A willingness to descend into that alien territory split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.
—Homi K. Bhabha
These turns of phrases [words designating the male and female parts and copulation] are there to be used. If it was generally believed that they were not supposed to be uttered, they would have had no meaning in the first place or would have already been removed from the language for reasons of probity and to protect its purity.
—Al-Jahiz
IRONICALLY, IT IS to a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman bishop and chaplain that we owe the earliest extant and most explicit depiction of lesbian sexual practices in French literature. Etienne de Fougères is indeed credited with writing the least ambiguous portrait of same-sex sexual practices between women in the entire French literary Middle Ages. The most striking elements in Etienne’s account of lesbianism are undoubtedly the erotic military metaphors and unfamiliar linguistic terms that permeate seven stanzas of his Livre des manières (ca. 1174). As I decipher the eroto-military tropes and linguistic innovations of Etienne de Fougères’s depiction of lesbian sexuality, I will argue that though unique in medieval French literature, the erotic military images found in Etienne’s text strikingly echo various passages from widely circulated Arabic erotic treatises.
Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières is the earliest extant example in French of the medieval genre of estate literature (états du monde).1 As a moralistic composition, this genre is intended both to justify and to rectify the actions of the various members of society. Etienne’s Livre des manières divides society into two groups: those who belong to the upper estate or social level and thus hold power–that is, respectively, the king, the clergy, and the knights; then those who make up the lower estate and thus lack power–namely, the peasants, the bourgeois, and women. In fact, his entire poem is divided exactly into two parts to address these two main categories: vv. 1–672 (the upper estates) and vv. 677–1344 (the lower estates).2
Like his contemporary Marie de France, Etienne de Fougères was associated with the Anglo-Norman courts of Henry II Plantagenêt, where he served as the king’s chaplain. Like Marie de France’s Esope, Etienne’s poem also invites a cross-cultural reading. For Henry II’s courts have long been recognized as especially rich hubs to which Arabic scientific, material, and cultural goods flowed from scholarly centers in Sicily and Spain.3 The multiple exchanges between Norman England and Norman Sicily insured in fact the regular presence of Englishmen at Sicilian courts. English scholars, translators, and administrators were encouraged to study in Sicily as the number of scientific and literary works dedicated to Henry II seems to suggest.4 Moreover, Etienne de Fougères’s dedication of his Livre des manières to the countess of Hereford (vv. 1205–24) is further evidence that his work is connected to the matter of Araby. The Cathedral of Hereford is indeed recognized to have been a major center for the translation and transmission of Arabic scientific (and literary) learning in the twelfth century. Its important school and library drew Western scholars of Arabic science, many of whom having returned there to teach after their trips arabum studia (Walcher of Malvern, Roger of Hereford, and Adelard of Bath, among others). The Cathedral of Hereford was also the teaching center of Petrus Alfonsi’s astronomical lessons based on Arabic scientific findings in the first quarter of the twelfth century, that same Petrus Alfonsi, author of the Disciplina Clericalis, who was responsible for the introduction of a significant amount of Arabic literary material into the West.5 Etienne was therefore living in a milieu that had repeated contact with Arabic scientific, cultural, and literary traditions either through scholars and translators, or at least merchants and returning crusaders. The association he establishes with the Cathedral of Hereford is an indication that he was familiar with Arabic scientific and literary writings, including undoubtedly their important homoerotic elements.6 In this chapter, we will see that the first portrait of lesbian sexuality in medieval French literature may be considered a veritable hybrid composition between East and West, a polyphonic text that weaves Arabic homoerotic material with French generic conventions. Etienne de Fougères’s seven stanzas on the lesbian stand thus as a prime example of the types of compositions produced in the cross-cultural milieu of mid-twelfth-century Anglo-Norman France.
