The love which you bear one another ought not to be carnal, but spiritual: for those things which are practiced by immodest women, even with other females, in shameful jesting and playing, ought not to be done even by married women or by girls who are about to marry, much less by widows or chaste virgins dedicated by a holy vow to be handmaidens of Christ.
—Saint Augustine
IF LESBIANISM WAS staged via cross-dressing and same-sex marriage in the Yde and Olive narratives, it is ushered in by a predatory bird (a kite) and its theft of a silk purse in Jean Renart’s thirteenth-century romance Escoufle (The Kite; ca. 1200–1202). The scene of the kite’s robbery is so crucial to the entire romance, and to the lesbian episodes that soon follow it, that the narrator calls attention to it specifically, as he defends in the epilogue his choice of the romance title (Escoufle) and justifies it against those detractors who consider it inappropriate (“c’on en tient a lait”):1
Pour ce si dist que grant tort a |
This is why I say that he is wrong |
Who blames and despises the title [of the book]. |
|
Se li escoufles n’eüst prise |
If the kite had not stolen |
L’aumosniere, on n’en parlast ja. |
The purse, we would not speak about it. |
(vv. 9092–95) |
According to the narrator, the entire romance hinges precisely on the kite’s theft of the silk purse (aumosniere). Without this crucial scene, the entire romance would have had no existence.
The narrator’s defense of his title and his emphasis on the kite’s theft of the silk purse make sense in the narrative economy of the romance. After all, the kite appears at a key moment in the text, shortly after Guillaume and Aelis (the central heterosexual couple of the romance) are forced to flee from Rome to Normandy in order to escape from Aelis’s father’s (the emperor of Rome) injunction against their marriage. While they stopped to rest near the town of Toul in Lorraine, a kite, suddenly descending from the skies and acting as a veritable deus ex machina, steals from Guillaume the silk purse containing the precious ring that Aelis had just given him as a token of her love. Guillaume, hoping to recover the valuable gift, pursues the kite, leaving Aelis asleep. The lovers are separated. Aelis wakes up to find herself alone, assumes that Guillaume has abandoned her, and decides to press forth to Normandy. As for Guillaume, after a few days pursuing the kite, he salvages both purse and ring but, upon his return, discovers that Aelis has disappeared. Thinking that she might have been caught by her father’s men, he turns back toward Rome in search for her. During the seven years of Guillaume and Aelis’s separation and search for each other, Aelis becomes a successful businesswoman in Montpellier where she establishes an embroidery workshop with a new female friend, Ysabel. She soon contracts two additional important friendships, one with the lady of Montpellier and another with the countess of Saint-Gilles, before being reunited with Guillaume at the end of the romance. The Escoufle concludes with the marriage of Guillaume and Aelis and their double crowning in Normandy and in Rome.
It should be clear from this brief overview that the scene of the kite represents indeed a turning point in the narrative economy of the romance, justifying the narrator’s defense of his title in the epilogue. We might be tempted to attribute the discomfort presumably felt by the medieval audience toward the title of the romance to the fact that the kite held multiple negative associations in the medieval Western imaginary. Since classical antiquity, in the Christian tradition, as in didactic and allegorical writings throughout the Middle Ages, the kite was linked to the theft of farm animals and evoked the Devil.2 Such an analogy could certainly have predisposed the medieval reader to view with suspicion Jean Renart’s entire literary project. The author’s defense of his title in the epilogue may thus be interpreted as a warning against judging the entire romance by its title alone and against any predisposition to spurn the text without reading what lies between its covers.
However, and more important, Jean Renart’s defense of his romance title in the epilogue serves to draw our attention to the scene of the kite’s theft and to underscore the fundamental changes in gender and social identities to which it gives rise. After all, the scene of the kite’s theft of the silk purse represents a critical juncture in the romance as a whole that destabilizes the heterosexual paradigm, while marking the onset of alternative emotional attachments between women. As a matter of fact, the presence of both the kite and the silk purse sparks the heterosexual couple’s seven-year separation and ushers in three female friendships with their associated configurations of gender and social trouble. It is the interjection of the kite and silk that gives rise to thousands of lines of narrative that relate the heroine’s intimate encounters with other women.3 In other words, the heterosexual lovers’ separation, permitted by the bird’s theft of silk, literally transforms the heretofore heterosexual narrative into a series of homoerotic female spaces and encounters.
In this sense, Jean Renart’s warning at the end of the romance confirms the fact that the frame of the romance does not tell us the entire story of the Escoufle. This romance, like most others in medieval literature, begins and ends in a very conventional mode. It starts with count Richars’s (Guillaume’s father) crusade and pilgrimage to Jerusalem, both very legitimate goals for any able-bodied man at the turn of the thirteenth century when Europe was engaged in its crusading efforts in the Middle East. The romance ends in equally legitimate and praiseworthy pursuits, with the celebration of the heterosexual couple, crowned both in Normandy and in Rome. Such an ending implies that the couple, now united in marriage, is going to fulfill the expectations of the monogamous heterosexual family, produce lineage, and reaffirm the patriarchal order. Clearly, the paratextual apparatus (the prologue and epilogue)4 upholds conventional morality and gender binarism, while endorsing patriarchy and normative sexuality.
Such a reading, like reservations about the title of the romance, might be especially undesirable because it could lead the reader to miss the key narrative development of the middle section of the romance. By warning us against misjudging his romance by its title (or by its paratext), the narrator of the Escoufle draws our attention to the middle section which describes Aelis’s (mis)adventures, her alternative friendships, and the novel socioeconomic practices in which she engages. A careful reader of Jean Renart, Roberta Krueger, warns us similarly against focusing exclusively “on where the major protagonists of courtly romances eventually `end up.’”5 Only by examining the period of a maiden’s autonomy before marriage can one indeed appreciate the multiple ways in which the genre of the romance, and more specifically of the “realistic romance” (to which the Escoufle belongs),6 subverts conventional gender and social categories under the guise of upholding them. As we will see, it is precisely when the kite intervenes that heterosexual relations come to an end, and it is once they are (temporarily) put on hold that alternative friendships, same-sex female intimacy, and novel sociocultural practices begin to emerge. The title of the romance acts thus as the very (threatening) sign of its queerness.
I will add that the title of the romance is also a sign of the cross-cultural nature of the project as a whole.7 In fact, I will submit that the Escoufle (like Le Livre des manières, Yde and Olive, Floire and Blancheflor, or Marie de France’s Fables, for example) is a key example of medieval Western, hybrid writings, a product of the contact zone between the medieval European and Islamicate worlds. The very title of the romance, the scene of the kite’s theft of a silk object, as well as the numerous references throughout the text to Saracen silk and to Eastern material goods highlight the textual indebtedness of the Escoufle to the matter of Araby.
After all, the key role that both kite and silk play in the Escoufle resonates with the equally critical role that another bird and another snatched object enclosed in silk play in an Arabic tale from the One Thousand and One Nights, a tale that is likely to have been familiar to Jean Renart and at least some members of his audience. I am referring here to The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour which I discussed in Chapter 3, with reference to the Yde and Olive narratives. This framed tale which, we will recall, is one of the eleven core stories known to have circulated in Europe as early as the twelfth century, recounts how while traveling, Qamar al-Zaman and Princess Boudour stop to rest by a meadow. Like Aelis, Boudour falls asleep. As he caresses her, Qamar al-Zaman sees a ring hanging at the end of a silk ribbon from his beloved’s drawstring pants (Boudour does not give this ring as a gift to Qamar al-Zaman as Aelis does to Guillaume). While the intrigued Qamar al-Zaman examines the ring outside of their tent, a bird (not identified specifically as a kite) steals it from his hands and flies away. Just like Guillaume, Qamar al-Zaman follows the bird in an effort to recuperate his wife’s property, and when he returns, he finds that Boudour (like Aelis) has disappeared. While in the Escoufle, after her separation from Guillaume, Aelis becomes a successful businesswoman and forms a series of three female friendships, in the Arabic tale, Boudour cross-dresses, takes on her husband’s identity, and marries the daughter of King Armanos, Hayat al-Nefous.8 Both in the French romance and in the Arabic tale, therefore, the separation of the heterosexual couple, permitted by a bird’s theft and by the introduction of silk, leads directly to the establishment of alternative sexual practices between women. Both texts also end on a seemingly normative tone, with the reunification of the heterosexual couple and their official marriage.
