We need to recognize how fully, if invisibly, the lesbian has always been integrated into the fabric of cultural life.
—Terry Castle
BECAUSE REPRESENTATIONS OF same-sex love and desire are intrinsically linked to constructions of social identity, my cross-cultural reading of medieval lesbianism cannot conclude without an investigation of the medieval lesbian’s social identity, as it is depicted in literary texts. This topic remains hardly broached in either literary or historical scholarship, even in studies devoted to marginal groups (including women). And yet, as we will see, just as they determine the social identity of marginal groups, Western clerical presuppositions about women and single women especially play an important role in the production of the social identity of the medieval French literary lesbian.
In this chapter, we will examine the depiction of Aelis’s social identity in Jean Renart’s Escoufle (ca. 1200–1202), and we will see how the narrator of the thirteenth-century French text inscribes history into his fiction and invites us to read Aelis’s social function through the lens of prevailing clerical systems of classification for women. We will demonstrate that Aelis’s occupations in Montpellier and the fictive social spaces that she creates both there and at Saint-Gilles establish what we may call a mirage of historic mimetism, a narrative that both reflects and refracts aspects of thirteenth-century French social life. Aelis’s social identity, while resonating with medieval clerical discourses on women’s proper place in European society, cannot be contained or be reduced to them. In fact, new interpretations emerge as soon as we compare Aelis’s social function and the spaces she inhabits in the Escoufle with those occupied by some women in medieval urban Islamicate society. It is only by contextualizing Aelis’s occupations within both Eastern and Western traditions that we will be able to grasp the complexity of Aelis’s truly hybrid and cross-cultural social identity.
After two years of crisscrossing Europe searching for Guillaume (v. 5405), traveling from East (Toul) to North (Normandy) to South (Montpellier), both Ysabel and Aelis decide to halt their quest (vv. 5416–17), to settle down in Montpellier (v. 5451), and to open a new business from which they can both earn a living (v. 5454).1 This decision represents a turning point in the personal development of Aelis both as a character and as a single woman involved in an intimate liaison with another woman.2 The blurring of gender identities and of binary constructions of emotional attachments (love versus friendship) that I discussed in Chapter 4 is accompanied by the development of alternative and highly marginal social spaces, at least seen from a Western cultural perspective. Roberta Krueger points to the moment of Aelis’s relationship with Ysabel as the veritable turning point in the romance and notes that Aelis’s arrival in Toul marks her entrance into “a new liminal space marked by private domesticity, variable economic status, ties with women, and urban settings.”3 If we distinguish for a moment the turning point in Aelis’s “domestic” or personal gender identity (her lesbian relationship with Ysabel) from the development of her social identity (the departure from Toul, the establishment of the household business in Montpellier, and her move to Saint-Gilles), we note that in the Escoufle, the development of alternative social spaces is depicted as the logical consequence, as the inescapable result, of alternative gender identities.
This relation of cause and effect between the personal and the social is manifest in the description of Aelis and Ysabel’s departure from Toul in search for Guillaume, shortly after their first night together in bed. Throughout their travel, they go on foot (Aelis leaves her mule to Ysabel’s mother, v. 5313), they do not lower their eyes as contemporary conduct manuals advised women to do,4 they do not cross-dress, but don their women’s clothes without any male escort, and without any attempt to cover up their particularly vulnerable social situation:
El ne se repounent ne mucent, |
They do not disguise or hide, |
Ains vuelent bien que on les voie. |
They do not mind being seen. |
(vv. 5328–29) |
In fact, Ysabel is richly dressed since Aelis has taken care to outfit her opulently:
Ele ot vestue richement |
She [Aelis] has richly dressed |
Ysabel de robe novele |
Ysabel with a new dress |
Cote ot tot d’un et cape bele |
The tunic was all of one color; the nice cloak |
Et coterel d’un drap mellé |
And the coat were of a multicolored woolen cloth |
Dont li giron furent ml’t [sic] lé. |
[and] the skirt was very wide. |
(vv. 5340–43) |