The seven stanzas depicting the lesbian in Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières occupy an intriguing space in the overall economy of the work and of the genre as a whole. For the genre of estate literature to which Etienne’s text belongs does not address women. Though placed at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, after the peasants, the very insertion of women as a category in Etienne de Fougères’s work and the fact that they are permitted to occupy a total of seventy stanzas in the text are in themselves noteworthy. Not content simply to add women to his moralistic view of the social makeup, Etienne subdivides the section on women into three portraits: first, the “bad, aristocratic woman” who receives a particularly misogynist description (vv. 977–1096); second, the lesbian whose sin is dubbed “vile” (“lei pechié,” v. 1097) (vv. 1097–124); and, finally, the “good woman” (“bone fame,” v. 1133) whose main representative is the Countess of Hereford, to whom the entire poem is dedicated (vv. 1125–224).7 It is interesting to observe the placement of the highly erotic portrait of the lesbian which is situated neither at the very bottom of the social hierarchy (as we may have expected), nor before the depiction of the “bad, aristocratic woman.” Curiously, in this text, the portrait of the lesbian is inserted between the two extremes of the bad and good woman.8
This is how Etienne depicts the lesbian in his Livre des manières:9
De bel pechié n’est pas merveille, |
There’s nothing surprising about the “beautiful sin” |
Des que Nature le conseille, |
When nature prompts it, |
Mes qui de lei pechié s’esveille |
But whosoever is awakened by the “vile sin” |
Encontre Nature teseille. |
Is going against nature. |
One must pursue [him] with dogs, |
|
Pieres et bastons estrüer; |
Throw[ing] stones and sticks; |
Torchons li devreit [l’en] rüer |
One should smite him with blows |
Et con autres gueignons tüer. |
And kill him like any other cur. |
Ces dames ont trové i jeu: |
These ladies have made up a game: |
O dos trutennes funt un eu, |
With two bits of nonsense they make nothing; |
Sarqueu hurtent contre sarqueu |
They bang coffin against coffin, |
Sanz focil escoent lor feu. |
Without a poker to stir up their fire. |
Ne joent pas a piquenpance, |
They don’t play at “poke in the paunch” |
A pleins escuz joignent sanz lance |
But join shield to shield without a lance. |
N’ont soign de lange en lor balance, |
They have no concern for a beam in their scales, |
Ne en lor mole point de mance. |
Nor a handle in their mold. |
Hors d’aigue peschent au torbout |
Out of water they fish for turbot |
Et n’i quierent point de ribot. |
And they have no need for a rod. |
N’ont sain de pilete en lor pot |
They don’t bother with a pestle in their mortar |
Në en lor branle de pivot. |
Nor a fulcrum for their see-saw. |
Dus et dus jostent lor tripout |
In twos they do their lowlife jousting |
Et se meinent plus que le trot; |
And they ride to it with all their might; |
A l’escremie del jambot |
At the game of thigh-fencing |
They pay most basely each other’s share. |
|
Il ne sunt pas totes d’un molle: |
They’re not all from the same mold: |
L’un [e] s’esteit et l’autre crosle, |
One lies still and the other grinds away, |
L’un[e] fet coc et l’autre polle |
One plays the cock and the other the hen, |
Et chascune meine son rossle. |
And each one plays her role. |
(stanzas 275–81) |
Paradoxically, and as Robert Clark has accurately observed, what predominates in these seven stanzas on lesbian sexual practices is “the ever-present but always absent phallus”:10 the absence of any “lance,” or its multiple synonyms in the text, “poker,” “pointer,” “handle,” “rod,” “pestle,” “fulcrum.” Throughout these stanzas, therefore, and just as the authors of the Yde and Olive stories do one and two centuries later, Etienne de Fougères attributes to lesbians a phallocentric sexuality.11 In this text, lesbian sexual acts are understood in terms of heterosexual relations, which the two women are presumably attempting to replicate.
At the same time, one must observe the usage and role of the other military metaphors in stanzas 278 and 280: the joining of the two shields in stanza 278 (“join shield to shield without a lance”) and the joust in both stanza 278 (“They don’t play at jousting”) and in stanza 280 (“At the game of thigh-fencing”). If as Robert Clark pointed out, the “lance” (in stanza 278) represents indeed the absent phallus, the “shields” in the text are evidently a metaphor for female sexual organs. As a consequence, the “joust” would represent a highly erotic and explicit scene of lesbian lovemaking. The absence of the “lance,” combined with the image of two “shields” banging against each other (stanza 277) in a sexually charged “tournament” (stanza 278) thus elaborate a type of sexuality that is inherently idiosyncratic and lesbian, certainly a sexuality that is distinct from heterosexual norms.
While some critics have recognized the uniqueness and originality of Etienne’s military description of lesbian sexuality,12 others have claimed that such verses could not have been written by a bishop and that they must be considered a product of scribal interpolations. Charles-Victor Langlois for instance has observed that the detailed depiction of “acts against nature” in Etienne’s text is “quite useless, display a shocking obscenity.” He alleges further that the depiction of such acts is “written in a sarcastic and joking tone that contrasts strikingly with the rest of the book and which, no matter what the freedom of the period might have been, would have seemed more than odd at the hand of a bishop.” In other words, the seven stanzas on the lesbian “display all the traits of an addition to the original text.”13 Langlois’s assumption that Etienne’s original text may have been written in Latin (no longer extant) and that the French text that has survived has suffered from important scribal alterations 14 may not be the only conclusion to be drawn from the poem. Nor is Anthony Lodge’s interpretation convincing when he remarks that the lesbian episode is nothing but a humorous insertion within the text, fabliau-like, meant to entertain the audience, even as it edifies.15 In their effort to extirpate Etienne from the responsibility of having authored the earliest extant, most detailed and explicit depiction of lesbianism in French literature, critics have pointed to the fact that the single surviving manuscript (dating from the early thirteenth century)16 is poorly written and that the entire text, and especially the seven stanzas on the lesbian, contain words of unclear etymology that are unattested elsewhere in medieval literature.17 Such a text could not have been composed in earnest by someone as educated, highly regarded, and greatly admired a bishop and literary writer as Etienne was.18
I will argue that Etienne de Fougères’s military depiction of lesbian practices is informed by two Arabic treatises dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries, thus written earlier than Etienne’s Livre des manières. They are the late tenth-century Encyclopedia of Pleasure (Jawami` al-ladhdha), written by Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Nasr al-Katib,19 which is considered to be the earliest example of Arabic homoerotic compilations, and the eleventh-century philological work entitled al-Muntakhab min kinayat al-udaba’ wa isharat al-bulagha’ (An Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech) written by Iraqi religious judge Abu al-Abbas Ahmad Ibn Muhamad al-Jurjani (d. 1089). These two works provide us with some of the most crucial insights into the literary representation of the medieval Arab lesbian, and constitute key, unacknowledged intertexts of the Livre des manières.
