing that “of all groups within medieval society lesbians are the most marginalized and least visible.”15 Almost ten years after the publication of this landmark study, scholarship on the medieval lesbian and on same-sex desire among women in the Middle Ages (in stark contrast to that on medieval male homosexuality) remains scarce. A literary history of medieval lesbianism has yet to be written. While Crossing Borders does not purport to write such a history nor to discuss systematically all literary instances of lesbian practices in the premodern period, it aims nevertheless to unearth a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices between women that has thus far remained unnoticed. In so doing, it will unveil the unsuspected role that medieval Arabic sexological literature and culture has played on the literary constructions of same-sex desire and alternative sexual practices between women in Old French texts.16 Throughout this study, medieval Arabic writings on sexuality will serve as a crucial basis for reading eroticism in a wide range of Old French texts.
By juxtaposing medieval Arabic texts and medieval French works, Crossing Borders will shed light on the literary existence of female homosexuality prior to the nineteenth century in both the East and the West, give voice to a subaltern group that has usually been overlooked, and salvage from oblivion key medieval Arabic and French writings on alternative sexual practices. The comparative cross-cultural strategy adopted here will allow us to grasp nuances in each literary tradition that remain hidden whenever one text is examined singly or is read in isolation from its multicultural context of production. Furthermore, it will permit us to recognize the mixed, hybrid identities that emerge necessarily from contacts between cultures. The medieval French lesbian, as we will see, is an example of such a mixed identity, a product of the “contact zone” that took place between the French and the Arabs during the Middle Ages.17
The scarcity of scholarly investigations into medieval female homosexuality is partly attributed to some postmodern (and unfortunately hasty) readings of Foucault’s unfinished History of Sexuality. Because Foucault focused on homosexuality as a modern (Western) phenomenon, a result of nineteenth-century advances in the fields of medicine and sexology, and because he did not address the medieval period or female homosexuality, some critics have hurriedly concluded that homosexuality did not exist in the Middle Ages, and that there were no lesbians to speak of before the dawn of the twentieth century.18
Happily, others have contested the oversimplification of notions of alternative sexual identities derived from readings of Foucault and have taken the latter (and his readers) to task for leaving premodern homosexuality out of history.19 Despite his usually constructionist stance, David Halperin has even recently observed that Foucault himself would have been the first to be “astonished” at the limitations placed today around his history of sexuality:
It is a matter of considerable irony that Foucault’s influential distinction between the discursive construction of the sodomite and the discursive construction of the homosexual, which had originally been intended to open up a domain of historical inquiry, has now become a major obstacle blocking further research into the rudiments of sexual identity-formation in pre-modern and early modern European societies. Foucault himself would surely have been astonished. Not only was he too good a historian ever to have authorized the incautious and implausible claim that no one had ever had a sexual subjectivity, a sexual morphology, or a sexual identity of any kind before the nineteenth century (even if he painstakingly demonstrated that the conditions necessary for having a sexuality, a psychosexual orientation in the modern sense, did not in fact obtain until then). His approach to what he called “the history of the present” was also too searching, too experimental, and too open-ended to tolerate converting a heuristic analytic distinction into an ill-founded historical dogma, as his more forgetful epigones have not hesitated to do.20
Similarly, feminist medievalists have called into question the validity and legitimacy of keeping medieval lesbians inside the closet of theories of sexuality and outside of scholarship. Karma Lochrie, for instance, has decried Foucault’s view of the Christian Middle Ages, which “functions as the historical `other’ in [his] history of sexuality, as that time when discourse about sexuality was `markedly unitary.’”21 More recently, Anna Klosowska has asked: “Why need we be so prompt to examine our right to queer readings and precisely what entitles us to take for granted the legitimacy of heteronormative readings?”22
But Foucault cannot be made solely responsible for the scholarly neglect of the medieval lesbian. The study of female homosexuality in the Middle Ages has been further hampered by anachronistic views of what constitutes lesbianism. Given the definitional fluidity of this category today (Who exactly counts as a lesbian?), critics have been at a loss as to where to search for medieval literary lesbians. Because the distinction between desire and acts still remains a powerful organizing principle in queer studies, scholars have been struggling with important methodological issues: Should the medievalist search for expressions of female homosexuality in literary depictions of same-sex acts or in the portrayal of homoerotic desires? Can one speak of homosexuality even in the absence of specific (homo)sexual acts? What conclusions should be drawn from texts that insert a brief sexually alternative interlude only to end on a heteronormative note? Where is the line between intimate female friendships and female same-sex attachments? What distinguishes the lives of medieval literary single women, prostitutes, and lesbians? These questions, coupled with the fact that medieval lesbians for the most part did not leave traces of their relations and that the majority of surviving literary texts are composed by men, have all contributed to the further silencing of the medieval literary lesbian in contemporary scholarship.