The description of Ysabel’s dress is striking not because it is such an extraordinary contrast to the rags she wore when Aelis first met her, but because such a transformation erodes, rather than maintains, established class distinctions. Stripped of the poor clothes that marked her as economically disadvantaged and socially marginal, Ysabel is now dressed in lavish, multicolored, and ample clothes that blur the distinction between lower-class and bourgeois states.5 As she crosses the sartorial lines that identified her with the lower socioeconomic classes and dons opulent clothes, Ysabel acquires a new social body made of cloth and, consequently, also a new public identity. In so doing, she embodies the social threat posed to the old nobility by the rising wealth of the urban bourgeoisie to which Ysabel and Aelis will soon belong. This dress falsely marks Ysabel as a member of a social elite (rising bourgeoisie) and depicts “the kind of conspicuous consumption among lower ranks that royal decrees sought historically to curtail.”6 In other words, Ysabel’s clothing, bestowed upon her through Aelis’s largesse, is a fictive example of those novel trends that augmented anxiety in medieval France about the visual confusion of social ranks. It is the threat of such erosion of class (and gender) distinctions that will lead both kings and preachers to promulgate the first sumptuary laws, which in turn will give rise to the urban legislation of dress and class boundaries in the mid-thirteenth century.7
Ysabel’s new dress recalls Enide’s transformation from the daughter of a poor vavasor to a wealthy countess through her marriage to Erec at the beginning of Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide. But while Enide’s luxurious garments were presented to her by the queen, in front of an approving assembly of male courtiers and as a material sign of her heterosexual union, Ysabel’s dress is given to her in private (the reader does not witness the actual transfer of luxury clothing from Aelis to Ysabel), as a marker of a social class to which she does not belong by birth, and as an affirmation of the alternative, homosexual liaison in which she has engaged. As she adopts lavish clothes, Ysabel might be considered “socially cross-dressed.” It is precisely this new socially cross-dressed status that legitimates the new type of conjointure developed in the Escoufle, one that is made possible by the emotional union and business relation between two women. The scene of Aelis and Ysabel’s travel from Toul to Montpellier thus highlights the fact that the transgression of heterosexual relations is primarily also a transgression of established social lines.8
In comparison to other romance heroines who cross-dress, Aelis and Ysabel might be considered far more threatening characters precisely because of Ysabel’s transgression of social borders. In fact, it is likely that both Aelis and Ysabel would have appeared less threatening had they cross-dressed, for cross-dressing would have theoretically turned them into men and thus justified their independence. Ironically, the absence of cross-dressing in the Escoufle leads to the establishment of a more subversive scenario than its presence allows in other texts, for it puts into question both gender and social identities. But more important perhaps, Aelis and Ysabel are more subversive because the social occupations in which they will engage, first in Montpellier and later in the Saint-Gilles household, cross the lines that seem to matter most in the medieval West, namely, those of social class and the prescribed sociocultural practices for women.
Aelis’s establishment as a businesswoman in Montpellier, and a successful one at that, represents a move from an aristocracy whose wealth is calculated in terms of land possession, feudal recognition, and inheritance by birth right to a bourgeois economy characterized by the exchange of goods, the accumulation and transfer of money, and shrewd marketing strategies. If historically in the West, powerful women were typically queens and nobles, Aelis’s agency, her financial and social success, are all the more remarkable since she is acting as a bourgeois woman and no longer as an aristocrat. Emmanuèle Baumgartner has remarked that Aelis in the Escoufle (just like Fresne in Galeran de Bretagne) achieves her happiness through her own work, rather than from the more traditional family inheritance (“droit d’ancesserie”).9 In fact, Aelis notes that her need to labor with her “two hands” (vv. 5436–37) is due to the loss of her social status following her elopement (vv. 5431–33). She points to this as her “sin” (“péchié,” v. 5426) which, curiously, does not refer to her same-sex relation with Ysabel, but rather to her fall from aristocracy (v. 5420). Aelis hence goes on foot, instead of riding her mule (vv. 5421–22), and establishes herself as a working woman instead of living on her private, inherited income. Settling in an urban Montpellier household may be read as the staging of Aelis’s new social identity, one that is compatible with her alternative same-sex sexual practices. As she nourishes her intimate relationship with Ysabel, she fashions herself into a businesswoman in Montpellier.