Before I discuss the striking linguistic, metaphorical, and cultural crossings between Etienne’s Livre des manières and these Arabic literary texts on lesbian lovemaking, one observation must be made with regard to the Arabic erotic tradition. As may be clear from the title of al-Jurjani’s An Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech, erotic material in the Arabic tradition is not confined to a specific genre. If Arabic erotic writings are most typically included in the literature of mujun (profligacy) and in kutub al-bah (treatises on copulation),20 they are present in seemingly more “serious” texts, such as in al-Jurjani’s work on linguistic metaphors. And indeed, An Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech, despite its focus on language, is a particularly rich reservoir of information on homosexuality in the Arabic literary tradition. Focusing on the use of indirect expressions among the literati and orators, and in an effort to display his erudition and mastery of the Arabic lexicon, al-Jurjani quite naturally turns his attention to euphemisms used for various forms of illicit sexual practice, including active and passive male homosexuality (respectively, liwat and ubna or bigha), lesbianism (sahq), adultery (zina), male homosexual prostitution (ijara), male masturbation (jild), and intercrural intercourse (tafkhidh). While the overall organization of al-Jurjani’s text might baffle the Western critic, Everett Rowson has demonstrated that the “impression of incoherence” that results from the classification system at work here is attributable to various cultural assumptions. These assumptions are twofold: what constitutes illicit sexuality (choice of partner, activity, or social context), and a conception of sexuality that views it primarily in penetrative and non-penetrative terms.21 More important for our purposes is the strategy (adopted by al-Jurjani) of discussing the topic of sexuality in books whose primary focus lies elsewhere. This technique reveals one of the ways in which some Arabic conventions on homosexuality may have been transmitted to the West in the Middle Ages, namely, embedded in various rhetorical, poetic, legal, medical, or scientific treatises.
The “lance,” “shield,” and “joust” as erotic metaphors will become commonly used in French from the thirteenth century onward. We find them used, for instance, in Le Tournoi des dames by Hue d’Oisy and Le Tournoiement as dames de Paris by Pierre Gentien where they describe women’s involvement and skill in joust.22 At the end of the twelfth century, however, such eroto-military metaphors were still atypical in French writings. They were, on the other hand, quite conventional throughout the Arabic literary tradition.23 Central to this study is the fact that as early as the tenth century, in Arabic literature, the word “shield” was understood to represent the vulva. For example, in the tenth chapter, “Lesbianism,” of his Encyclopedia of Pleasure, Ibn Nasr writes: “Your vulva became like a shield.”24 The penis, not surprisingly, comes to be referred to in Arabic erotic writings as both the “lance” and the “sword.”25 Once this basic eroto-military semantic field was established, the joust (or war or tournament) metaphor logically followed and came naturally to mean lovemaking. These eroto-military metaphors were repeated verbatim from one century to the next, from one writer to the other throughout the Arab world.
The military metaphors that we find in Etienne’s text and that appear so new and original to Western critics can easily be traced to specific lines of any number of Arabic erotic treatises. They repeat in fact verbatim some key metaphorical, if not linguistic, conventions of the Arabic homoerotic tradition, such as those we encounter in al-Jurjani’s Anthology of Metonymic Devices:
They [lesbians] manifest a war in which there is no spear-thrusting,
But only fending off a shield with a shield.26
Anyone who remains unconvinced of the obvious sexual connotations of the words “war,” “spear-thrusting,” and “shields” in this quotation need only compare their usage with Ibn Nasr’s Encyclopedia of Pleasure from the previous century. This work, which was undoubtedly one of al-Jurajani’s sources, presents the metaphoric military words in their literal garb:
What’s the good of two vulvas rubbing against each other?
It is the penetration of the penis that is important.27
Clearly, al-Jurjani’s “spear” and “shield” respectively provide thinly veiled euphemisms for explicit references to “penis” and “vulva” in Ibn Nasr’s text. Similarly, al-Jurjani’s “fending of a shield with a shield” refers to Ibn Nasr’s “rubbing of the vulvas.”