Perhaps the most persistent methodological (and theoretical) issue facing medievalists is the question of naming: How should the absence of a specific label denoting lesbianism in medieval Western literary texts be interpreted (and this will be the case of all Old French texts that we will be examining)?23 Critics continue to struggle over what to call expressions of same-sex desire in the Middle Ages. They have been especially reticent to apply the label “lesbianism” to manifestations of same-sex attraction, sentiments, eroticism, and even behaviors because the notion of sexual identity continues to be viewed as a modern phenomenon. The fact that no specific label to denote lesbianism was used until the sixteenth century has been taken to mean that medieval culture was silent on the question of lesbianism. And yet, as Sautman and Sheingorn remind us, it is “highly problematic to assume that sexuality begins to exist only when discourse says it does, either by explicitly naming it (as in the modern period) or by speaking authoritatively about it (as in the medieval period).”24 It is equally problematic to assume that the absence of a name necessarily means absence of power, for again, as Sautman and Sheigorm observed, such lack may paradoxically also signify “power reclaimed through resistance to externally imposed categories with their implicit negative assessments and marginalizations.”25
Recent scholarship has revealed that female same-sex desire and practices, if not a specific identity, then at least an actual consciousness, existed in the West well before the nineteenth century.26 In fact, classical archaeology has uncovered that the first figurations of female couples (in clay, bronze, and stone) predate any other figuration of human couples including not only that of Adam and Eve, but also Homeric couples such as Achilles and Patrocles. The statues of these female couples, discovered in the Gonnersdof caves in the Rhine Valley and dated to 12,500 B.C.E., are not unique. Some have also been discovered along the Danube River, in Romania, while others were painted on Anatolian vases. In fact, 90 percent of all human couples dating from the twelfth to the sixth century B.C.E. are of female couples, according to Gabriele Meixner.27 Furthermore, the existence of female homosexuality is attested in Plato’s Symposium where Zeus’s slicing of humans resulted in three types of couplings: male homosexuals, female homosexuals, and androgynous heterosexual couples. Female homosexuals are clearly identified in Plato’s text: “All the women who are sections of the woman have no great fancy for men: they are inclined rather to women, and of this stock are the she-minions.”28 The Greek term for female homosexuality that Plato uses here is hetaïristriai, but other words circulated as well, including tribades, dihetairistria, and lesbiai. In Latin, words for female homosexuals were also in use, such as tribas, fricatrix, and virago;29 and in the medieval Arabic tradition, the category “lesbianism” existed as is evident in the use of the term sahq, as we will see in detail below. Finally, the term “lesbian” (lesbiai, plural of lesbian)–used to mean same-sex relations between women–is not entirely absent in the Christian Middle Ages since it occurs in a tenth-century Byzantine commentary on Clement of Alexandria, by Arethas (d. 914).30 After its tenth-century usage, the term seems to have disappeared (it has perhaps been purposefully erased); it did not come into use in French until the sixteenth century and then seemingly only once.31
Even though medieval French narrators did not use a specific term to denote lesbianism, we are certainly permitted to read descriptions of female characters whose primary emotional attachments are to other women or those who engage in sexually intimate relations with other women as evidence of lesbian practices in medieval textuality. The absence of a name, rather than meaning the absence of lesbianism, might indicate that lesbianism was constructed publicly as silent and nameless (this is precisely what the medieval jurists’ vocal insistence on the silent sin described earlier teaches us). It might further reveal that we have read the construction of alternative sexualities in medieval texts with inadequate theoretical and methodological tools. After all, instead of one term that denotes lesbianism and lesbian sexual practices, the premodern period often deployed a wide range of vocabulary and verbal strategies, as Judith Brown has observed: “A large array of words and circumlocutions came to be used to describe what women allegedly did: mutual masturbation, pollution, fornication, sodomy, buggery, mutual corruption, coitus, copulation, mutual vice, the defilement or impurity of women by one another. And those who did these terrible things, if called anything at all, were called fricatrices, that is women who rubbed each other, or Tribades, the Greek equivalent for the same action.”32
The absence of one specific label to denote lesbians in the European Middle Ages thus reveals the presence of another terminology, another semiotic system. It is precisely the goal of Crossing Borders to identify and decode the sign system of alternative sexualities in medieval French literary writings. My reading will thus scrutinize anew the vocabulary of sexual desire and sexual practice in Old French texts in order to better understand the textual strategies at play in the construction of female homoeroticism. Lesbianism in medieval French literature, I submit, was denoted by a wider affective language, a broader range of behaviors, and a more expansive configuration of gender trouble than has traditionally been thought. In the process, the semiotic system characteristic of same-sex desire between women in medieval French texts will be shown to be heavily indebted to Arabic literary and cultural traditions. My goal will hence be to recover the multiple Arabic intertextual resonances that regularly lie beneath the surface of medieval French textuality and its literary depiction of lesbian love and desire.
My reading has benefited from Judith Bennett’s concept of “lesbian-like,” which has proved to be especially helpful in expanding the scholarly search for “real life” lesbians in the Midde Ages.33 Because Bennett’s goal is to document the sexual practices of “ordinary [Western] women” who represented “more than ninety percent of medieval women” (2)–as opposed to literary lesbians (whose story Crossing Borders will begin to tell)–she bids us to broaden our investigation into medieval sources and to include “women whose lives might have particularly offered opportunities for same-sex love; women who resisted norms of feminine behavior based on heterosexual marriage; women who lived in circumstances that allowed them to nurture and support other women” (10). If these are the women that Bennett dubs “lesbian-like,” this is how she describes the “range of practices” that such women might engage in:
If women’s primary emotions were directed toward other women, regardless of their own sexual practices, perhaps their affection was lesbian-like. If women lived in single-sex communities, their life circumstances might be usefully conceptualized as lesbian-like. If women resisted marriage or, indeed, just did not marry, whatever the reason, their singleness can be seen as lesbian-like. If women dressed as men, whether in response to saintly voices, in order to study, in pursuit of certain careers, or just to travel with male lovers, their cross-dressing was arguably lesbian-like. And if women worked as prostitutes or otherwise flouted norms of sexual propriety, we might see their deviance as lesbian-like. (15)
Bennett’s category “lesbian-like” has many advantages, not least that of being more specific than Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum,” which includes all woman-identified experiences.34 It also possesses undeniable value for the study of literary lesbians in the Middle Ages, for, as will become evident in the following chapters, the range of practices that Bennett describes permeates much of medieval French writings. We will see indeed that diverse as the literary medieval French lesbians may be, they all display primary emotional attachments; many live in female quarters, resist marriage, cross-dress, and at times even prostitute themselves. What also unites the different medieval lesbian characters that we will be discussing is their resistance to the heterosexist politics of domination and to normative sexual and social expectations of their period.35 While the literary depiction of such characters in Old French literature is not labeled lesbian, it can certainly be considered “lesbian-like.”
Throughout this study, and while recognizing the historicity of the notions of sexual identity and gender politics, I have opted for the use of the term “lesbian” for several reasons. First, for reasons of convenience and variety: speaking each time of “same-sex desire among women,” “same-sex sexual practices,” “lesbian” in quotation marks, or even “lesbian-like,” while having the merit of being perhaps more theoretically specific, becomes a bit tedious and cumbersome stylistically. More important, such phrases end up maintaining medieval lesbians in othered categories of time and culture. Crossing Borders demonstrates however that same-sex desire and same-sex sexuality among women were more prevalent that heretofore recognized. It thus argues in favor of a continuity rather than a rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of alternative sexualities. The use of the term “lesbian” is hence an acknowledgment of this continuum. The third reason for opting for the word “lesbian” in this study is the hope of integrating same-sex desire in the Middle Ages into contemporary discourses and investigations of alternative sexual practices. Without neglecting the historical specificity of medieval same-sex desire and of modern lesbianism, I believe that using a different language when speaking of a strikingly parallel phenomenon ends up obscuring the important dialogue that can (and should) take place between past and present.36 Finally, using the term “lesbian” invites us to move beyond the debates of essentialism and constructionism, beyond discussions about the concept of “sexual identity” and about the distinctions so many still uphold between acts and identities that have divided the field and have now reached a point of stagnation. I propose instead to focus on other important yet neglected aspects of same-sex desire, namely, those of a (cross-)cultural import.