Even though the Arabic tale and the French romance each depict the subversion of binary gender distinctions through different narrative strategies (cross-dressing in one and intimate female friendships in the other), both texts trace the onset of alternative gender and social identities to the same events, namely, a preying bird (a kite), and the presence of silk (a silk purse in the Escoufle and a silk ribbon in the Arabic story). These thematic and intertextual resonances between the Escoufle and The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour are crucial, as they invite us to reread the French romance and its depiction of female friendships through Arabic writings and cultural practices. Analyzing Jean Renart’s Escoufle through the reading lens of the Arabic tradition permits us thus to decipher in new ways the affective and intimate friendships that Aelis develops with three women in the romance (Ysabel, the lady of Montpellier, and the countess of Saint-Gilles), and the uncertainty about gender and sexual roles that the French text, in parallel to the Arabic tale, emphasizes. Read from this perspective, the title of the French romance acts not only as a sign of the queer relations between women that are depicted therein, but also as a symbol of the hybrid, cross-cultural nature of the entire literary project.
The relation between the Arabic tale and the French romance reaches beyond the intertextual resonances that we have just described. It extends to the economic ties that medieval France entertained with the medieval Arab Islamicate world, and by extension to the intercultural connections between the French narrative and Arab sociocultural traditions. In other words, and even though Jean Renart does not allude explicitly to any Arabic intertext (in contrast for instance to the multiple references to the Tristan and Ysolde legend), we must remain sensitive to the “fabric of implicit [Arabic] allusions”9 and to the blending of Western and non-Western cultural traditions in the romance. The “implicit [Arabic] allusions” that permeate the Escoufle reside in the repeated references in the romance to material goods, silk cloth, precious stones, and luxury commodities coming from the East. Such allusions are not to be read as ornamental, empty signifiers without any bearing on the interpretation of the text. Rather, I argue, they hint at unsuspected and veiled expressions of cross-cultural contacts, and at times even of intimate desire between women.
In the Escoufle, silk, like the kite, plays a key role in destabilizing the overall narrative economy of the romance. It operates similarly to the way it functions in the courtly romances recently analyzed by Jane Burns in her Courtly Love Undressed,10 By introducing into Western romance multiple references to Eastern material goods, silk defines Western hero(ine)s with a material identity coming from the East. In the case of the Escoufle, Aelis’s entire life before her elopement with Guillaume and after her establishment in Montpellier, as well as throughout her stay in Saint-Gilles, is marked by silk and lavish clothes. While still a child, she had learned to embroider with gold thread and silk; in fact, the narrator describes her involvement in such activities with her puceles in her palace room in Rome (vv. 2060, 2967–71). Aelis is also often portrayed wearing silk clothes, at least until the moment of her elopement when she must exchange her silk tunic (“bliaut de Sire,” v. 3991) for one made of Flemish wool (“drap flamenc,” v. 3996) in order to conceal her identity (vv. 3990–96). Her mother gives her a precious ring with a magic green stone (vv. 3805–13) which Aelis encloses in an “aumosniere / d’un samit” (vv. 3828–29), a purse made of luxurious heavyweight silk imported into the West from Syria and Asia Minor. Even though the text does not specify the origin of this ring or of its stone, the reader may easily infer that they both came from the East since this was the provenance of precious stones and metals in the medieval West. Finally, throughout the Escoufle and whenever the narrator specifies the origins of material goods, it is often an Eastern one: “Besaces turcoises” (“bags from Turkey,” v. 3590); “bliaut de Sire” (“a silk tunic from Syria,” v. 3991); “vaissel d’or d’uevre turcoise” (“gold dishes crafted in Turkey,” v. 8854).
The multiple references to Eastern goods in the Escoufle reveal the omnipresence of such commodities in Western Europe and the role that Middle Eastern culture (material and otherwise) played in the cultural, social, and political life of the medieval West. As far as the transmission of silk and embroidery from the East to the West is concerned, recent archaeological findings indicate that trade routes were more direct than heretofore believed, rendering the exchanges between the two civilizations less circuitous and the borders more porous. As a matter of fact, while it has long been thought that Oriental weavers and embroiderers were settled in medieval Italy and that it was from there (Luccha, Genoa, and Venice, in particular) that silk and gold embroidery techniques spread to the rest of Europe as early as 1160, the latest scholarly findings suggest otherwise. Recent scholarship has revealed that Italian merchants had settled in Northern Iran (in the city of Tabriz especially), and it was there that they learned gold embroidery and Eastern weaving techniques; it was also from Iran that they traded silk to Italy and from there progressively to the rest of Europe.11 Moreover, Olivia Remie Constable has uncovered the crucial role played by al-Andalus (and the cities of Almería, Córdoba, and Zaragoza, in particular) in the silk industry as early as the eighth century, and in the diffusion of Andalusian gold, silk, and textiles to markets in the central and eastern Mediterranean, as well as to Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.12 More recently, Kathryn Reyerson has unearthed the important position that the town of Montpellier occupied in the diffusion of gold embroidered textiles and techniques from the Southern Mediterranean and al-Andalus to Northern European markets.13
Aelis’s lavish silk aumosniere, which will be stolen by the kite, stands therefore as an undeniable mark of imperial opulence and of imported Eastern luxury. As such, it marks her Western identity with a material wealth deriving from the East and fashions consequently hybrid gender identities. Not only does it set the stage for the development of Aelis’s cross-cultural gender and social identity, but as a unisex symbol offered by Aelis to Guillaume as a token of love, it is also capable of crossing gender binaries. Once he recovers Aelis’s silk purse from the kite, Guillaume will have it sewn in his pants (“en ses braiel,” v. 7723), as a sign of his own ambiguous gender identity. In addition, silk permits the crossing of social lines since its transfer from Aelis to Guillaume cements the relation of a son of a count to the daughter of an emperor. Finally, the separation of the couple, permitted precisely by the transfer of the silk aumosniere from Aelis to Guillaume and its momentary loss to the kite, enables Aelis to step outside the heterosexual role expected of an imperial princess and its attending responsibility to ensure proper dynastic succession. In other words, the transfer of the aumosniere de samit from Aelis to Guillaume liberates Aelis from the gendered expectations of heterosexual marriage and casts her in a liminal space in which she fashions alternative identities and moves in new sociocultural geographies, at the crossroads between East and West.
It is thus perhaps not surprising that the scene of the kite and its theft of the silk purse is situated outside of Toul, a town in Lorraine that is midway between Rome (Aelis’s inheritance) and Normandy (Guillaume’s lands), and midway between Rome (Aelis’s city of birth) and Montpellier (city in which Aelis establishes her highly alternative residence). Being geographically located in the middle of Western Europe halfway between Normandy and Montpellier, Toul acts as an intermediate liminal space, where all becomes possible including the transformation of Aelis from a heterosexual beloved into an active lover of women.
The first person that Aelis meets after the critical scene involving the kite is a young girl who will become her close friend throughout the romance, namely, Ysabel.14 As soon as she sees her, Aelis voices a startling wish mentally at first, that of spending the night together in one bed:
Ce vait pensant bele Aelis |
Fair Aelis began thinking |
Ke bien porra la nuit uns lis |
That the two of them could well spend the night |
Souffrir a eles ii ensamble. |
In one bed together. |
(vv. 4885–87) |
A few moments later, she repeats that desire directly to Ysabel:
She gently asks |
|
La meschine que o li gise. |
The young girl to sleep with her. |
(v. 5264–65) |
Though certainly unexpected, Aelis’s desire to spend the night in one bed with Ysabel may be explained by the particular context of the scene. At this point in the romance, Aelis is a twelve-year-old girl who finds herself alone in the midst of Lorraine without any male protection, victim of the two trusted men she knew: her father and Guillaume. At twelve, the legal age of marriage in medieval society and the onset of puberty, Aelis had certainly reached an especially vulnerable stage in her life. This is precisely the age when Silence, heroine of the romance of the same title, wonders whether she should continue her life as a boy with the social advantages to which this gender entitles her, or if she should instead assume her female role.15 As a girl alone in the midst of a medieval urban setting, like maidens lost in forests in courtly romances, Aelis could certainly become easy prey to passing men.16
Aelis’s request to sleep with Ysabel is ambiguous, however. The ambiguity rests on the use of two polysemic terms in the above two quotations employed to express Aelis’s desire to share Ysabel’s bed: lis (v. 4886) and then jesir (v. 5265). According to Godefroy’s Old French dictionary, jesir has the double meaning of “to rest” and “to sleep with someone, to cohabit,” while the word lis means “marriage,” in the sense of a husband and wife sleeping together.17 Aelis’s desire to spend this first (and future nights as she will soon add [v. 5271]) together in the same bed with Ysabel invites us therefore to consider a sexual, (homo)erotic interpretation. In fact, her request may be read as an alternative same-sex marriage proposal. If so, this wish places this romance squarely within the parameters of same-sex desire among women in the Middle Ages and Aelis in the lineage of the numerous unrecognized lesbians of medieval French literature.