The same eroto-military metaphors appear again in an early thirteenth-century Arabic text written by a Tunisian author named Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Tifashi (1184–1253) and entitled Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab, which has been translated as The Delight of Hearts Or, What One Cannot Find in Any Book. Although this text is written slightly later than Etienne de Fougères’s time, its importance cannot be underestimated, because it shows the extent to which the military metaphors used to describe lesbian lovemaking since at least the tenth century had become conventional in the Arabic homoerotic tradition of the thirteenth century:
They invented a tournament
In which there is no use of lance,
Hitting only with great noise
One shield against the other.28
Speaking of lesbian lovemaking as the banging of shields/rubbing of vulvas without the use of a lance is so embedded in the Arabic homoerotic tradition that it may be considered one of its most identifying trademarks. Even the word for “lesbian” in Arabic, sahq, evokes this rubbing (grinding) behavior. The word sahq, from the root s/h/q, means “to grind” (spices) or “to rub,” while lesbians are referred to as sahiqat, sahhaqat, or musahiqat, meaning literally “those who engage in a rubbing behavior, or who make love in a rubbing fashion.” But more significant than the rubbing metaphor which is found also in Greek antiquity (tribades) is the military image of the “shields” to refer to women’s vulvas. This metaphor is characteristic of Arabic erotic writings and is striking in the context of Etienne de Fougères’s stanzas. Thus, when readers familiar with Arabic homoerotic metaphoric conventions read in Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières that women join one another shield against shield, as though in a joust without a lance (as we saw in stanzas 278 and 280), they cannot fail to recognize the Arabic intertextual references interwoven throughout the Old French poem.
The striking metaphorical echoes between Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières and Arabic literary descriptions of lesbian sexuality do not end here. They are present throughout the seven stanzas under study here, although they do not come through clearly in the modern English translation. Critics of Etienne de Fougères often comment on the unfamiliar vocabulary encountered in the section on the lesbian and have gone so far as to question Etienne’s authorship of these stanzas. However, the vocabulary used to describe the lesbian that sounds unusual to the Western ear resonates differently for the critic attuned to the multicultural milieu of the twelfth century. All that appears unusual today in this text seems so only because it belongs to a different cultural tradition. The eroto-military metaphors are, as we saw, an example of this phenomenon. Another example occurs in the last line of stanza 277: “Sanz focil escoent lor feu,” translated as “Without a poker to stir up their fire.” The cross-cultural reading of the Livre des manières proposed here would suggest that the translation of “escoent lor feu” as “to stir up their fire” reduces the tremendous ambiguity of the Old French verb escoer, which results in silencing the Arabic literary tradition that stands evident behind this line. Escoer is indeed one of those Old French verbs that has multiple significations. It means “to deliver, to agitate, to preserve, to avoid, to protect” and also “to cut the tail” or “to castrate” (and these two last significations, “to cut the tail” or “to castrate,” are the primary meanings of the verb escoer).29 The use of escoer with “fire” is uncommon; but its association with a “poker” may explain the selected English translation, for a poker stirs up a fire, after all.
The ambiguity of the Old French verb invites another translation. In fact, I would suggest rendering this line as “They deliver themselves from their fire without the use of a poker.” This translation is not only linguistically and grammatically permitted, given the ambiguity of the Old French verse, but it illuminates further Etienne de Fougères’s indebtedness to the Arabic erotic material. In translating this line thus, one aligns Etienne’s French text with the medical definition of lesbianism as it was known in the medieval Arab world, and as summarized in Ibn Nasr’s Encyclopedia of Pleasure: “Lesbianism is due to a vapour which, condensed, generates in the labia heat and an itch which only dissolve and become cold through friction and orgasm. When friction and orgasm take place, the heat turns into coldness because the liquid that a woman ejaculates in lesbian intercourse is cold whereas the same liquid that results from sexual union with men is hot. Heat, however, cannot be extinguished by heat; rather, it will increase since it needs to be treated by its opposite. As coldness is repelled by heat, so heat is also repelled by coldness.”30
Ibn Nasr is here repeating the medical causes and treatment of lesbianism as they were understood during his time, claiming that lesbianism is a condition whereby heat is generated in the labia and can be reduced only through friction and orgasm with another woman. The reduction in heat cannot be achieved through intercourse with a man since the man’s liquid is hot and as Ibn Nasr reports, “heat . . . cannot be extinguished by heat.” Friction between two vulvas, on the other hand, is effective in calming the original heat because it results in the ejaculation of a cold liquid. Returning to Etienne de Fougères’s text, we now recognize that given the context of “sanz focil escoent lor feu” (it is between two sections strongly reminiscent of the Arabic tradition since they both evoke the banging/rubbing of shields and include the military metaphors discussed earlier), “escoent lor feu” more likely refers to the extinction of fire (and therefore the reaching of orgasm), rather than to the stirring up of fire that the two women seek to achieve in their union. A lack of awareness of the Arabic homoerotic tradition that informs Etienne de Fougères’s seven stanzas in the Livre des manières evidently leads to either (unintended) mistranslations or obscurities in the text. These mistranslations lead to further silencing the multicultural dimension of medieval society and further eliding the sisterhood of the Arab and French lesbian in the Middle Ages.