Over the past fifteen years or so, a series of insightful publications has begun to investigate women’s alternative sexualities as depicted in literary texts that otherwise maintain a strict heterosexuality (epic, romance, poetry, and religious writings). Medieval literary scholars have come to recognize the fact that if theological discourses had silenced female eroticism, literature offered a privileged space for the expression of female same-sex sexuality. Developments in queer theory invited new readings of medieval literature that focused on the unpredictability and variety of expressions of female attachments. Queering medieval texts permitted scholars to move beyond a description of the sexual in its purely genital connotation to the role of the homosocial and homoerotic in medieval literary productions. By queering medieval literature, critics have thus succeeded in detecting fluid gender positions that challenge the conventional binary sexual ideology, and hence in uncovering unsuspected alternative sexual meanings in medieval texts. They have begun to demonstrate that “non-conforming female subcultures, like other subaltern groups, developed alternative, carefully coded types of discourse and social practices to express both homoerotic desire and resistance to heterosexist politics of domination.”37
The scholarly production on medieval lesbian practices has focused primarily on three categories of texts:38
• The majority of this scholarship has explored same-sex desire in the writings of female mystics (Hildegarde of Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant, Margery Kempe, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete) and examined expressions of alternative love in devotional texts to the Virgin Mary or in the vitas of Beguines (life of Ida Louvain). Much has been written about the “feminizing of Christ’s body” and the “genitalizing of his wound,”39 about the analogy between wound and vulva, about the metaphorical interpretation of kissing Christ’s wound, about devotional “sobs and sighs,” and about the “bodily rapture” expressed by some nuns in same-sex contexts.40
• A second category of texts that has proved to be especially rich in uncovering the endless possibilities of gender bending and gender trouble in medieval literature includes writings that stage cross-dressed heroines: romances, plays (the fourteenth-century Parisian Miracles de Notre Dame), and chronicles of historical heroines (Joan of Arc).41 The homoerotic resistance that cross-dressed characters inscribe in such texts has demonstrated the extent to which medieval gender categories are elastic and permeable.
• A much smaller group of scholars has focused on medieval love poetry and correspondence purportedly produced by women.42 The coded poetry of trobairitz Bieris de Romans (ca. 1200–1220) has perhaps naturally been the primary focus of these investigations as it remains the sole surviving instance of a text that may have been produced by a “real” medieval lesbian poet. Her only poem has thus generated a heated debate between critics who consider it to be a valuable document on medieval lesbian expression and those who vehemently deny such a reading.43 While we will probably never know who Bieris truly was and what her sexual orientation might have been, the debate over her poetry reveals the extent to which female expressions of subversive homoerotic desires continue to be considered anachronistic and hence occulted.
Crossing Borders builds upon these valuable investigations into the multiple fluid gendered positions deployed in medieval French literature, while adding a new dimension: a cross-cultural reading of Old French texts. In the following chapters, I will continue to explore how medieval French literary writings challenge our notions of gendered binaries and resist a heterosexual reading. My reading of the Old French texts selected will be at once queer and cross-cultural. Queer because I will focus on the multiple ways in which literary representations of female desire, even as they appear to confirm and support heterosexual expectations, may be read in fact as unsuspected spaces for the expression of alternative attachments. My reading is cross-cultural because, as I will show, expressions of same-sex love in Old French texts are in constant dialogue with writings about lesbian desire from the Islamicate tradition.
As a matter of fact, my thesis in Crossing Borders is that Old French critical discourses on lesbianism have been limited because they have been made without historical contextualization. I have thus sought to understand medieval French lesbianism by anchoring it in its historicity. This historicity points us necessarily to the intertwined histories of the Arab Islamicate world and Western Europe,44 beginning with the Arab invasion of Spain (711). Cultural interaction continued through the founding of the Latin Kingdoms of the East during the Crusades (1099–1291) and well beyond the fall of Granada in 1492 and the Muslims’ expulsion from Spain. If medieval French lesbians as a category of analysis or as evidence of a certain textual (and perhaps even social) reality have often been occulted or thought to be nonexistent, it is undoubtedly because much of medieval French literary writings continues to be read in isolation from the context of cultural interaction, seduction, and anxiety between the Arab Islamicate world and Western Christian Europe.
A considerable amount of research has been conducted by medieval historians documenting the repeated interactions and exchanges (economic, political, and scientific especially) between the West and the Islamicate world in the Middle Ages. These investigations have focused primarily on three key historical moments and cross-cultural geographical centers: The Crusades with the founding of the Latin Kingdoms of the East; the establishment of the Islamic caliphate in Spain (al-Andalus); and Norman Sicily with Roger II’s (1130–54) international center of learning and Frederick II’s (1215–50) relaxed policies toward Muslims.45 Although until recently the Crusades had been viewed primarily in terms of political and religious conflict and heralded as a paradigmatic illustration of a “clash of civilizations,”46 they are now recognized as a privileged moment of cultural and intellectual interaction as well as of material exchanges. Recent studies have indeed unearthed the role of trade and commerce in furthering the cultural relations between medieval Europe and the Islamicate world, even during the period of the Crusades. Antioch, for instance–which was occupied by the Franks as early as 1136 when Raymond of Poitiers married Constance, daughter of Bohemond II–is known to have been a powerful commercial center of international trade and boasted important cross-cultural funduks.47
Historians have also shown the decisive role that Arabic medicine, mathematics, and astronomy have played on the development of the European sciences.48 As early as the late eleventh century and until circa 1250, medieval Toledo (Spain) and soon Palermo (Sicily) became important centers of translation and key sites for the transmission of Arabic sciences to the West. Well-known European scholars and translators, including Adelard of Bath, Robert of Ketton, Herman the Dalmatian, Daniel of Morley, Alfred the Englishman, and Michael Scot, among others, studied either at Toledo or Palermo. After a period of time spent seeking Arabic knowledge (arabum studia), these European scholars went back to England, France, or Italy to teach and share with their fellow European intellectuals knowledge acquired among Muslims and Jews abroad. In addition to being a chief location for the transmission of Arabic sciences to the West, al-Andalus also played a key role in international trade and in the transfer of desirable luxuries and material goods from the Far and Middle East to Northern Europe (precious metals, textiles, spices, paper). As a gateway between Christian Europe and the Islamicate world, the Iberian peninsula became a habitual passageway to scholars, diplomats, soldiers, travelers, and merchants and a transfer point for letters and commodities “even in times of political discord.”49
If the historical role that crusaders, pilgrims, political envoys, scholars, merchants, and travelers have played in the transmission of scientific and material goods from the East to the West is amply documented, the diffusion of Arabic cultural and literary traditions to Western Europe remains a highly controversial subject area. For while the dissemination of knowledge from the Islamicate world to Europe can be substantiated in some disciplines (medicine, mathematics, astronomy) with a great deal of historical details concerning translators and geographical sites of encounters, it is difficult to document cases of literary and cultural transmission with a similar precision. Two literary topics only have been investigated (and hotly contested) thus far: troubadour poetry and European courtly love and their indebtedness to the Arabic muwasshahat and zajal traditions;50 and the fable tradition and the role that Kalila wa Dimna has played on Marie de France’s Esope.51
Yet, despite the scholarly resistance to the role that less tangible Arabic cultural categories, such as literature, has played on the West, it is evident from the current state of research that medieval Europe had ample opportunities to learn about Arabic literature and culture. I would submit that Western familiarity with Arabic literature and social customs took place through the same channels that insured the transfer of scientific knowledge and commercial goods from the Islamicate world to Europe in the Middle Ages. European knowledge of Arabic literature and traditions was gained either directly in the West’s political or economic dealings with the East or indirectly by hearsay from returning crusaders, pilgrims, travelers, and merchants. Westerners who came to live, trade, or conduct any sort of business in the Orient witnessed firsthand modes of living, cultural traditions, and customs different from their own; they heard stories told, poetry recited, and songs sung all the while engaging in whatever commercial or political transactions they had come to accomplish. Upon their return, along with the material goods that they hauled in their carts, next to the silk cloth and precious stones they transported in their bags, they also carried ideas, stories, poems, tales, and varied new customs which they transmitted to their people.