Aelis’s proposition to sleep in the same bed as Ysabel is especially astonishing because it (innocently?) voices one of the very behaviors explicitly condemned by medieval theologians and forbidden by the rules and regulations of women’s monastic communities. These rules continued to be repeated from one century to the next, since Saint Augustine’s fifth-century warning (cited as an epigraph at the head of this chapter), undoubtedly indicating that the perceived threat of women’s friendships in convent settings continued to be felt. A seventh-century rule stated specifically that “young girls should never lie down together lest in some adversity of the flesh their warmth carries them off to sin.”18 Seven centuries later, the councils of Paris (1212) and Rouen (1214), in an effort to stamp out such relations “prohibited nuns from sleeping together and required a lamp to burn all night in dormitories.”19 Thirteenth-century monastic rules echoed the same prohibition against nuns sleeping in each other’s cells, and, in addition, required them to keep their doors unlocked so that they might always be able to prove their innocence if need be.20
As it encodes ambiguously what religious discourse posed only in negative terms, Aelis’s request to be lodged with Ysabel conflates the categories of the “designing damsel” and the “damsel in distress,” both well known from Arthurian romance.21 But while such ladies typically make their sexual requests to knights and in courtly settings, Aelis makes her appeal to another woman and in the context of a city. Moreover, while traditional damsels (designing or in distress) are regularly eliminated from Arthurian romance because they impede the trajectory of the male hero,22 Aelis, once she makes her request to Ysabel, emerges truly as the central character of the romance, becoming the veritable (female) “knight” of the Escoufle, ultimately justifying the critical categorization of this romance as “feminocentric.”23
The role and status of Aelis in the Escoufle and her relationship with Ysabel have been variously interpreted by critics. Most have opted for a nonsexual analysis except for G. Diller who proposed a sexual reading of the romance.24 Adopting a social-constructionist view of homosexuality, Diller interpreted Aelis’s friendships with other women as intimate sexual attachments and attributed them to her double victimization and disappointment by Guillaume and her father. If Aelis loves women, according to Diller, it is only by reaction, as a defense mechanism and in an effort to “cease being reduced by men to the level of a woman-object” and to “liberate herself from male domination.”25
Though I question Diller’s social-constructionist view, I agree with his perspective that Aelis’s relationships with women ought indeed to be read as sexual ones.26 Failing to recognize the erotic nature of Aelis’s request and of the ensuing intimate friendships–first with Ysabel, soon with other women–or failing to acknowledge the ambiguity of these episodes means that one defines the lack of sexuality in Aelis’s life subsequent to her separation from Guillaume as the lack of heterosexuality. If lesbianism has been thought to be absent from premodern European literary production, it may well be because expressions of same-sex intimacy (such as we find in the Escoufle) have simply not been recognized as sexuality at all.27
If lesbianism remains latent in the Escoufle, it is on the other hand openly depicted in The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour. In the Arabic text, as discussed in Chapter 3, the separation of the heterosexual couple leads to the development of an intimate same-sex relation between Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous. While in the Arabic tale, same-sex marriage between the two women is permitted by Boudour’s cross-dressing, the narrator of the Escoufle stages a same-sex intimate relation between women without recourse to cross-dressing. His originality lies in his recasting of a (Arabic) tale of cross-dressing into a romance of female friendships, spoken in a language that hovers at the borders between the sexual and the nonsexual, between love and friendship. The intertextual resonances between the Arabic tale from the One Thousand and One Nights and the Escoufle invite us thus to ask questions about Aelis that we may not have asked in a monocultural reading of the romance and permit us to envision novel interpretations of Aelis’s sexual and social practices that we may not have considered.
My analysis of the Escoufle reveals that same-sex relations between women do not depend on cross-dressing. In fact, characters like Aelis who do not cross-dress can become involved in same-sex relations, just like those (such as Boudour, Yde, or Silence) who do. Women who do not cross-dress too can question binary gender roles by exploring the lines that distinguish female friendship from lesbian love. Aelis’s emotional and sexual maturity from the moment of her separation from Guillaume to the establishment of her alternative friendships–respectively with Ysabel, the lady of Montpellier, and the countess of Saint-Gilles–urges us to interrogate her gender and ultimately her social categorization, and to ponder, in light of Arabic intertextuality, the implications of the implicit, yet ubiquitous, sexual overtones of her friendly request.
Like Aelis’s ambiguous request to share her bed, Ysabel’s initial response is a double entendre, perhaps in order to conceal the fact that she has indeed understood Aelis’s implicit sexual invitation:
Dame, fait ele, vo franchise |
My lady, she said, your nobility |
Ne requiert pas que tex ancele |
Can not require a servant |
Com je sui gise a tel pucele |
Such as I am to sleep with a young maiden |
Come vos estes; n’est pas droiture. |
Such as you; it is not right. |
(vv. 5266–69) |
Ysabel’s response, like Aelis’s proposition, hovers between the sexual and the nonsexual, the legitimate and the illegitimate. Her reply both maintains the ambiguity of the verb jesir (lying down and sleeping together as a married couple) that Aelis had introduced and expands it with the observation n’est pas droiture (v. 5269). Let us recall that in medieval usage, droiture means not only “right,” but also “the rightful position,” including the one taken during (hetero)sexual intercourse. Since medieval law held a wide definition of aberrant sexualities and thus prohibited not only acts of sodomy, masturbation, or bestiality, but also wrongful sex positions between heterosexual couples,28 Ysabel’s remark on droiture refers not to heterosexual positions, but to the sexual illegitimacy of having two girls share the same bed. Her comment on the sexual inappropriateness of sleeping with Aelis uses, therefore, the terms of (non-normative) heterosexuality in order to speak about alternative sexuality. If this demonstrates that medieval French literature lacked an established vocabulary to speak about female homoeroticism, it also reveals the fact that the expression of same-sex desire between women in Old French textuality was expressed through a detour. While at times, the detour was Arabic rhetorical devices (Chapter 2), at others, it was Arabic thematic motifs (Chapter 3). In the Escoufle, the strategy involves the recourse to Arabic thematic parallels (the kite’s theft), Eastern material goods (silk and precious stones), as well as the mimicking and subversion of Western conventions associated with the most legitimate model of sexuality, namely, heterosexual relations.