To Ysabel, who proposes to earn their living sewing towels and wimples (“touailes, de guimples faire,” v. 5454), Aelis replies that she will contribute to their livelihood through her luxurious embroidery:
Fait Aelis: “S’en iert mes deus. |
Aelis said: “We will both do that [work]. |
Bien sachiés que jou referoie |
Please know that I will embroider |
Joiaus de fil d’or et de soie; |
Luxury accessories with gold thread and silk; |
K’il n’est feme ki tant en sache: |
No woman knows as much as I do |
D’orfrois, de çainture, d’atache, |
About gold embroidery, belts and fasteners, |
De ce faire ai je tot le pris. |
I am renowned for doing this. |
(vv. 5456–61) |
The insistence on Aelis’s exceptional skills at fashioning accessories, at embroidering silk with precious stones and gold thread, is intriguing because it runs counter to the way women’s work was perceived by medieval Western clerics, as an invention of the devil, as an alienation of the body and the soul. This kind of condemnation was especially virulent when women’s work “brought them status and prestige,”10 something that Aelis’s business quickly achieves. Moreover, Aelis’s business is unusual if only because medieval romances typically describe nonworking women, or if working, involved in unpaid jobs. As a matter of fact, if embroidery is the most traditional occupation of noble women in medieval romance,11 their end products are never remunerated; more often they are given away as tokens of love (Soredamors in Cligès; Fresne in Galeran de Bretagne) or offered as gifts to the church (Lienor in Jean Renart’s Roman de Guillaume de Dole). Aelis’s embroidery workshop on the other hand, being a privately owned and operated one and participating in the “household economy” typical of most crafts and trades in the Middle Ages, is a full-fledged business and a financially lucrative one. Rather than its conventional association with the decorative and the adornment and fetishizing of women, the literary depiction of embroidery in the Escoufle gives rise to Aelis’s social mobility and financial sovereignty.12
Aelis’s social success is indeed rapidly achieved as she becomes quickly acquainted with the knights and nobles of Montpellier:
Ele a lués droit la grace eüe |
[Aelis] quickly received the favors |
Des chevaliers, des damoisiaus. |
Of knights, and of young noblemen. |
(vv. 5486–87) |
As a fictional bourgeois businesswoman, Aelis defies the ideological presuppositions of women’s proper role in medieval society. She enacts a new fate, albeit an imaginary one, for secular women who no longer need to be restricted to or constrained by marriage, heterosexuality, or the private arena; she inaugurates instead an innovative public, social, and lucrative space, that is also as we will see a cross-cultural one.
As she gains social status and prosperity, Aelis becomes like one of those autonomous literary single women in the Middle Ages, discussed by Krueger, who existed socially independent from a male protector (husband, father, lord, lover) and family supervision.13 Aelis’s independence and affluence are especially remarkable because luxury trade (such as that of silk and precious stones) was known to require not only skills but also investments, capital, and commercial organization, all more readily available to married and widowed women than to single women such as Aelis.14 Even though such practical details are missing from the romance, it appears that our heroine has sufficient available resources to set up her business, perhaps through the jewelry she had remembered to take along with her when she escaped from her father’s house in Rome (vv. 3790–95). The expendable wealth that Aelis brought with her functions similarly in the romance as the dowries that medieval women would have used to offset their business costs.
Aelis’s achievement leads both to increased social recognition and surprising financial prosperity. In fact, the narrator insists on how well remunerated Aelis is for her embroidery:
Il ne li donent pas a conte |
They do not give her money |
Les deniers; ml’t croist et engraigne, |
Sparingly; her extreme kindness |
Por ses joiaus et por s’ouvraigne, |
Increases and augments the wages |
Le loier sa grans gentelise. |
Of her precious stones and her business. |
Ne cuidiés pas c’on li eslise |
Do not even think that one can point to |
Mauvais argent quant on li done: |
Defective money when she is given any: |
Cascuns li baille et abandoune |
Everyone gives her and hands her |
De l’avoir tant com ele veut. |
As many riches as she wants. |
(vv. 5492–99) |
Aelis’s financial success firmly situates her work beyond the traditional medieval female domestic role of family food provider and beyond reproduction. It represents a fictive departure from what we know of women’s work in medieval towns. Sharon Farmer has indeed pointed out that in thirteenth-century Paris, most migrant women worked in the lowest paid sectors of the economy as domestic servants or unskilled laborers.15 Similarly, Kowaleski and Bennett, building upon the groundbreaking work of Marian K. Dale’s study of silk workers in fifteenth-century London, have argued that with the notable exception of female dominated guilds in Rouen, Paris, and Cologne, “most women in medieval towns worked as domestic servants, petty retailers, spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, and the like, all occupations never recognized as skilled, much less organized into gilds.”16 In the Escoufle, therefore, it is noteworthy that Aelis and Ysabel, two single women without a male connection to an established trade, are able to set up a successful private embroidery business, a business under their sole control, outside Paris, Rouen, or Cologne.17 As it crosses the borders between history and fiction, the Escoufle inaugurates an intriguing new fictional image of medieval business women.