Literary scholarship, particularly French scholarship, seems to have been especially resistant to the idea that Old French literature may have also been marked by the cross-cultural exchanges of the period. Despite the multiple references to Oriental material culture in medieval French texts, there is a persistent assumption that French literature (in contrast to other disciplines) has escaped the stamp of medieval exchanges.52 Still today, medieval French and medieval Arabic literatures continue to be read, taught, and studied in different academic departments, by different scholars, and within entirely different (at times opposite) theoretical frameworks. Crossing Borders demonstrates that literature, like science, bears traces of its associations with its Eastern neighbors. As it builds upon the important contributions of noted scholars of medieval cross-cultural encounters, this project demonstrates that the medieval Arabic erotic tradition has played a determining role in French literary writings on gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages.
Focusing on cross-cultural (Franco-Arabic) representations of same-sex relations does not mean promoting the view perpetrated by medieval Western polemical writers and some theologians that homosexuality is an importation from the Orient or that Islam sanctions licentiousness and sexual perversity. For, after all, such was one of the most prevalent rhetorical metaphors used in the Christian Middle Ages (and later throughout Western colonization of the Middle East) to justify crusading efforts, the Spanish reconquest, and the unrelenting aspiration to destroy Islam.53 Ever since the writings of Paul Alvarus (ca. 850) and San Eulogio, medieval Christian discourses associated homosexuality with the Muslim enemy and the Prophet Muhammad with sodomitic practices.54 The image of the aggressive, predatory homosexual Muslim is perhaps best known through Hrostvit of Gandersheim’s tenth-century Latin play depicting the adolescent Christian martyr Pelagius imprisoned and seduced by the Muslim caliph, a man described as “corrupted by sodomic vices.”55 Moreover, medieval Christian writers pointed to Muhammad’s multiple wives, the Oriental practice of polygamy, Muslims’ ratification of divorce, and Qur’anic descriptions of a material, sensual paradise as proofs of the immorality of Islamic teachings.56 More than a threat of unbelief, Islam was a threat of (male) sodomy.
In fact, William Adam, a fourteenth-century French bishop, is reported to have proclaimed that: “According to the religion of the Saracens, any sexual act whatever is not only allowed but approved and encouraged, so that in addition to innumerable prostitutes, they have effeminate men in great number who shave their beards, paint their faces, put on women’s clothing, wear bracelets on their arms and legs and gold necklaces around their necks as women do, and adorn their chests with jewels. Thus selling themselves into sin, they degrade and expose their bodies. . . . The Saracens, oblivious of human dignity, freely resort to these effeminates or live with them as among us men and women live together openly.”57
The association between Saracens, Muslims, and homosexuality was perceived to be especially threatening because of the seductive power that homosexuality could exert over Christians. Like others before him (including Orderic Vitalis), William Adam was vocal in calling attention to the contagious nature of Muslim homosexual desire and the danger it posed to Christians who entertained commercial relations with them.58 Such polemical views persisted throughout the early modern period until the eighteenth century59 and became especially common in nineteenth-century Orientalism with the popularization of the image of the Orient as an exotic, erotic space where all forms of sexual deviance were permitted and exalted and where a homosexual encounter was always a latent possibility. It is in that spirit that Sir Richard Burton, in his “Terminal Essay” (1886), which concludes his ten-volume translation of the One Thousand and One Nights, promulgated his theory of a “Sotadic Zone,” a geographic space that extends from the Mediterranean to Japan in which “the Vice [pederasty] is popular and endemic, held to be at the worst a mere peccadillo.”60
The association of Islam with homosexuality in the Western Christian imaginary focused for the most part on male-male rather than female-female sexual practices. The threat of lesbianism, while not always explicitly described, remained nevertheless at the level of consciousness, as the frequent recourse in Old French romances to the harem as a stereotypically Oriental space replete with lesbian practices indicates. The mid-twelfth-century romance of Floire et Blancheflor, for instance, plays on Floire’s resemblance to Blancheflor and especially his feminine features in order to depict an intimate scene in the harem. Floire is mistaken for a girl because “k’a face n’a menton n’avoit / barbe, ne grenons n’i parait” (“he had neither on the face nor on the chin / a beard or facial hair”).61 While the scene is really a heterosexual depiction of the reunited couple, the lesbian overtones are not absent, since the chamberlain himself, who sees the sleeping couple, mistakes them for Blancheflor cuddled in the intimacy of Gloris, the daughter of the King of Germany and a fellow concubine in the harem:
Ainc mais si grans amors ne fu |
There has never been as great a love |
Com a Blanceflor, vers Gloris |
As the one that Blancheflor has for Gloris |
And she for her, it seems to me. |
|
Ensanle dormant doucement, |
They sleep together softly, |
Acolé s’ont estroitement, |
Tightly hugging (or embracing), |
Et bouce a bouce et face a face |
Mouth against mouth and face to face |
S’ont acolé, et brace a brace. |
They are holding each other arms entertwined. |
(vv. 2594–2600) |
What is interesting in these lines is the fact that the chamberlain does not appear in the least surprised by the scene he witnesses. He is not shocked to find two girls sleeping tightly together, “hugging, / mouth against mouth and face to face” (vv. 2598–99). In fact, he depicts the love he sees with some degree of admiration, if not tenderness. If he is not surprised, it is likely because in the Western imaginary, such a scene of alternative sexual practices “makes sense” in the context of an Eastern harem. It is precisely the cultural otherness of the harem, moreso than the depiction of any racial otherness in the text, which generates in the text a discourse of sexual alterity. We will see that the recourse to such Middle Eastern sociocultural practices functions as textual/sexual strategies to express same-sex love between women in medieval French literature.