In addition, Ysabel’s remark on the sexual illegitimacy of sleeping in the same bed as Aelis points to the social illegitimacy of the request. The first lines of her response indeed move the sexual connotations of Aelis’s plea to an emphasis on social class. A close reading of her words indicates that she is reacting with disbelief at the idea that Aelis would display so much generosity (nobility) as to consider an association between herself (pucele) and Ysabel (ancele). The contrast between these words is important as both pucele and ancele had very specific meanings in the Middle Ages. While pucele means any young unmarried woman, regardless of rank, and will come to signify exclusively a virgin,29 ancele possesses a technical meaning in medieval charters and law. Drawing primarily on Mediterranean sources, Susan Mosher Stuard has argued that ancilla was “the Roman term for female chattel slave that remained in use through medieval centuries.”30 It soon came to refer to maidservants, a quasi-exceptional category in the tripartite sexual system of classification for women developed by Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) and Franciscan Gilbert de Tournai (d. 1284) in their ad status sermons.31 Ancilla, hence, encompassed those single women who were not free–single female slaves who lived and worked for their master and who had very limited rights in medieval society. Interestingly, Ysabel fits this description. She is the unmarried daughter of an unmarried mother (the narrator never calls Ysabel’s mother a widow, and no information is ever provided concerning Ysabel’s father), herself probably also a slave who has passed her unfree state to her daughter. Moreover, both Ysabel and her mother live in a warehouse belonging to a rich bourgeois and work for him (vv. 4964–74).32 Ysabel’s observation that it is not droiture that a pucele associates with (lives with, sleeps with, or, marries, depending on our interpretation of jesir) an ancele thus likely alludes to the prevalent debate in medieval society concerning the legal and social status of ancillae. As she translates the heterosexual terms of this debate into the homosexual context of her own fictive situation, Ysabel’s comment may refer to the social instability that maidservants were accused of provoking and more specifically to the threat of sexual transgressions they were believed to pose to the medieval Western social order.33
Because of the possibly sexual meaning of jesir, Ysabel’s astonishment at the potential alliance between a pucele (Aelis) and an ancele (herself) might even point to the question intensely debated within canon law about the right of slaves to marry. This was an especially pertinent topic in the year 1200 (circa the time when the Escoufle was composed) when marriage rites came to be considered church sacraments. The very invocation of history in the romance, while tempting us to read fiction as history, playfully points to the limits of history. For if the church validated a marriage between a free man and an unfree woman,34 it said nothing about consent between two women of different social conditions, and nothing about the unintended and intriguing possibility of considering such consent to be an officially sanctioned marriage. The silence over same-sex consent and unions may have unwittingly opened a space in which the narrator of the Escoufle could safely imagine the alternative social and gender configurations that suddenly became possible under new church legislation.35
Reread in this light, Aelis’s request to jesir with Ysabel may be interpreted as the verbal (thus valid) consent by a free woman (Aelis) to contract an intimate relation with an unfree woman (Ysabel). Under medieval law, this consent (if we set aside for a moment the fact that it is given for a same-sex relation and not a heterosexual one) legitimizes their bond, permits their cohabitation and sets Ysabel free.36 If canon law did not give full parental rights to a free man who married an unfree woman (her children continued to belong to her master), thereby limiting the total number of men who married ancillae, the question of children is not at issue between Aelis and Ysabel. Therefore, Ysabel stood to gain everything from an intimate (marital) association with Aelis, hence her wonder at Aelis’s nobility and generosity (“vo franchise,” v. 5266). Ysabel’s emphasis on social class may thus be read primarily as a comment on the extraordinary liberating potential of a (same-sex) liaison with a free individual. An alliance (between women), imagined to have the same consequences as a heterosexual marriage, could become the very door to freedom for the ancele Ysabel.37
And indeed, the same-sex relation that develops from this moment forward between Aelis and Ysabel affords Ysabel an unexpected upward social and economic mobility. Freed from her ancilla status, she is richly clothed by Aelis with a new dress (“robe novele,” v. 5341); she sleeps with Aelis in the same bed as jesir is no longer a prerogative of heterosexual unions, but remains until the end of the romance when Aelis and Guillaume are reunited, the exclusive privilege of same-sex relations between women. Moreover, Ysabel’s social promotion represents a veritable manumission of her ancilla state. She is never referred to by this name again in the romance. She freely leaves Toul with Aelis, settles down in Montpellier and trades the poor household (“povre ostel,” v. 4924) she shared with her mother for a comfortable furnished house with a front yard and a garden in the back (vv. 5473–75). Through her relationship with Aelis, Ysabel partakes of the material wealth of her companion and participates fully in the establishment of the new embroidery workshop/beauty salon. Even the poor gimples (wimples) she sews acquire a higher status as they are sold on an equal footing with the more luxurious embroideries that Aelis confects.38 Ysabel’s mother participates in the material advantages gained from this lesbian relationship. Aelis leaves her mule with her as a retribution for their lodging (vv. 5313–17); later in the romance, she will sell the mule with great profit. The same-sex relation that develops in the Escoufle expresses, therefore, the very tempting possibility of (imaginary) freedom for those women in the Middle Ages, those ancillae and maidservants who were single and unfree “by law and custom.”39
Ysabel’s upward social mobility goes hand in hand with the development of the young girls’ erotic relationship. It does not take long for Ysabel and Aelis to engage in more intimate activities. If Ysabel begins by placing herself in bed with Aelis souvine (“on her back,” v. 5273), she likely remains in that position only momentarily for soon thereafter she agrees to accomplish all of Aelis’s wishes:
She tells her |
|
Qe’ele fera sans contredit |
That she will accomplish completely |
Sa volenté, comment k’il aille. |
Her wish, whatever it is. |
(vv. 5291–93) |
Ysabel’s willingness to submit to Aelis’s desires is described as being the result of Aelis’s more convincing nonverbal arguments:
Ele se traist plus deles li, |
She moves closer to her |
Si la baise, estraint et acole. |
She kisses her, embraces and hugs her. |
(vv. 5288–89) |
As the couple transgresses social and sexual lines, the narrator violates the linguistic register specific to love and collapses descriptions of same-sex female friendship with those of heterosexual love. As a matter of fact, the behaviors that Aelis and Ysabel engage in borrow the vocabulary that pertains to heterosexual intimacy, all the while remaining at the threshold of genital activity.40 The verbs used here, baise, estraint, or acole, recall the terms that characterized Yde and Olive’s relationship which I discussed in the previous chapter. Like them, these verbs invite and resist a sexual reading. After all, these are terms that are commonly used throughout medieval literature to depict both sexual and nonsexual bonds, to describe lovers and friends, legitimate and illegitimate relations; they can be read both sexually and not, metaphorically and literally. Far from explicitly choosing one meaning over another (be it friendship or love), the text maintains a veil of ambiguity over the relationship described and blurs the precise nature of the bond between the two women. By remaining equivocal as to the extent of the two girls’ relationship, the narrator leaves the reader wondering, and hence imagining, what exactly went on in the privacy of their bedchamber.
In addition to the ambiguity of the vocabulary used to describe the relation between Aelis and Ysabel, the narrator couches the same-sex love pursuit in terms of a heterosexual (courtly) quest (“la conquiert,” v. 5291).41 Yet, this image, used to reinscribe within the lesbian relation the traditional heterosexual hierarchy of active (male) and passive (female), as well as the active/passive model associated with male homosexual activity, is also the very means of its subversion.42 For in the Escoufle, there is no active male hero (heterosexual or homosexual). Rather, it is Aelis who performs this role, having become the sole active female heroine of the romance. Another moment of the veritable mimicking and undermining of heterosexuality is achieved by locating the first moment of the two girls’ intimacy on the very bedsheets on which Aelis and Guillaume had slept the night before (vv. 5242–49). In a very literal and physical sense, the lesbian friendship is superimposed on the heterosexual bed.
Aelis and Ysabel’s relationship continues to develop in equally ambiguous terms even after they leave Toul and begin their voyage north to Normandy, then south to Montpellier in their long quest for Guillaume. Ysabel quickly becomes a loyal friend (“amie et feeille,” v. 5396); she serves Aelis and provides her with “so much solace, so much pleasure” (“tant de soulas, tant de delit,” v. 5400); Aelis “enjoys herself in so many ways” (“ml’t par se deduit bien et bel,” v. 5402) that she soon feels less pain and anger (v. 5464); the “friendship” between the two girls develops so happily that Ysabel’s “only pleasure is to be with the fair maiden” (“Or n’est il deduis se cil non / Que d’estre o la france pucele,” vv. 5476–77). The main verbs used here to depict the affective relation between Aelis and Ysabel (soulas, delit, and deduit) display the same implicit sexual register as jesir, acoler, estraint, and baisier discussed above. Like deduire which can denote both “to enjoy” and “to make love to someone,” soulas and delit possess both sexual and nonsexual connotations; they can be used to mean “pleasure” in a physical and in an emotional sense.
Regardless of the precise nature of Aelis and Ysabel’s relationship, it remains clear nevertheless that their bond up to that moment in the romance is characterized by “exclusivity in affection,”43 precisely that very loyalty and closeness that developed in monasteries and beguinages and which Augustine and monastic rules condemned repeatedly. If such intimate friendships could develop in all-female communities and if these became key spaces for the development of alternative forms of eroticism between women, the originality of Aelis and Ysabel’s relation lies in its localization outside established religious spaces or formal groupings, in the context of the developing European urban and bourgeois milieus of the thirteenth century.
The narrator of the Escoufle seems to be fully aware of the sexual ambiguity created and to revel in it. By playfully interrupting it at some key passages, the narrator heightens the emotional charge of these scenes. Such is the case when, immediately following the lines cited above that describe Aelis’s pleasure in Ysabel’s company: “Ml’t par se deduit bel et bien” (“[She] enjoys herself in so many ways,” v. 5402), the narrator comments on the efforts deployed by the two girls in their search for Guillaume, observing: “Et ml’t le quisent sagement” (“They searched for him wisely,” v. 5403). The adverb sagement, following on the heels of deduit, puts an abrupt end to the audience’s imagination and any effort to understand the nature of the friendship between the two girls. Should their deduit be considered sage, or is it to be interpreted differently? The opposition between sagement and deduit highlights the two competing events in the girls’ lives: the quest for Guillaume (verbally and socially dubbed sage) and the development of the same-sex intimate affair (left unspoken, perhaps purposely silenced).