The most revealing example of interlinguistic crossings between the French and Arabic homoerotic traditions has to do with the usage of two words in Etienne’s text, “trutennes” and “eu” in stanza 277, for which critics have found no clear etymology and which remain unattested elsewhere in medieval literature.31 I would like to propose that these two terms may well be transliterated Arabic words. That Etienne de Fougères included two Arabic words in his poem would offer undeniable proof of his familiarity with elements of Arabic homoerotic literature. I recognize the tremendous problems involved in making a case for transliterations of Arabic terms into romance (in this case Old French), for there can never be absolute certainty. However, and especially given my analysis of the parallelism in the eroto-military metaphors used, and given the fact that these words are unattested in French, the hypothesis of Arabic terminology is worth considering.
It should also be pointed out that the presence of transliterated Arabic words in Etienne de Fougères’s text, while striking in the context of a literary work, is not surprising when compared to the survival of Arabic and Arabic-derived terms in European languages in general. After all, the establishment of the Umayyad caliphate in medieval Spain and the Arabization of the Iberian peninsula have led to the adoption of many Arabic words related to philosophy, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, flora, colors, buildings, official titles, business, crafts, and musical instruments. In fact, because there were no Latin equivalents for the new technical developments introduced by the Muslims in al-Andalus, Arabic words were simply co-opted and Latinized. A similar argument can be made for the vocabulary of lesbianism and same-sex attachments for which there was no available language. Because lesbianism was to remain unnamed throughout the European Middle Ages, it is very possible that medieval authors resorted to Arabic terminology when depicting same-sex relations. In this sense, the use of transliterated Arabic words in the Livre de manières may be likened to the adoption of Arabic technical vocabulary in the sciences.
I suggest that the word trutennes comes from the Arabic word turrah from the root tlrlt (the ending “ennes” is the grammatical ending for the dual form), which literally means “forelock” and thus by extension “mons.” Although the word t/r/t is not used in any of the three Arabic homoerotic treatises cited above, I have found this word used in another erotic Arabic text entitled Rushd al-labib ila mu`asharat al-habib (An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition), dating to the fourteenth century and written by Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Falita (d. 1362).32 The word t/r/t is used in this work to refer to the mons of the beloved (both male and female). Even though this term occurs in a text that postdates Etienne de Fougères’s work, it was likely a familiar word in Arabic erotic treatises, since Ibn Falita’s writing, like that of all his predecessors, is only a compilation of sexual knowledge in the Arab world, up to the time of its composition.33
The word eu in the same line (“O does trutennes funt un eu”) appears to be an onomatopoeia, attested both in Old French and in Arabic, that would reflect the moaning and panting associated with lovemaking and pleasure as well as the ultimate fulfillment of desire in orgasm. The line would thus signify: “In addition to the rubbing of two mons, they make moaning and gasping sounds.” In the Arabic erotic tradition, these moans were believed to be essential to lesbian lovemaking. In fact, they were thought to be one of the foundations of lesbian knowledge and were an integral part of the training of future lesbians. Al-Tifashi writes that between lesbians attention was regularly paid to “this music of love that the breath produces as it escapes the throat and passes through the nostrils.”34 Similarly, one of the pieces of advice given by an experienced lesbian mother to her daughter is precisely about these moans: “You should snort heartily while wriggling lasciviously.”35 A bit later in the text, al-Tifashi speaks of “wheezing, panting, purring, murmurs, heart-breaking sighs.”36
The use of these two transliterated Arabic words (“trutennes” and “eu”) in Etienne de Fougères’s poem and the quasi-verbatim rendering of various military erotic metaphors that I discussed earlier in this chapter suggest two possible ways of conceiving the question of the accessibility of the Arabic material in Europe and the likely channels of transmission. One could argue that Arabic homoerotic literature was available to the medieval West, and Etienne de Fougères was familiar with the Arabic literary tradition of lesbian eroticism; or alternately that Etienne was familiar at least with some foreign “dirty words” (trutennes and eu). In other words, it is possible to envision that in parallel to a high cultural literary or scientific register of transmission, there also existed a nonlearned level of transfer from the Islamicate world to Europe. Travelers, crusaders, pilgrims, and merchants may have been instrumental in this lower register of cultural transmission, just as scholars and translators secured the transmission of the scientific material.37 Through travelers, merchants, crusaders, and pilgrims, Arabic dirty words, in authentic or butchered forms, may well have crossed the borders between East and West, and given voice to the heretofore silenced “vile sin.” Whether Etienne de Fougères learned about Arabic eroto-military metaphors through the scientific high cultural register or through nonlearned channels, his inclusion of Arabic terms and images of lesbian sexuality in his poem testifies to the reality of cross-cultural relations between East and West in the Middle Ages and suggests that Arabic homoeroticism was central to the literary construction of lesbian desire and sexuality in medieval France.