Rather than demonstrating that Islam sanctions lascivious practices, my reading of such homoerotic interludes highlights the interweaving of alternative sexualities with Oriental themes and motifs in medieval French literary writings. At a time when lesbianism was neither named nor spoken in medieval Europe, Middle Eastern motifs, luxury goods, Arab social customs, thematic echoes between Arabic tales and Old French texts, and at times even Arabic vocabulary permitted Old French writers to articulate alternative modes of sexual expression. They may be considered, as we will see, a textual strategy, a cross-cultural literary technique of speaking and of naming that which remained too dangerous to depict openly in medieval Europe.
If the absence of a specific terminology to denote lesbianism in medieval Europe seems to have compromised the production of scholarship about same-sex desire among women, the existence of the label sahq and sahiqa (Arabic words for lesbianism and lesbian respectively) in medieval Arabic writings did not result in a richer critical production.62 This state of scholarship into alternative sexual practices in the Arab Islamicate world is especially astonishing considering the survival of a noteworthy body of primary texts dealing precisely with this topic. Furthermore, if one broadens the category of Arab lesbian to that of Arab “lesbian-like,” as Bennett has suggested in our construction of the history of Western female homosexuality, we uncover even more expressions of Arab lesbian presence. As we will see, the cultural and social life of some women in certain medieval Arab courts, including their work and lifestyle, may well unveil unsuspected spaces in which same-sex activities might have occurred. If it is not always clear that these practices could indeed be dubbed lesbian, they certainly may be considered “lesbian-like.”
One might argue that the Arabic terms for “lesbianism,” sahq, sihaq, musahaqat al-nisa’, and sihaqa, refer primarily to a behavior, an act, rather than an emotional attachment or an identity. The root of these words (s/h/q) means to pound, to rub, and lesbians (sahiqat, sahhaqat, musahiqat), like the Greek tribades, are literally those who engage in rubbing (or pounding) behavior, or who make love by pounding or rubbing. In fact, some medieval medical views of lesbianism, reported in the Arabic sexological tradition, point to rubbing as an essential characteristic of the practice. Galen, the second-century Greek physician whose own daughter was reportedly a lesbian, is supposed to have examined her labia and surrounding veins and to have concluded that her lesbianism was due to “an itch between the major and minor labia” that could be soothed only by rubbing one’s labia against another woman’s labia.63 In the ninth century, Arab and Muslim philosopher al-Kindi echoes Galen’s observation of labial itching and recommends the same treatment, namely, rubbing.64
Other Arab physicians thought of lesbianism as an inborn state, caused by the mother’s consumption of certain foods that, when passed through the milk during nursing, led to labial itching and lifelong lesbianism. Hence, according to the famous ninth-century Nestorian Christian physician Yuhanna Ibn Masawayh, also known as John Mesué (d. 857): “Lesbianism results when a nursing woman eats celery, rocket, melilot leaves and the flowers of a bitter orange tree. When she eats these plants and suckles her child, they will affect the labia of her suckling and generate an itch which the suckling will carry through her future life.”65 Rubbing is again prescribed and recognized as capable only of relieving, not of curing, the woman; female homosexuality is thus clearly depicted as both innate and lifelong. Foreshadowing the medicalization of homosexuality in the nineteenth century, lesbianism in the medieval Islamicate literary tradition seems to have already been regarded as a medical (though not deviant) category requiring specific treatment, namely, rubbing. Such views were standard and were repeated from one century to the next, from one literary treatise on sexualities to the other.66
If etymologically and medically, sahq denotes a behavior, culturally speaking and in the context of medieval Arabic literary writings, sahiqat (lesbians) were associated rather with love and devotion and at times they were even known to form an exclusive and supportive subculture. As a matter of fact, the origin of lesbianism according to popular anecdotes in the Arabic literary tradition is regularly traced back forty years before the emergence of male homosexuality (liwat) to an intercultural, interfaith love affair between an Arab woman and a Christian woman in pre-Islamic Iraq. The earliest extant erotic treatise in Arabic, Jawami` al-ladhdha (Encyclopedia of Pleasure), written at the end of the tenth century by a certain Ali Ibn Nasr al-Katib,67 tells us the story of the first lesbian couple, the enduring love between Christian princess Hind Bint al-Nu`man (daughter of the last Lakhmid king of the Iraqi town of Hira in the late sixth century) and Hind Bint al Khuss al-Iyadiyyah from Yamama (located in present-day Saudi Arabia), known as al-Zarqa’ and reportedly the first lesbian in Arab history: “She [Hind Bint al-Nu`man] was so loyal to al-Zarqa’ that when the latter died, she cropped her hair, wore black clothes, rejected worldly pleasures, vowed to God that she would lead an ascetic life until she passed away and, as a result, she built a monastery which was named after her, on the outskirts of Kufa. When she died, she was buried at the monastery gate. Her loyalty was then an example for poets to write about. There are also other women who continued to shed tears on their beloved ones’ graves until they passed away.”68
Even though it is impossible to ascertain the veracity of this account, the fact that it continued to circulate throughout the literary Islamicate world is sufficient to demonstrate that lesbianism was thought to be far more than a behavior or sexual practice. In the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, this lesbian love story is praised and presented as evidence of the greater loyalty and devotion that women have for their female partners, compared to men’s attachment to women. Ibn Nasr cites the following verses written by an unnamed (presumably male) poet about the love of Hind for al-Zarqa’:
O Hind, you are truer to your word than men.
Oh, the difference between your loyalty and theirs!69
If the relationship between Hind and al-Zarqa’ is the one most often cited in the Arabic sexological tradition, it is not the only lesbian relation to exist in Arabic literary history. In fact, in his Fihrist (The Catalogue), al-Nadim (d. ca. 990–98) lists the names of twelve lesbian couples who were known until the tenth century, but about whom nothing else has been preserved.70
Medieval Arab lesbians are said to have formed groups, to have held meetings, and to have led schools in which they taught other lesbians how best to achieve pleasure.71 Tunisian physician, philosopher, and poet Ahmad al-Tifashi, in his thirteenth-century Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab or The Delight of Hearts Or, What One Cannot Find in Any Book,72 for instance, provides several examples of the teachings of famous medieval lesbians, notably on the most successful sounds that ought to accompany lesbian sexual practices (which he calls massage) (252). He also gives information about a lesbian association and the same-sex teachings of Rose, the head lesbian within it (257).73 Similar associations of lesbians are evoked by Leo Africanus, the fifteenth-century traveler from Granada, in his account of female diviners of Fez: “Female diviners of Fez who, claiming to be possessed by djinns or demons, foretold the future or served as healers, were in fact suhaqiyat (sahacat, as he transliterated into Italian the current Arabic word for `tribades,’ lesbians), women who had the `evil custom’ of `rubbing’ (fregare) each other in sexual delight.”74
Needless to say, stories such as these are significant not only for the history of lesbianism, but also because they have no equivalent in the medieval French (or Western) literary tradition. Arab lesbians were both named and visible in Classical Arabic literature. Theirs was not a “silent sin”; in fact, lesbianism was a topic deemed worthy of discussion and a fashion worthy of emulation. I do not wish to imply here that medieval Arabic literature on sexuality was prolesbian or protofeminist. Far from it. The Arabic writings that have survived focus on men much more than on women; they remain for the most part phallocentric and ultimately reflect a male perspective. Whenever mentioned, lesbians occupy only one chapter. Even the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which is the first extant erotic treatise in Arabic dating from the late tenth century, speaks more loudly about men and male homosexuality. Nevertheless, the material on lesbianism in the Arabic Middle Ages, while undoubtedly a smaller proportion in the overall economy of medieval Arabic sexological literature, and while at times contradictory, is significant and merits investigation.