Shortly thereafter, the narrator once again deflects our attention from the eroticism of the two girls’ relation and the pleasure they are having in each other’s company and refocuses it on more legitimate, socially appropriate concerns. After commenting on their deduit, the narrator describes Aelis as a pucele (“young girl” or “virgin,” v. 5477). This characterization catches the reader off guard for Aelis’s virginity is unlikely to have been part of one’s thinking at this moment in the romance. Calling Aelis a pucele precisely at the moment of describing the girls’ pleasure teases the reader and confounds any attempt at drawing clear conclusions about Aelis and Ysabel’s relationship. The normative reading of the romance thus competes very powerfully with the nonnormative interpretation.44
The alternative relationship that Aelis builds with Ysabel is only the first in a series of three that are depicted in the Escoufle. The next friendship that she initiates is the one she launches with the lady of Montpellier, shortly after she meets Ysabel and after they both establish themselves as businesswomen in Montpellier. Aelis’s decision and desire to have more than one friend puts into question the exclusivity of affection characteristic of medieval religious women writers discussed above; it also interrogates traditional courtly love scenarios in which a knight is preoccupied with one woman only. Even as it takes its inspiration from women’s homoerotic religious discourse and courtly love literature, the Escoufle does not reduce Aelis’s intimate liaisons with other women to either model. The multiplicity of female spaces and of emotional attachments among women staged in this romance creates an alternative social system in which women engage in same-sex practices under the guise of friendship.
One might trace the very first steps in the development of Aelis’s friendship with the lady of Montpellier to the moment when she resolves to present her with a gift. This scene may be considered to be Aelis’s effort to create a space for female intimate relations within the urban milieu of medieval Montpellier where she has settled. In fact, Aelis explains that her decision to offer a gift is prompted by the indifference of some women toward her in church (the lady of Montpellier does not speak to her), and that, in contrast to some, the lady of Montpellier does not buy her lavishly embroidered goods. It is thus neither as a businesswoman nor as an embroideress that Aelis goes to visit the lady of Montpellier.45 Rather, she goes there seeking the lady’s friendship, speaking to her already as a future friend: “cel qui ml’t se fait s’amie” (“She who acts greatly as her friend,” v. 5643). Clearly, the presentation of the gift is depicted as Aelis’s attempt to overcome psychological, social, and economic hostility from some women, as well as her desire to establish a personal bond with the lady of Montpellier. In this sense, Aelis may be considered a thirteenth-century urban reincarnation of Marie de France’s courtly female characters in the Lais (ca. 1170) who depend on other women in order to surmount the social, psychological, or familial obstacles they face.
The notion of a gift as a token of friendship should make us pause for a moment.46 In medieval epic, gifts were exchanged in order to bind social and political relations between men; they expressed largesse between a lord and his liege vassals, created strong ties of loyalty, conferred honor and prestige upon the giver, and initiated a cycle of return giving. In medieval romance, gifts cemented relations between lovers and at times took place in one-sided heterosexual attachments. The Escoufle, on the other hand, describes a situation that evidently falls outside these conventional situations privileged by either epic or romance. Aelis’s presentation of a gift to the lady of Montpellier recounts a situation in which the gift is offered in a nonheterosexual context (from one woman to another), does not confirm a love relation (Aelis claims she wants to be the lady’s friend, v. 5643), and is not meant to facilitate homosocial bonding through largesse. Rather than a gift that establishes (male) unity, that binds men to one another, or that upholds relations among heterosexual lovers, Aelis’s present may be more usefully thought of as a “friendship gift” whose intent is to establish relations between women. As such, it gives rise to alternative social and gender scenarios, legitimizes an entirely different system of female solidarity, of emotional and also of sexual bonds between women. Yet, and even as it distinguishes itself from them, the friendship gift is created by taking the homosocial and heterosexual versions of the gift as its model.
Aelis’s gift to the lady of Montpellier possesses unquestionable market value. It consists of a luxurious gold embroidered silk purse (“une ml’t riche aumosniere / d’orfroi,” vv. 5561–62) and a belt embroidered with rich gems (“Anelet et bocle et mordant / Fist faire d’or en la çainture” [“She placed a ring, a buckle and a fastener / made of gold on the belt”], vv. 5578–79). Both belt and aumosniere are embroidered with the coat of arms of the lady’s husband, the count of Montpellier (vv. 5560–69). The choice of this decoration is deliberate as Aelis hopes that by appealing to the presumed love between the heterosexual couple, she would have more success constructing the same-sex (friendly) relationship she seeks:
Ml’t devra chier tenir le don, |
She should hold dear the gift, |
Car c’iert des armes son baron |
For both the purse and the belt |
Et l’aumosniere et li tissus. |
Are embroidered with her husband’s coat of arms. |
(vv. 5567–69) |
If luxury garments are often understood in the medieval imaginary to be located in and associated with the bedchamber and its delights,47 the aumosniere and belt, both luxuriously produced and embroidered with the husband’s coat of arms, bespeak of the presumed intimate delights between the lady of Montpellier and her husband. At the same time, these gifts presented by a woman to another woman create a fantasy about the potential pleasures of friendship that may develop between the two women. They may suggest that the delights of female friendship could parallel those of the heterosexual courtly couple. As Aelis appeals through her gift to the presumed love between the count and lady of Montpellier, she demonstrates the extent to which the representation of women’s friendships models itself on heterosexual relations, while hinting at the possibility that heterosexual love might at times have served as a foil to female intimate friendships.
Aelis’s initiation of a female intimate liaison with the lady of Montpellier through gifts is successful. Very quickly, the lady of Montpellier is herself drawn into the cycle of gift exchange and transfer. In fact, in return for the material commodity received, she grants Aelis her solemn protection:
[. . .] Ja mar ares doute |
Do not have any worry |
D’ome qui en la vile viengne, |
No man who comes to the city |
Ne ja tant comme il i remaingne |
However long he may stay |
Will dishonor your name. |
|
(vv. 5724–27) |
Granting Aelis protection in exchange for a (friendship) gift places the lady in the position of a feudal lord who promises protection in exchange for his vassal’s military service (Aelis’s gift). But these lines could also be interpreted inversely, as positioning the lady as the liege vassal (and not the lord) who promises to protect Aelis’s (her lord) social status in exchange for the latter’s largesse. Whichever way we choose to interpret these verses, we ought not be surprised to find the model of feudal exchange and reciprocal service invoked here, since, after all, the friendship gift reenacts gift exchange in feudal society, even as it distances itself from it. As such, the exchange of friendship gifts becomes the central ritual that binds together the new community of women friends that Aelis is forming. However, the fluid exchange of positions between Aelis and the lady, who can be viewed each in turn as a lord or a vassal, disrupts the hierarchical gender and social stations inherent to the feudal (and courtly) model. Contrary to the hierarchy of feudalism and of heterosexual love that is supported and strengthened by gift exchange, the circulation of gifts among women gives rise to alternative social and emotional scenarios. Rather than sustaining hierarchy (as in feudalism and heterosexual love), friendship gifts in the Escoufle establish female intimate relations characterized by the equality of the partners and the flexibility of gender roles.48
In addition to promising Aelis her protection, the lady of Montpellier becomes actively involved in the new gift-exchange economy initiated by Aelis. Her involvement proceeds in two steps: first by ensuring the circulation of the gift that Aelis gave her; and second by presenting Aelis with a return, thank-you present.
If the lady of Montpellier graciously accepts Aelis’s gift, it is not because it displays the coat of arms of her husband as our heroine had thought, not even because of its economic value, but rather because she plans to give it in turn to her own adulterous lover (the count of Saint-Gilles) as a token of her love and loyalty to him. In fact, no sooner does the lady accept Aelis’s gift than she mentally offers it to her lover (shortly thereafter she will give it to him in person):49
La dame l’a ja son ami |
The lady has given it already |
Donee, et si ne la vit onques. |
To her friend; and yet he did not see it (or her) yet. |
(vv. 5698–99) |
We might be tempted to interpret the lady’s mental transfer of Aelis’s gift to the count of Saint-Gilles as the failure of Aelis’s gift to achieve its intended goal. But, in fact, it is the very circulation of the gift that ensures its success. In the Escoufle, not only is Aelis’s friendship gift circulated, but it is also recast more specifically as a love gift for a (adulterous) heterosexual liaison.50 In other words, the gift that was intended for a woman ends up being the legacy of a man. Such transfer confirms the fact that in the Escoufle same-sex bonds between women are not absent, but they remain modeled on heterosexual relations (legitimate or not) and they persist in the shadows of heteronormative associations. They evoke in this sense the relation between Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous from the Arabic Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour where the lesbian relationship is maintained at the end of the tale, under the cover of the harem, “protected” by the socially and politically legitimizing polygamous marriage.