That the Livre des manières should exhibit Arabic intertextual and interlinguistic resonances is not surprising, for after all, the entire text invites a polyphonic reading. As such, it is one of multilayered resistance. We must note from the outset that the insertion of the category “women” in the genre of estate literature, a tradition from which they are traditionally excluded, may be viewed as the introduction of textual fragmentation in the genre as a whole. Women, considered by medieval theologians to be a deviation of the moral order, are in Etienne de Fougères’s text the very signal of sexual and moral confusion. Not only do they introduce social and sexual disorder, but they also disrupt the authoritative language of estate literature and transgress established social, moral, and (hetero)sexual order. Similarly, the presence of the figure of the lesbian in Etienne’s work and her placement in an intermediary position between the bad and the good woman, rather than at the very bottom of the social hierarchy as we might have expected, unsettles the overall syntax of the text. The semantic confusion and syntactical diversity that permeate the Livre des manières invite us to question the conventional coherence and stability of generic, social, and sexual hierarchies. Ultimately, they undermine the homogeneity of the social makeup and signal disruptions yet to come in the overall economy of the text.
It is indeed in the context of the insertion of social (women) and sexual (lesbian) minorities in the Livre des manières that Etienne’s plurilingualism must be considered. If thus far, estate writings had been composed in Latin, Etienne de Fougères is credited for being among the first to write an estate work in the vernacular. By choosing French over Latin and by inserting Arabic rhetorical devices, images, and linguistic terms in his text, Etienne privileges polyglossia over monoglossia, diversity over homogeneity. He thus points to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Anglo-Norman courts in which he thrived, a place in which Latin, Old French (Anglo-Norman), and Arabic were present simultaneously, interacted with, and subverted one another. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones have recently argued that “in twelfth-century Britain, to choose to write in any particular language was, inescapably, to make an ideological statement about the purposes of the text and the author’s relationship to the structures of power.”38 If this observation is true, then the plurilingualism (both explicit and implicit) that informs the entire text of the Livre des manières puts in question the notion of “father-tongue” (Latin) and underscores the pluralistic, hybrid, and linguistically diverse culture that characterized Henry II Plantagenêt’s courts in the middle of the twelfth century. More important, the polyglossia that permeates the Livre des manières points to the limits of Latin to maintain an idealized linguistic order through a social, heterosexual harmony. For if as Bakhtin has shown, polyglossia signals the simultaneous death of two long cherished myths–“the myth of a language that presumes to be the only language, and the myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified”39–the use of the French vernacular and the insertion of Arabic linguistic and metaphorical motifs in the Livre des manières expose the passing of Latin as a uniquely unifying language. At the same time, Etienne questions the very idea of social categorization based upon binary terms or heterosexuality. In a period of social and political upheaval such as the one that marked the reign of Henry II Plantagenêt, Etienne de Fougères’s work may be considered a hybrid literary and linguistic form, innovative because it mixed high and low,40 official and vernaculars, French and Arabic, heterosexual and homosexual. His work heralds a new form of sociosexual contestation within the discursive economy of Old French literature. As medieval farces will accomplish decades later, Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières dialogizes and hybridizes medieval French writings and shows how the dominant, unifying, and male language with its attending heterosexual concerns is contested by other languages and sexual practices from subordinated groups.
Etienne de Fougères’s work may thus be considered a prominent example of a composition produced in the contact zone between the Anglo-Norman courts and Arab Islamicate cultures in the Middle Ages; as such, it hints at the multiple and unrecognized multilinguistic and multicultural encounters between these societies in the middle of the twelfth century. Because the Livre des manières is a heterogeneous, bilingual construction, it invites different readings from “people occupying different positions in the contact zone.”41 As it deploys French and Arabic semantic and rhetorical systems, it resonates differently for bilingual speakers than for monolingual speakers of either language. Furthermore, because it depicts different modes of sexual practice, it likely resonated differently also to straight and gay members of the audience (medieval or modern). It is precisely due to these multilayered systems of representation and of linguistic expression that the Livre des manières has been thought by some critics to have been emended by a careless scribe and possibly not even written by Etienne himself. In the absence of any archival or philological evidence to the contrary, our reading suggests that the Livre des manières is in fact a coherent work and that the juxtaposition of low (vernacular, Arabic dirty words, military metaphors, sex, lesbian) with high (estate literature, moral writings, Latin, heterosexuality) languages does not result in cacophony. Rather, it gives us a glimpse of the multicultural milieu in which Etienne was writing and of the potential for resistance to the social, linguistic, and sexual orders when the subaltern (social, sexual, and linguistic) is allowed to speak.42
Even as Arabic rhetorical and linguistic tropes enrich and inform our reading of Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, and even as Arabic intertextuality invites us to consider the extent to which medieval French writings about female homosexuality are more prevalent than hitherto believed, it is important to remember that the explicitness of the French tradition pales in comparison to that of Arabic writings. For indeed, equally significant to this analysis is the absence, in Etienne’s poem as in other medieval writers’ works, of other fundamental Arabic homoerotic metaphors. For in the end, only fragments of Arabic writings (and only a few fragments) describing explicitly lesbian practices were assimilated into the nascent vernacular literatures of Europe. Though no less phallocentric than their French counterparts and though written likewise from a male (not lesbian) perspective, the medieval Arabic treatises on homosexuality (for example, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure and An Anthology of Metonymic Devices) are by far more detailed, direct, and explicit than any depiction of lesbianism found in the French Middle Ages, including that of Etienne de Fougères. Thus, while Etienne’s description of lesbianism is both original and explicit in the context of the French erotic tradition (there is probably nothing as unambiguous in French until the eighteenth century with the marquis de Sade and Restif de la Bretonne), it remains limited when compared to any of the Arabic homoerotic treatises.