From the existence of the category lesbianism in medieval Arabic writings and from the information gathered about Arabic (literary) lesbian subcultures, we must not rush to equate the medieval Arabic Islamicate notions of female-female sexuality with contemporary Western notions of lesbianism and sexual identity. The categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, like those of “natural” or “unnatural” sexualities, it must be stressed, are Western concepts and do not have parallels in the medieval Arabic tradition. To begin with, if indeed medieval Arabic sexological writings are obsessed with identifying and defining every variety of sexual practice and thus regularly use the terms sahq (lesbianism), sahiqa (lesbian), mutazarrifat (elegant ladies-lovers); haba’ib (beloveds), liwat (active male homosexuality), luti (active male homosexual), hulaq (passive anal intercourse, term used until the ninth century), ubnah (passive male homosexuality), ma’bun (passive male homosexual), qatim (passive male homosexual in Andalusian dialect), mukhannath (male effeminate, transvestite, transsexual, hermaphrodite), tafkhidh (intercrural intercourse), bidal, mubadala (taking turn in active and passive homosexuality), as well as nisa’ mutarajjilat (masculinized women) and rijal mu’ annathin (feminized men), no medieval Arabic word exists for bisexuality, considered to be the neutral, most common practice, for heterosexuality, or even for sexuality. The contemporary Arabic word jins, used today to mean sexuality, did not acquire this connotation until the early twentieth century. Up to that time, jins (derived from the Greek genus) denoted type, kind, and ethnolinguistic origin. Its connotation of biological sex, national origin, and citizenship is a modern development, resulting from Arabic translations of Freud in the 1950s and of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the 1990s.75 Interestingly, the impact of these Western medical and theoretical ideas about (homo)sexuality on the Arab world has led to the replacement of the medieval Arabic terms of liwat and, to a lesser extent, sahq with mithliyyah (sameness) to mean homosexuality and ghayriyyah (differentness) to mean heterosexuality. The coining of these new Arabic terms was accompanied by that of al-shudhudh al-jinsi (literally, sexually rare or unusual), a translation of the Western concept of homosexuality.76 The notions of sexuality and heterosexuality, and the categorization of homosexuality as sexual deviance appear thus to be some of the Western imperial legacies to the Arab world today. Ironically, and despite its promise of “modernizing” and “liberating,” the hegemony of the Western cultural and intellectual capital has ended up erasing the flexible medieval Arabic model of sexuality and imposed instead a heterosexual binary view of sexuality onto the Arab world.
The surprisingly positive valuation of lesbianism and homosexuality in medieval Arabic literary writings (in comparison to the medieval West) is most likely a consequence of the general commendation of eroticism and (hetero)sexual practice in Arab and Islamicate discourses. Not only is sexuality explicitly celebrated in a large number of medieval Arabic scientific and literary texts but sexuality is positioned at the very heart of religious piety. In fact, it has been argued that “sexual activity is an important form of worshipful pleasure.”77 In contrast to medieval Christianity, sex is not a sin in Islam and heterosexual desire (in marriage or concubinage) is viewed as both licit and desirable. The Qur’an itself describes Paradise in sexual terms and proclaims the primacy of physical sensual pleasures.78
It is worth noting that the principal, most vehemently condemned sexual sin in the official Islamic discourse is adultery (zina), not homosexuality (liwat). Zina is defined very specifically in Islam as vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman who is neither his lawful wife nor his concubine. Much more than same-sex desire, zina is emphatically and unambiguously condemned in both the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and has traditionally been the focus of Islamic scholars and of jurisprudence. Interestingly, the interest in zina seems to have encouraged, at least partly, the acceptance of liwat in Islamicate societies. In fact, in his chapter on “lesbianism” in his fourteenth-century Rushd al-labib ila mu`asharat al-habib (An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition), Ibn Falita (d. 1362) compares sihaq and zina and underscores the social advantages of the former over the latter. He writes: “Know that lesbianism insures against social disgrace / While coition is forbidden except through marriage.”79 In that perspective, Everett Rowson has observed that “because of the cult of female virginity and the dependence of a man’s honor on the chastity of his female relations, heterosexual philanderers were in fact playing a more dangerous game than lutis, and an argument could be made for a shift over time in the weight of societal disapproval towards the former and away from the latter.”80 Because the Qur’an does not prescribe a specific punishment for homosexuals, Islamic jurisprudence tended to analogize (qiyas) homosexuality to adultery for the purposes of punishing homosexual acts. Moreover, as liwat was specifically defined as anal penetration by a penis, and since lesbianism was considered not to involve penetration by a man, it was generally agreed that sahq merited a lesser punishment than liwat.81 In most legal compendia of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), sahq is not even regularly addressed.
Despite the severity of Islamic law toward homosexuality, it appears that in practice homosexuality was tolerated within Muslim societies. During the early Abbasid period (ca. 750–850), for instance, homosexuality was broadcast among the fashionable misbehaviors of the time, along with wine drinking, gambling, cockfights, and dogfights.82 In the caliphate court of ninth-century Baghdad, the tradition of the ghulamiyyat, singing slave-girls who cross-dressed as boys (at times even with painted mustaches), became the cultural fashion to be imitated by upper-class women of the city.83
But it is especially during the Mamluk period (1249–1517) that homosexuality became a veritable cultural fashion of the Islamic world, as many of the caliphs themselves maintained homosexual lovers. Verses celebrating homosexuality became more popular than those praising heterosexuality.84 Same-sex behaviors became especially trendy, if not the norm, in intellectual circles, and in caliphate courts throughout the Islamicate world. The public role of male effeminates as court jesters in caliphate courts may have also secured the visibility of alternative sexual practices and hence officially sanctioned a certain degree of tolerance toward them.