It is only after the mental displacement of the gift from the lady to her (male) lover that the lady of Montpellier begins to respond explicitly to Aelis’s request for friendship and to call her, for the first time, “friend”: “Ceste moie novele amie” (“This new friend of mine,” v. 5769). It is as though the social space for female friendships, and within it the relationship between Aelis and the lady, can take place only after the gift has been circulated and the friendship gift between women has been reinscribed as a heterosexual love gift.
For the lady of Montpellier, regarding Aelis as a friend translates into treating her as a lover. The lines following the lady’s promise to safeguard Aelis’s reputation complicate indeed the developing friendship and show that the line demarcating friendship from love is not drawn as neatly as we might have expected; it is in fact in danger of collapse. As the lady of Montpellier expresses her gratitude for Aelis’s gift, she invites her to dinner and places her in the most distinguished seat at the table:
E[n] liu de signor et de per |
In the seat of her lord and companion |
Fist avoec li mangier la dame. |
The lady had her [sit] to eat with her. |
(vv. 5738–39) |
The first reading of this passage reveals how much the countess appreciates Aelis (and her gift) since she seats her in the place of honor, the one typically reserved for the signor, the lord, the husband of the house. This reading is quickly undermined, however, by the ambiguity of the phrase en liu de (v. 5738). While this locution means “in the seat of,” it also signifies “instead of.” This second meaning utterly transforms the implications of the scene and invites the reader to consider the countess’s attention toward Aelis in a new light. For here, the countess treats Aelis as if she were her husband, instead of her signor.
Taking the place of the signor in the lines above, Aelis becomes, by the same token, the lady’s per (v. 5738). This word, meaning “companion,” has the connotation of equality. It highlights once again the fact that female friendship is characterized by the equality of the partners, in contrast to the inherent inequality of medieval marriage.51 Another meaning of the word per according to Godefroy’s Old French dictionary is “spouse” and seems often to be used to refer to the female spouse as a synonym for moullier, wife.52 If the lady of Montpellier treats Aelis as her per, she considers her, therefore, as her equal (female) spouse, constructing their (friendly) relationship as a marital one.
The reader gets an even more precise inkling of the nature of the incipient “friendship” between the two women a little later in the same evening. Once dinner has been completed and the tables cleared, we are made privy to the lady’s thoughts:
Ml’t vousist bien avoir a oste |
The lady would really have liked |
La dame la bele Aelis, |
To have Aelis as a guest |
Et si que sa couche et ses lis |
And that she would happily |
Li fust mi partis volentiers. |
Share her bed. |
(vv. 5750–53) |
These lines are reported in free indirect discourse, indicating that it is impossible to know whether these are the lady’s inner wishes, or whether she revealed her yearning to Aelis. What is clear to the reader, however, is that the lady of Montpellier’s appreciation of Aelis’s gift and her offer of friendship are not platonic but extend to a desire to keep her as a guest and . . . share her bed! The lady’s intimate thoughts are made explicit in the above lines through the use of two synonyms–couche and lis. These signifiers refer to “bed” both in its intimate (couche) and physical (lis) sense and reveal that the lady is imagining, fantasizing about the emotional and physical intimacy that she might enjoy in her friendship with Aelis.
The same desire to share a bed had been voiced, we will recall, earlier in the romance by Aelis in her initial encounter with Ysabel. Here, it is the lady of Montpellier who initiates the invitation, albeit perhaps only mentally. The same-sex (sexual) proposition that she voices leads to mental, if not physical intimacy since the disclosure of the countess’s intimate thoughts is immediately followed by the timely and discreet departure of all servants (vv. 5754–55). Even though the narrator informs us that they go to eat, the staff’s timely exit conveniently provides temporary privacy to the two ladies, as well as a titillating space for the reader’s imagination.53 The narrator seems to revel in drawing out the suspense of this scene. The reader wonders if the lady of Montpellier’s wishes will be followed by their actual accomplishment; we are left to wonder what would happen if the two ladies were to find themselves in bed together.
The suspense around this friendship about to turn erotic is drawn out even longer after the servants’ withdrawal, at the moment when Aelis asks permission to take her leave. To this request, the lady replies that she would like her to remain with her until the servants have finished their supper so that they may accompany her back to her house. The narrator playfully points out: “Ce la fist encore targier” (“This delayed her even more,” v. 5761). This additional wait time lengthens the scene and ultimately increases the emotional charge of the intimate meeting between the two women. Yet, this private moment escapes representation; it is never described. The reader is left imagining what might have happened between the two women, knowing especially the countess’s train of thought, wondering at what moment the servants will interrupt the scene again. These moments of privacy, however brief, may well have provided a mental relief to some audience members and a window into intimate encounters between women, far from established norms of heterosexual practices.54
It is again during this very short pause, which gives rise to the audience’s erotic fantasy, that the narrator heightens the sexual tension of the scene. He does so by reintroducing the theme of the mutual exchange of gifts. While waiting for the servants to resume their service, the lady offers Aelis a gift, in return for the luxurious presents she has received:
Onques el mantel n’ot atache: |
This coat never had any fastener |
Bien amendera cest damage |
This new friend of mine |
Ceste moie novele amie. |
Will easily repair this defect. |
(vv. 5767–69) |
As it reenacts the medieval value of largesse, depicted in countless scenes of epics and romances in which a ruler bestows a robe on a knight, this scene superimposes an erotic dimension. For, as the lady participates in the cycle of giving, circulating, and returning gifts, she is unwittingly solidifying the emotional bond between herself and Aelis. In the lines just quoted, the lady reveals that the robe she is offering Aelis does not have the required metal “fastener” (v. 5767). She insists that the robe never had a fastener, indicating perhaps that it is a brand new one, and urging Aelis who is a skilled embroideress to repair this lack.
Rather than being insignificant details in the romance, the very mention of the robe and the absence of a metal fastener are signs of the hybridity that characterizes the romance as a whole. In the Arabic sexological tradition, the “unfastened robe” is one of the numerous metaphors used to depict alternative sexual practices, in this case heterosexual anal intercourse. This sexual metaphor is found in Ruju` al-Shaykh ila sibahi fi al-quwati `ala al-bahi (The Return of the Sheikh to His Youth Through Vigor and Coition), a work that has traditionally been attributed to Tunisian writer Ahmad al-Tifashi (1184–1253), author of The Delight of Hearts that I discussed in Chapter 2, or to Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (1445–1505). These attributions have come under criticism, however, since the work contains some references to individuals who lived after these authors’ death. More commonly today, The Return of the Sheikh to His Youth is credited to an Islamic Ottoman judge working under Suleiman the Magnificient, Ahmad b. Sulayman, better known as Ibn Kamal Pasha (d. 1533 or 1534) who, in fact, only translated the work into Turkish. Even though the current state of scholarship does not permit us to date precisely this work, the metaphors it lists are likely to have circulated in compilations dating earlier than the sixteenth century but that have since disappeared. Among the sixteen metaphors recorded for heterosexual anal intercourse in The Return of the Sheikh to His Youth, we encounter that of hall al-izaar, or the “unfastening the robe.”55
Although the metaphor of “unfastening the robe” in the Arabic text is not specific to lesbian practices, it is one nevertheless that has an obvious sexual connotation. Read from an Arabic perspective, the lady of Montpellier’s presentation of an “unfastened robe” to Aelis may hence be interpreted in sexual terms, as an invitation to Aelis to partake in sexual activity with her. The fact that the robe she offers never had a fastener may imply that she herself has never engaged in alternative relations before, but that she is willing to experiment with her new friend, Aelis.