An examination of a key passage from Ahmad al-Tifashi’s The Delight of Hearts demonstrates the great differences between the medieval Arabic and French traditions in their treatment of homoeroticism and alternative sexualities. Even though al-Tifashi’s treatise, as pointed out earlier, was written later than Etienne de Fougères’s text, it represents nevertheless an excellent compilation of earlier Arabic writings on homosexuality, some of which have been preserved (such as Ibn Nasr’s Encyclopedia of Pleasure and al-Jurjani’s Anthology of Metonymic Devices), while others are attested only through his extensive references to them. The erotic metaphors that pervade The Delight of Hearts stand thus as a key synthesis of the ways in which alternative sexualities were viewed in the Islamicate world and provide us with an unsurpassed reservoir of information on the sexual metaphoric conventions in the Arabic tradition up to the thirteenth century. Etienne de Fougères may well have been familiar with any number of Arabic texts to which al-Tifashi refers, which existed in the twelfth century but have since disappeared.
The following account of lesbian sexual practices permits us to grasp the very different descriptive modes that animate French and Arabic texts on female homosexuality:
The tradition between women in the game of love necessitates that the lover places herself above and the beloved underneath–unless the former is too light or the second too developed: and in this case, the lighter one places herself underneath, and the heavier one on top, because her weight will facilitate the rubbing, and will allow the friction to be more effective. This is how they act: the one that must stay underneath lies on her back, stretches out one leg and bends the other while leaning slightly to the side, therefore offering her opening (vagina) wide open: meanwhile, the other lodges her bent leg in her groin, puts the lips of her vagina between the lips that are offered for her, and begins to rub the vagina of her companion in an up and down, and down and up, movement that jerks the whole body. This operation is dubbed “the saffron massage” because this is precisely how one grinds saffron on the cloth when dyeing it. The operation must focus each time on one lip in particular, the right one for example, and then the other: the woman will then slightly change position in order to apply better friction to the left lip . . . and she does not stop acting in this manner until her desires and those of her partner are fulfilled. I assure you that it is absolutely useless to try to press the two lips together at the same time, because the area from which pleasure comes would then not be exposed. Finally, let us note that in this game the two partners may be aided by a little willow oil, scented with musk.43
This detailed account of lesbian sexuality in The Delight of Hearts certainly stands in stark contrast to the current political climate in Arab Islamicate countries and explains, partly, the tendency to occlude the Arab-Muslim lesbian in most contemporary writings, critical or otherwise. But it certainly also stands in marked contrast to any description of lesbian sexuality in French literature, at least up to the eighteenth century.
Certainly, a few details in al-Tifashi’s account of lesbian practices evoke some lines of Etienne’s description (once again, al-Tifashi is not Etienne de Fougères’s direct source in these instances, because his treatise was written slightly later than Etienne’s. However, there may very well have been intermediary sources known to Etienne that are now lost or not yet edited). For instance, the uncommon Old French phrase “escremie del jambot” or “thigh-fencing” (stanza 280) seems reminiscent of the insistence on the positioning of the legs in the Arabic erotic treatise. The balancing of the two women in the act of love and their effort to rub only one labium at a time strongly resonates with the third line of stanza 278, “n’ont soign de lange en lor balance,” and with the last line of stanza 280, “s’entrepaient vilment l’escot.” The similarity between these lines and the Arabic treatise is, however, once again lost in the translation. The third line of stanza 278 may be more accurately rendered as “they do not need a tongue in their balancing act,” and the last line of stanza 280 as “they go at the game of thigh-fencing one person at a time.” These translations have the advantage of evoking much more explicitly the truly balancing and serial act of lesbian lovemaking in al-Tifashi’s text.
Yet, and once again, these parallels are allusive at best. For the most part, and despite their recognized explicitness, the metaphors we find in Etienne de Fougères often remain ambiguous (perhaps intentionally so), and they never match the unsparing details or at times the unabashed and blunt literalness of the Arabic treatises and the Arabic erotic tradition in general.44 In other words, even as we herald Etienne de Fougères as the first author of lesbian sexuality in French literature, and even as we point to his use of Arabic metaphorical and linguistic conventions, we must also note the vast differences between the two traditions.
But the greatest difference between the French and Arabic tradition on female same-sex practices does not lie in the degree of detail or explicitness of one text versus another. It resides rather in what we can surmise about the attitudes held by each culture toward lesbianism and lesbian sexualities. It lies in what we can infer from each of these cultural productions about audience expectations and reception. If we examine once again the very inclusion of women as a category in Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, we get a glimpse of the very different stance toward both women and female same-sex practices that animates this text, in contrast to Arabic writings on homosexuality.