In an attempt to emulate and surpass the courts of the Abbasids, the Umayyads of al-Andalus (756–1031) boasted their own tolerance of alternative sexualities. In Islamic Spain, homoerotic verses competed with and perhaps exceeded the production of heteroerotic poetry. The rulers themselves were both producers of such verse and vocal partners in same-sex love relations. Al-Mutamid, eleventh-century king of Seville, wrote to his male page: “I made him my slave, but the coyness of his glance has made me his prisoner, so that we are both at once slave and master to each other.”85 As the survival of this and other such verses reveal, homosexual relations were not kept a secret but were sung in courts, as well as in other milieus of Muslim Spain. In addition, it must be pointed out, the fact that “much of the most popular gay erotic poetry is written in a vulgar Arabic dialect containing many Romance words and expressions [suggests] that it was composed in a milieu familiar with if not consisting partly of Christians.”86 The cultural encounters between Muslims and Christians in al-Andalus thus not only promoted amorous liaisons between the two groups,87 but also ensured cultural exchanges and the transmission of erotic verse to the West.
The case of Wallada (d. 1087 or 1091) deserves mention here. Daughter of the last Umayyad caliph in Muslim Spain (al-Mustakfi), Wallada unquestionably stands as the prototype of the unparalleled refinement of the Andalusian aristocracy in the eleventh century and of women’s unsuspected sexual freedom. Hostess of a literary salon in eleventh-century Cordoba, Wallada defled conventional societal expectations as she is said to have openly entertained two male lovers (Ibn Zaydun and Ibn `Abdus) as well as one female lover (Mohja). While critics disagree as to whether Wallada may indeed be considered an Andalusian Sappho,88 and while we cannot equate a poet’s persona, the literary motifs used, and what real life was like for medieval Andalusian women, Wallada’s story nevertheless serves as an important reminder that same-sex desire between women in the urban, courtly Islamicate literary world was far from absent.
There is a surprisingly large literature (composed in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish) on same-sex practices in the medieval Islamicate world. Most of it is very difficult to access in bookstores and libraries worldwide; the majority has not been translated into Western languages, and because of the contemporary Middle Eastern political and social attitudes toward gender, very few of these works have been examined in criticism either within or outside of the Arab Islamicate world.89
The earliest extant Arabic homoerotic poetry dates from the late eighth century with the writings of Iraqi judge Yahya Ibn Aktham and poet Abu Nuwas (d. 815), the latter being traditionally considered “the principal originator of homoerotic poetry in the Muslim environment.”90 Much of the information on homosexuality in the medieval Arabic tradition may be gathered from what Arabists call the belletristic tradition (adab), namely, collections of poetry and anecdotes. As a literary genre that developed at first in the sophisticated urban environment of eighth-century Baghdad and that was sponsored by the Abbasid caliphate, adab was especially interested in promoting zarf (refinement, elegance), love as a science, erotology, and in exploiting the far reaches and power of linguistic formations. The semiscientific view of love, characteristic of adab in the Abbasid period and later found throughout the Islamicate world, including Muslim Spain, resulted in the composition of numerous treatises on love and topics such as music, singing, and dancing slave-girls. Adab anthologies are important not only as literary writings, but because they give us insights into the attitudes held by urban, elite, and mostly male writers and readers of the period.91 One of the key subcategories of the adab tradition is the genre of mujun (profligacy) which contains books known as kutub al-bah (treatises on copulation). These are sex manuals interspersed with erotic tales that “flouted societal and religious norms.”92 Texts in the mujun tradition focus mostly on male alternative sexualities, but many include a chapter devoted to lesbianism and speak about female eroticism under other subheadings as well. It is the various chapters and passages on lesbianism of these larger adab texts that will be especially relevant to Crossing Borders.
Space allows us to mention here only some of the most prominent examples of this literary tradition: (1) Abu al-Faraj Ibn Muhammad al-Isfahani’s tenth-century compilation, Kitab al-aghani (Book of Songs), which contains key information about songs and melodies, and offers anecdotes about poets, musicians, and personalities from the pre-Islamic era to the Abbasid period;93 (2) the late tenth-century collection by Ibn Nasr al-Katib entitled Jawami` al-ladhdha (The Encyclopedia of Pleasure) and its multiple rewritings throughout the centuries, most importantly by Ahmad al-Tifashi in the early thirteenth century (The Delight of Hearts) and Ibn Falita in the middle of the fourteenth century (An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition); (3) the early eleventh-century anthology by a religious scholar named Abu al-Qasim al-Husayn Ibn Muhammad al-Raghib al-Isfahani entitled Muhadarat al-udaba’ wa-muhawarat al-shu `ara’ wa-al-bulagha’ (Lectures by the Literati and Conversations in Poetry and Eloquent Speech); and (4) the eleventh-century philological work written by an Iraqi religious judge named Abu al-Abbas Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Jurjani (d. 1089) entitled al-Muntakhab min kinayat al-udaba’ wa isharat al-bulagha’ (Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech).94 It may seem peculiar today to think of Muslim judges as authors of mujun literature, but this type of composition was considered a valid literary genre and does not reflect necessarily the sexual orientation or practices of its author nor the degree of permissibility such behavior had in its society.95 In fact, one of the conventions of mujun is precisely the use of religious language to flout religious norms.
Another important genre that scholars have examined in their research on same-sex desire in medieval Arabic literature is that of the wasf tradition, or epigrammatical description in verse.96 This poetical genre focused on multiple topics, including the comparative merits of boys and girls, of virgins and nonvirgins, of beardless boys and maidens as sex partners, and even of boys’ jealousy and women’s jealousy of male lovers. As far as sexual orientation is concerned, the tradition of wasf varied in its evaluation. At times, it showcased the advantages of heterosexuality as in al-Jahiz’s (d. 868) Kitab moufakharati al-jawari wa al-ghilman (Boasting Match over Maids and Youths) and Tafdil al-batn `ala al-zahr (Superiority of the Belly to the Back);97 at others, it upheld a bias toward homosexuality as in Ibn Falita’s fourteenth-century Rushd al-labib ila mu `asharat al-habib (An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition) which includes a chapter heading referring to the “greater excellence” (tafdil) of boys over slave girls.98
Last, but not least, the framed narrative tradition of Alf layla wa layla, or the One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Arabian Nights), is another important genre that is essential to any study of sexuality in the medieval Arabic world, especially as it relates to the lower levels of society who are never represented in other texts. As we will see in the following chapters, tales from this work which have circulated orally and in performance as early as the ninth century, but for which no written manuscript has survived prior to the early fourteenth century, give us key insights into alternative sexuality and female same-sex practices in the Islamicate world.
Despite the unquestionable value that texts such as these have for an investigation of alternative sexual practices in the medieval Arab world, and despite their overall importance in Arabic literary history and the promise they hold for a reevaluation of gender in the Arab Islamicate world, these works remain little known except by a select group of scholars. In fact, because of the sociopolitical climate in the Arab world today, and because such texts paint women with unexpected agency over their social and sexual lives and have thus the potential to become powerful sociopolitical models of resistance for contemporary Arab and Muslim women, many are often silenced or censored. They are also at times unedited, unpublished, and difficult to access not only in manuscript, but even in libraries and bookstores across the Arab world. One of the main challenges of the present study is precisely that of locating and obtaining copies of the relevant material. Understanding these difficulties and appreciating who is permitted to have access to Arabic materials on alternative sexuality provide a glimpse of the political and social potential for subversion that these documents possess.