The use of an Arabic metaphor of sexual practice in the Escoufle, like the use of military rhetorical devices in Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières discussed in Chapter 2, points to the cross-cultural literary milieu in which the romance was composed or recited, and to the linguistic, thematic, and cultural hybridity of Old French writings on female homosexuality. It reveals also that the lady of Montpellier, like Aelis, is another instance of a Western character whose gender identity is at least partially fashioned in the East. The very invocation of an Arabic sexual metaphor in the context of this Western romance underscores the lady of Montpellier’s cross-cultural identity and her interest in alternative sexual practices. While bilingual members of the Western audience would certainly have been attuned to the sexual overtones of the lady’s presentation of an “unfastened robe,” monolingual speakers would have reveled in the ambiguity of the text and of the friendship it describes. Whichever the case, it is evident that in the Escoufle, like in Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, Arabic functions as the language of the obscene, the language that permitted medieval Western narrators to speak lesbianism while keeping it silent.56
If the friendship between Aelis and the lady of Montpellier remains subordinated to the adulterous relation between the lady and the count of Saint-Gilles, the friendship that develops soon thereafter between Aelis and the countess of Saint-Gilles takes center stage in both women’s lives. Aelis’s liaison with the countess of Saint-Gilles is perhaps the most eloquent example of the success of the gift-exchange economy established through Aelis’s relation with the lady of Montpellier. Contrary to her previous liaisons, the attachment she develops with the countess is not initiated by either party but is depicted as the unswerving result of the circulation of Aelis’s gift to the lady of Montpellier and from her to the count of Saint-Gilles. For it is indeed the count’s display of the aumosniere and the belt given to him by his mistress (the lady of Montpellier) that confirms his adultery to his wife (the countess of Saint-Gilles), gives rise to a marital dispute, and leads very directly to Aelis’s voyage to Saint-Gilles and the third and final friendship between women in the Escoufle.57 Evidently, the circulation of the friendship gift (the belt and the aumosniere) is instrumental not only in setting the stage for the development of Aelis’s third intimate friendship, but also in establishing a network of women’s associations and in solidifying their bonds especially in the face of marital troubles.
The conjugal dispute between the count and the countess of Saint-Gilles that results from the circulation of Aelis’s gift is especially remarkable because it is a highly original variation and reconceptualization of the motif of the mal-mariée of the courtly love tradition. Like the mal-mariée Orable in the Prise d’Orange or the lady in Marie de France’s lai Yonec, the countess of Saint-Gilles in the Escoufle is initially depicted as the young, attractive, and unhappy wife not of an older man, as in conventional versions of the motif, but of an indifferent count. The age difference typically encountered in the mal-mariée motif is here translated into an emotional distance between the spouses–both situations being common at a time when marital unions were contracted for familial and economic reasons. Like the mal-mariée, therefore, the countess of Saint-Gilles is expected to find comfort with a handsome young (male) lover. All the while implicitly alluding to this common motif of courtly literature, the Escoufle skillfully transforms the conventional heterosexual, adulterous plot of the mal-mariée into a same-sex, publicly validated story: the countess will find solace in a woman (not a man) friend-lover, and the same-sex union will develop not as an adulterous liaison, but rather as an openly contracted affair, encouraged by the count himself.
If the intimate liaison between women becomes the agreed-upon solution to the count’s adultery, it is because it has been reconceptualized in socially acceptable terms and situated within sanctioned social categories. In fact, the entire episode of the Saint-Gilleses’ altercation may be read as a veritable process of negotiation between the spouses as to how to name intimate relations between women and ultimately how to render them socially admissable. Four principal terms are proposed.
The first term proffered to speak about the same-sex relation between women is suggested by the count himself, in response to his wife’s jealous outcry and in an attempt to find a solution to the marital dispute. He urges her to do “the same” as him:
Dame, fait il, faites autel, |
Lady, he said, do the same, |
S’il vos grieve de rien u poise. |
If it does not bother you to do so. |
(vv. 5913–14) |
The count’s response and invitation to his wife to do autel is highly ambiguous. For what does he mean by doing the same as he does? Is he simply inciting his wife to have a belt and aumosniere sewn for herself by the same seamstress who made the ones he now wears, as he tries to explain to his aggrieved wife (vv. 5929–35)? Or do his words encourage a sexual reading, as his wife’s interpretation seems to suggest?
The countess’s reply echoes the ambiguity of her husband’s proposition perhaps in order to conceal the fact that she has indeed understood the layering of ambiguity in her husband’s invitation to behave like him. For, after all, acting like him does not only mean to have a belt and purse embroidered by the same woman (Aelis), it does not just suggest that she ought to engage in an adulterous liaison, but it also appears to entreat her to get involved in a relationship with another . . . woman. The countess’s response and her use of the word çainturiere reveal that she has understood her husband’s proposition to be precisely that:
Certes, fait ele, en mon lignage |
For sure, in my lineage |
Ne sai jou nule çainturiere. |
I do not know any çainturiere. |
(vv. 5918–19, emphasis mine) |
The use of the word çainturiere is noteworthy because it points to the well-known association of sewing and loving, common in the lyric genre of the chanson de toile.58 The countess thus may be using the term çainturiere as a euphemism both for a woman who embroiders belts and for one who is proficient in the techniques and manners of love. When she claims that her family has no çainturiere, she may be pointing to the fact that her family lineage does not include belt makers, but more importantly that the female-female intimacy that her husband invites her to engage in is equally novel in her family.
Interestingly, the first lines of the countess’s response do not reject outright the notion of a female homoerotic relation, suggesting perhaps that such intimacy between women was more common than we might have been led to believe considering the clerical and theological condemnations of female intimate friendships. Yet, even as she understands her husband’s implied suggestion and even as her first reaction is not to be offended by it, the countess quickly changes her response. She adopts instead the role of the cheated wife who patiently endures her husband’s adultery and scolds the count for making such a lait proposition.59
Et quand jou sueffre en tel maniere |
And when I endure so |
Vostre volenté et ma honte, |
Your wish and my dishonor |
I do not see how |
|
Vos m’en deüssiés dire lait. |
You can say ugly/evil things to me. |
(vv. 5920–23) |
Recognizing the failure of the words autel and çainturiere to resolve the marital dispute, the count introduces a third term, pucele, in a last effort to exonerate himself both from the immorality of his own adulterous relation with the lady of Montpellier and from his homoerotic suggestion to his wife. He hence beseeches his wife to invite Aelis (and Ysabel) to come live with her, as her pucele:
Mandés li qu’ele viegne cha |
Invite her to come here |
Et s’amaint o li sa compaigne. |
And to live here with her companion. |
Si li priés qu’ele remaigne |
Ask her to stay |
Entor vous, s’ert vostre pucele |
Around you, as your maiden. |
K[e] il n’a si preu ne si biele, |
For there is none as skilled or as beautiful |
Si com on dist, en tot le raine. |
In the entire realm, as I am told. |
(vv. 5948–53) |
Inviting Aelis to live with the countess of Saint-Gilles as her pucele, maidservant, or lady-in-waiting, as aristocratic women were wont to surround themselves with in the Middle Ages, reflects the count’s effort to refocus his wife’s attention onto more socially suitable plans: to surround herself with a desirable lady. The shift from autel (v. 5913) to çainturiere (v. 5919) to pucele (v. 5951) represents veritable linguistic and conceptual switches that radically recast the conjugal dispute and the count’s sexually explicit proposition into something more socially admissible. And it is precisely the more socially acceptable solution of pucele rather than autel and çainturiere that ultimately pacifies the countess.
This scene foreshadows Raison’s discourse in Jean de Meun’s section of the Romance of the Rose (ca. 1270) and her discussion of the complex dyad coilles and reliques (vv. 7107–20). Without going as far as Raison, who highlights the fact that words are empty signifiers, the narrator of the Escoufle, through the three rhetorical devices used in this scene, points to the unquestionable advantages of linguistic conventions and lack of linguistic mimetism for depictions of alternative intimate relations between women. In contrast to sodomy, the absence of any single commonly accepted and recognized term to speak exclusively of lesbian relations in the Middle Ages ought not to be interpreted as a proof of the absence of such liaisons in the premodern period. Rather, and as the series of semantic decenterings or of word substitutions demonstrates, same-sex homoerotic relations were expressed through code words (pucele),60 which both validated such relations and safely occulted them. In other words, eroticism between women, far from being silent in the European Middle Ages, was expressed indirectly and implicitly in ways that permitted lesbianism to be at once voiced and unspoken, visible and invisible, and that ultimately allowed women to be both friends and lovers.61 Recoding lesbian liaisons as relations between puceles not only provides us with a renewed understanding of the category puceles in the Middle Ages, but it also blurs any distinction between love and friendship and keeps us at the threshold of interpretation.