In her article on the position of women in the Livre des manières, Jeri Guthrie has argued that if women are included in this text, they are ultimately also excluded from it since their sole accepted function is biological, the bearing of children.45 Besides their maternal role, women are otherwise banished from the economic sphere of society. I will add that if lesbians more specifically are included in Etienne de Fougères’s text, it is ultimately better to exclude them. For once they move from the outside to the inside of Old French writings, medieval French lesbians are consigned to the margins46 and are never permitted to take center stage in the text. In fact, the very positioning of the seven stanzas on the lesbian between the “bad” and “good” woman seems to literally enact her textual imprisonment within other (excluded) social categories. This reading lends support to Robert Clark’s conclusion that Etienne de Fougères’s seven stanzas on the lesbian participate in the formation of both a “persecuting” and “homophobic discourse”47 against women who claim to find sexual satisfaction with each other, outside of sanctioned marriage.
Moreover, the polyglossia that we discussed above that permits a richer understanding of Etienne’s text has as its corollary the very possibility of excluding the Old French lesbian from public discourse. For the use of Arabic, all the while providing a language (albeit indirect because it was metaphorical) for speaking the unspeakable, may also be understood in Etienne’s text as the language of the obscene.48 Similar to the use of Latin today that allows obscenity (naming anatomical parts, sexual activities, and sexual behavior in general) to be spoken in polite company,49 Arabic may have served in the Middle Ages as a medium for verbalizing the silent, vile sin (lei pechié), safer precisely because it hides at the same time as it reveals, more effective than Latin would ever have been.
Finally, the very fact that the Livre des manières has been preserved in only one manuscript makes us wonder what its reception was in the Middle Ages. Did this text, because of its overt description of lesbianism, not enjoy a wider circulation in the Middle Ages, or on the contrary was it purposely destroyed because of its popularity? While the contemporary state of scholarship is unable to provide us with a clear answer to this question, it remains interesting nevertheless to speculate as to the reasons why most of the French texts that we will be examining in this project, texts that depict same-sex desire among women, have each been preserved in only one manuscript.
Interestingly, and in contrast, the medieval Arabic sexological tradition has for the most part been preserved in multiple manuscripts. This in itself is an indication that Arabic writings on alternative sexualities commanded tremendous respect from patrons in medieval courts and cities alike throughout the Islamicate world. Moreover, and again in contrast to the status of women and lesbians in the work of Etienne de Fougères, it appears as though in the Arabic tradition, lesbians regularly occupied a space (a chapter) in writings addressing the question of sexuality. Certainly, each of the Arabic texts under consideration devotes a much larger space to men and to male homosexuality than it does to women or lesbians. Nevertheless, lesbians remain visible in most of these Arabic texts; they consistently occupy an independent chapter that is labeled with as much clarity as other chapters within the same work. The very common strategy in Arabic writings of juxtaposing various forms of sexual practice, and of considering each of them as a literarily or culturally legitimate subject matter, indicates therefore that homosexuality, in opposition to its contemporary status in the European Middle Ages, was not simply viewed as an anomalous form of sexuality that required a separate (and ghettoized) treatment. Rather, throughout Arabic literary writings on sexualities, lesbianism was considered as one among multiple types of sexualities and consequently received both space and voice in the overall economy of a given text.
I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter the extent to which the first literary portrait of lesbian sexuality in the Old French tradition is indebted to the Arabic literary homoerotic tradition. Informed by key Arabic metaphorical, rhetorical, and linguistic conventions, Etienne de Fougères’s depiction of lesbianism stands as a prime example of medieval cross-cultural writings and of East-West hybridity. Generally speaking, however, linguistic intertextuality such as the one we identified in Etienne de Fougères’s text occurs relatively rarely in other medieval French texts. Despite the access of the West to Arabic homoerotic literature, it appears that there has been, because of the subject matter, a process of selective borrowing, or perhaps even at times of straight-out violent silencing, in the material that was absorbed. Those aspects of love and desire that dealt with male, but even more so, female homosexuality, were more readily rejected, especially from the twelfth century on, with the increasing tendency toward heteronormativity. One might say that some form of censorship took place at some level, though it is hard to pinpoint at which one–at the level of the translators, of the poets themselves, or of the scribes. What is evident, however, is the growing erasure of explicit literary metaphors and devices characteristic of Arabic lesbian desire from the Western homoerotic tradition. This does not imply by any means that the vernacular literatures of medieval France, especially those depicting lesbian sexuality, lacked Arabic resonances altogether. We will see in the following chapters that rather than borrowing specific sexual tropes or linguistic terminology from the Arabic tradition, medieval French authors more frequently resorted to Arabic tales and thematic motifs, invoked the growing imports of Eastern luxury material goods to medieval France, or depicted lesbian-like Eastern urban cultural practices. Thanks to these varied detours via the Islamicate literary, social, and cultural traditions, the medieval French lesbian enjoyed a literary existence in the Middle Ages, and medieval French writers, through the safety of Arabic intertextuality, perpetuated the “vile sin” and continued thus to speak the unspeakable.