My research in Egypt (summer 2002) revealed that even though some editions of medieval Arabic erotic writings, such as the Encyclopedia of Pleasure do indeed exist, they are not made available or sold to Arab/Muslim women.99 A conversation I had with the assistant manager of a major bookstore in Alexandria (Egypt) illustrates the current status of erotic writings in the Arab world. After handing me a greatly censored copy of Abu Nuwas’s poetry (Abu Nuwas is considered to be the father of Arabic erotic poetry and is mentioned regularly throughout the Encyclopedia of Pleasure), and after I declined the book on this basis, the manager looked at me with shock mixed with suspicion; he then proceeded to politely explain to me that he indeed had the uncensored version in the back room of his store, and simply added “but I will certainly not sell it to you.” This conversation clarifies for me the fact that erotic writings, though available in some Arab bookstores, are not for the consumption of “proper” Arab and Muslim women.
I first obtained the only Arabic edition of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure that exists (to my knowledge) through the intercession of an Arab male friend living in New York City who knew a Cairo bookshop owner who sold him this volume in secret. At the same time that I discovered the existence of the Arabic edition of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, I found out that it was published in Damascus (Syria) by Dar al-kitab al-arabi (Arabic Book Press) in a series entitled Adab al-jins `inda al-`Arab (The Erotic Writings of the Arabs) which to date includes six titles on Arabic eroticism. I also quickly understood that Arabic erotic treatises were more widely available in specialized bookstores in the West (London and Paris in particular) than in the Arab world.
The initial moment of celebration at getting the Arabic edition of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure was quickly tempered when I actually examined the text. The name of the press had been carefully blackened out, as was the date of publication. The entire book was printed in black ink on white paper, over which were superimposed prints in red ink of large trees. Most likely, this represented a (cheap) attempt at avoiding censorship by making quick identification of the book’s subject matter difficult and ultimately the reading of the entire book quite challenging. The superimposition of text and image, of black ink over white paper, and of large red drawings over everything, literalized for me the multiple layers of veils that the Arabic erotic texts had undergone over time. Last, this Arabic edition, perhaps because it was based on an incomplete manuscript, did not contain several of the chapters found in the English translation (particularly those dealing with same-sex relations). Clearly, though available, the Arabic Encyclopedia of Pleasure continues to evade us, its erotic content having been judged ideologically too subversive, too dangerous to fall into the hands of just anyone. Until today, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure remains known primarily through an English translation, the 1977 Canadian Ph.D. dissertation of Salah Addin Khawwam, translated by Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam and published by Aleppo Publishing in Toronto. The presence of this English translation should not deceive us into thinking that this text is readily available. Quite the opposite. Aleppo Publishing has since gone out of business; none of the translators is to be found in any scholarly listings or directories; no information is given on the university where the dissertation was submitted and defended; the book is utterly unavailable for purchase anywhere, and only three copies of this dissertation are available in libraries worldwide: the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Columbia University, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London).100
The difficulty of accessing medieval Arabic writings on alternative sexualities should not be understood to be a specific problem of the Arab world because of its contemporary political and social restrictions; it manifests itself also in the West, though under a different guise. Similarly to the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, the English translation of Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Tifashi’s thirteenth-century Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab, The Delight of Hearts by Edward A. Lacey,101 has ended up ghettoizing this important Arabic text. Even though it is almost certain that this medieval Arabic work was addressed to a much wider audience, its contemporary English translation is published by an exclusively male gay press (Gay Sunshine Press) and is thus likely to be known primarily by a gay audience. Moreover, Lacey has taken the liberty to excise from his work the chapter on lesbianism as well as other sections dealing with heterosexuality because of budgetary concerns and press policy, which dictate that Gay Sunshine Press address exclusively male gay literature.102 The manipulations that The Delight of Hearts has thus undergone have transformed this important text almost beyond recognition. Not only has this English translation (the only one available) utterly erased lesbian voices in the medieval Arabic tradition, but it has also presented sexual divisions that were certainly not present in the medieval text. Translating only the sections on gay men’s sexuality has hence introduced a modern and Western perspective on the medieval Arabic work that places sexual orientations and their various practices on a continuum of behaviors.103
In the following chapters, I will demonstrate that Old French literature may be usefully considered a palimpsest, a textual surface that both obscures and reveals signs of multiple contacts (and conflicts) between medieval France and the Islamicate world.104 By unraveling what lies just beneath the surface of French textuality, beneath its Western and heterosexual veneer, Crossing Borders will recapture alternative female same-sex sexual voices, long thought to be absent because they are dressed in Oriental garb. Crossing Borders purports also to recover those references to the Arabic tradition and to alternative sexual practices in Old French texts which the medieval Western audience would have heard, but which we (the contemporary audience) no longer recognize because we have lacked the critical cultural (and at times linguistic) tools to identify them. Only by reconstructing the multicultural context in which medieval French literature was composed is it possible to hear the heretofore silenced voices of premodern European female homoeroticism.
We will see in Chapter 1 that the medieval Arabic erotic tradition permits the deciphering for the first time of various images, terms, and rhetorical devices (military metaphors in particular) in Old French texts that have thus far appeared ambiguous or obscure (Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières). Chapter 2 demonstrates the extent to which the Arabic tradition has offered a repertoire of themes, of tales, and of vocabulary for medieval Europe which permitted the expression of same-sex desire and sexuality between women (the Yde et Olive stories). Chapter 3 demonstrates how medieval French narrators represented same-sex desire between women through the safer discourse of friendship. A comparison between Jean Renart’s thirteenth-century romance Escoufle and the framed tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour from the One Thousand and One Nights reveals that the numerous repeated references in Old French texts to material goods, silk cloth, precious stones, and luxury commodities coming from the East are not to be read as ornamental, empty signifiers without any bearing on the interpretation of the romance. Rather, such allusions function as veritable narrative strategies that point to unsuspected and veiled expressions of intimate desire between women in Old French writings. Finally, Chapter 4 extends the meaning of intertextuality and cross-cultural literary encounters between the Arab world and medieval France to include the social and the cultural. We will see in particular how Arab cultural and social practices contributed to the development of the French literary lesbian’s social identity. In that chapter, Arabic resonances in Jean Renart’s Escoufle will be shown to far exceed specific linguistic or thematic borrowings and to reside rather in the development of alternative urban, socioeconomic spaces that are conducive to same-sex sexual practices between women.