The linguistic substitution of autel to çainturiere to pucele is accompanied by a fourth and final shift in the description of the countess’s future companion that teases us into believing we have reached a clearer understanding of the nature of the relationship between women that will soon take place. When the countess of Saint-Gilles sends her messengers to seek Aelis, she does not speak of her as çainturiere or pucele, but rather as amie (friend):
Or la me salüés m’amie |
Greet my friend |
Ke onques ne vi. |
Whom I have never seen. |
(vv. 5982–83) |
Rather than bringing us closer to naming the relationship about to develop between the two women, the use of the word amie evades the whole question of speaking the unspeakable, of naming the silenced sin. Could the term amie, like pucele, have been one of those signifiers in the Middle Ages which denoted same-sex love between women? Inviting Aelis as a “friend” interrogates once again the very notion of friendship between women throughout this romance, urges us to reread depictions of friendships in other medieval texts and to reflect upon the very porous borders that distinguish friendship from love.
In addition, the second line of the countess’s invitation in the above quotation is striking because it literally describes the developing same-sex female friendship between the two women along the same lines as Jaufre Rudel had depicted his love for the princess of Tripoli or as the Emperor Conrad for Lienor in Jean Renart’s other famous romance, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, namely, as an amor de lonh or love from afar. In this light, Aelis becomes the friend from afar, the never-seen friend, but the one who already occupies the countess’s heart. If geographical distance was great between Jaufre Rudel and the lady from Tripoli or between Conrad and Lienor, it is not so between Aelis and the countess of Saint-Gilles. The difference in this case is not so much geographical as it is social.62 Aelis does not go to the Saint-Gilles household as an imperial princess, an aristocrat, or even a successful bourgeois businesswoman, but rather as a lady-in-waiting. But if she is demoted from bourgeois to maiden, Aelis is elevated at the same time from the status of lady-in-waiting to that of desired (lesbian) beloved.
The friendship-love relation between Aelis and the countess of Saint-Gilles does not take long to develop. In fact, it soon becomes exclusive and autonomous:
Toutes sont i et cors et ame. |
They are all one body/heart and soul. |
Ne lor membre mais de Guilliaume. |
They no longer remember Guillaume. |
(vv. 6170–71) |
These lines serve to contrast sharply the unity of the women’s liaison to the heterosexual relation with Guillaume, whom the female friends have by now forgotten. This is evident at the stylistic (and visual) level, where a plural feminine (toutes)63 is opposed to a singular masculine (Guillaume), and where the affirmative voice (sont) to speak of the liaison between women is contrasted to the negative voice (ne . . . mais) used to refer to the heterosexual union. But it is the description of the complete harmony between the women that is especially remarkable here. The ladies are now all one in body/heart and soul (v. 6170). Such a unity between women is remarkable because it recalls the very common medieval view of heterosexual marriage of the husband (like Christ) as head and the wife as body.64 In the Escoufle, however, the narrator destabilizes the traditional associations of man as spirit (mens) and woman as body (carno) affirmed in the Bible (Ephesians 5:28, 5:22–23) and popularized by Augustine, Jerome, and twelfth-century theologians including Bernard de Clairvaux. For here it is the relation between women that is associated with the spiritual (cors et ame), while that with Guillaume is relegated to the domain of the physical, of the body, as the ambiguity of the word membre (“to remember” but also the “male sexual organ”) indicates.
The fourth and final term amie, used to describe Aelis and to validate the nascent relationship between Aelis and the countess, quickly acquires sexual implications. This is clear in the special welcome that Aelis receives from the countess upon her arrival in the Saint-Gilles household:
Or ne fu pas ce fait de feme |
No other woman was ever treated |
Que la gentix contesse en fait: |
In the way the noble countess did [Aelis]: |
El la baise, puis si la lait |
She kisses her, then let |
As autres puceles baisier. |
The other young women kiss her. |
Lors l’enmaine pour aaisier |
Then she takes her to relax |
En ses cambres par la main nue. |
In her bedroom, holding her with her naked hand. |
(vv. 6122–27) |
The friendship that evolves between the two women is marked by kissing: the countess kisses Aelis and allows her maidservants to do the same. She then leads her to her room and provides for her needs with her “naked hand” (v. 6127). The expression “naked hand” models once again the expression of same-sex desire between women upon heterosexual courtly and feudal scenarios. But if feudal homage is characterized by the joining of hands between two men (the lord and his vassal), and if courtliness is often described as uniting the hands of a woman to those of a man, friendship between women is defined as the joining of the hands of two women.65 The extraordinary welcome that Aelis receives from the countess renders the latter’s kisses suspicious and destabilizes our understanding of the nature of the women’s friendship.66
The seductive nature of the kiss between Aelis and the countess becomes even more pronounced when compared to the one which soon follows, this time between Aelis and the count of Saint-Gilles. For he too participates similarly in welcoming Aelis; and he does so by first asking permission from his wife (to avoid her jealousy, v. 6141) to kiss the newly arrived maiden. In contrast to the kissing scene above where the accent was placed on the kiss givers (the countess and her maidens), the following description focuses on Aelis as a recipient of the count’s kiss:
She did not turn away her head, |
|
Ains soufri le voloir le conte |
Rather, she suffered the count’s desire |
Bonnement, onques n’en ot honte. |
Willingly, without any shame. |
(vv. 6142–44) |
The heterosexual kiss described here, seemingly in parallel to the kisses between women, is titillating and far from innocent. At the same time, however, the introduction of the concept of “shame” in the last line (albeit to deny its presence) introduces a new element that was absent from the previous scene. It invites the reader to question the type of kiss Aelis receives from the count as well as the latter’s intentions. In addition, the choice of the verb soufri and the observation that Aelis does not attempt to dodge the count’s kiss seem to suggest that we are witnessing a forced kiss, not a mutually exchanged gesture of affection. The reader wonders why the count had asked permission from his wife and not from Aelis herself, if his intention was simply to give a “friendly” kiss. The very real possibility that Aelis, as a consequence of her move to the Saint-Gilles household, must henceforth submit to the droit du seigneur must be considered, with all the violence (physical and psychological) that this custom entails. The kiss that Aelis receives from the count of Saint-Gilles may be a manifestation of the conflation between (heterosexual) eroticism and violence or rape in medieval literature (and in the pastourelles in particular) that has been studied by Kathryn Gravdal.67 This heterosexual kiss, made possible because of the (apparent) class difference between Aelis and the count, may be considered heir to the sexual violence to which countless medieval maidens were subjected.
A comparison between the two scenes of kissing highlights the fact that Aelis did not appear to be forced when kissed by the countess and her maidservants; she did not attempt to avoid the kisses bestowed upon her and no reference to shame was made. Could the kisses between women have been more pleasurable to her than the heterosexual ones? Or were kisses between women, be they due to friendship or love, considered to be less threatening to a medieval Western patriarchal society than kisses that took place in the context of heterosexual adultery? While the precise nature and meaning of kissing remain ambiguous in this scene as in previous ones, it is clear nevertheless that this physical manifestation of desire plays a central role in the ambiguity of the text and contributes to blurring even further the lines between friendship and erotic desire, between lesbian love and heterosexual relations.
Reading the Escoufle through the Arabic Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour and through Arabic metaphorical tropes has allowed us to unearth expressions of female same-sex love and desire in the thirteenth-century French romance. By inserting continuous references to Arabic material culture and introducing Arabic thematic motifs and metaphorical conventions in his text, the narrator of the Escoufle invites us to cross the borders between the French romance and the Arabic sexological tradition. In so doing, the narrator urges us also to cross the lines of friendship and to realize that the borders between same-sex friendship and same-sex love are more porous than we might have imagined. Intimate bonds between medieval French female heroines, reconceptualized and verbalized through the Arabic tradition and through the subversion of key Western conventions, are enunciated, though they consistently remain couched in an implicit, ambiguous language that defies all attempts to differentiate clearly the discourse of love from that of friendship, the declaration of heterosexual love from that of homosexual intimacy. The absence of clearly demarcated categories of homosexual and heterosexual desire is not to be decried, however, since it may have authorized some female members of the audience to contemplate the (socially) unacceptable fantasy of lesbianism in an acceptable way.68
The significant role that Arabic literature and metaphorical devices plays in the Escoufle does not lie solely in the depiction of same-sex intimate relations between women, as we have seen in this chapter. It resides also in the incorporation into the French romance of various Arabic social and cultural traditions. These traditions are essential to the portrayal of Aelis’s social identity in the Escoufle. We will now turn to this question, and demonstrate how, as the narrator crosses the borders between French and Arabic, romance and mujun, friendship and love, he creates characters whose social identity is also a veritable hybrid between Western and Eastern cultures, at once queer and cross-cultural.