As we admire Aelis’s skilled, prestigious, and lucrative craft, we must wonder why Aelis (in the above quotation) is paid more than the actual price of the services she renders and in what ways her “grans gentelise” (“extreme kindness,” v. 5495) augments her salary.18 A close reading reveals the textual ambiguity surrounding Aelis’s embroidery. It is curious indeed that the lines cited above that describe Aelis’s financially lucrative business lack any direct reference to needlework per se. Embroidery is only referred to implicitly through words like “ses joiaus” (vv. 5489, 5494) and “s’ouvraigne” (v. 5494). The reader might be tempted to interpret these words to mean Aelis’s embroidery, but in fact, they suggest other connotations. For, in addition to its conventional meaning of “luxurious gifts,” “jewels,” and “gems,” the word “joiaus” is a euphemism often used in fabliaux and farces to speak of “female genitalia” and sexual pleasure, while the word “ouvraigne” is conveniently general and refers to all sorts of trades, including the sexual business.19 As it describes Aelis’s business and social identity, the text therefore lays out the provocative possibility that if Aelis is highly successful, and if she is paid more than the actual value of her embroidery, it may well be because she renders services over and above her needlework. These services are her “joiaus” (both her needlework and sexual favors) that she shares to her clients’ liking (“C’est par son sens et ses joiaus / K’ele fait tex comme il devisent” [“Through her good manners and her jewels / Which she makes to their liking,”] vv. 5488–89) and that consequently increase her remuneration (v. 5493).
If the description of Aelis’s services provides an ambiguous amalgam of skillful needlework and implicit sexual favors, the embroidery workshop that Aelis establishes in Montpellier may well have served, as some did in the Middle Ages, as a high-end private prostitution salon.20 This interpretation corroborates what some medieval historians have revealed about the working conditions of urban women. In this regard, Sharon Farmer has noted that many migrant working women in thirteenth-century Paris had to supplement their meager income with wages from prostitution.21 Moreover, Shulamith Shahar has pointed out that, throughout the Middle Ages, women (and at times men) kept brothels camouflaged as embroidery workshops and that successful prostitutes received their clients in their own homes and did not work in brothels, in contrast to lower-class ones.22 The literary text opens us here a lens into medieval social practices, for we are permitted to interpret Aelis’s lavish and fictional privately owned embroidery business as an instance of these historically documented and clandestine sexual trades.
The sexual connotations of Aelis’s embroidery are also evident in the fact that for the first time in the romance, Aelis is referred to as “feme” (woman, wife) and no longer exclusively as she had been thus far, “pucele” (young girl, but increasingly virgin).23 The term “feme” (an amalgam of the Latin mulier and femina, wife and woman) is revealing of the social and sexual transformation that Aelis undergoes when she moves to Montpellier. To call Aelis a “feme” precisely at this moment in the romance is to point very explicitly to her changed sexual status. Certainly, the word “feme” had already been used to describe the moment of Aelis’s entry into the city, such as when the narrator pointed out that his heroine does not go unnoticed and that the public heralds her as the most beautiful woman in the kingdom (“la plus bele feme del raigne,” v. 5480). The usage of the word “feme” in this verse does not yet reflect the change in Aelis’s sexual state which will soon follow, since the term occurs in the context of an idiomatic expression.24 A few lines later, however, and while describing Aelis’s novel social space in Montpellier, the narrator calls her again “feme,” this time with a more definite sexual meaning:
Avuec le grant avoir qu’ele eut. |
Because of all the great wealth she received. |
N’iert il si boine feme lors. |
There was no better woman then. |
Sachiés que c’est uns bons tresors |
Know that a good, beautiful and prudent woman |
De bone feme, bele et preu. |
Is a great treasure. |
(vv. 5500–503) |
The use of the word “feme” twice in these lines is significant. While the term appears here in the context of what seems to be a proverb or an aphorism (vv. 5502–3), suggesting that Aelis’s social behavior is that of a good woman and fits within conventional morality, “feme” refers also very specifically to Aelis. And it is the specificity of its usage that lends support to the fact that the new social space created in Montpellier is one that has “initiated”25 Aelis’s sexual and social transformation from “pucele” to “feme.” While the Escoufle, like most medieval literary texts, is not absolutely consistent in the usage of these terms, and while the narrator will continue to waver between “feme” and “pucele” when referring to Aelis in the remainder of the romance, it is still worth noting that the turning point from “pucele” to “feme” occurs at a key moment in the romance, precisely at the establishment of the Montpellier household business and the description of the (sexual) services Aelis renders to men therein.
The intimate relation between clothing (embroidery) and prostitution was implicit already in the way Aelis and Ysabel had been described when they departed from Toul on their voyage across France. Examining once again the description of Ysabel’s dress reveals that it is depicted in precisely those terms that twelfth- and thirteenth-century preachers and theologians condemned as manifestations of luxury and inappropriate attachments to the material world. Maurice de Sully (bishop of Paris in the late twelfth century), Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, Dominicans Etienne de Bourbon, Humbert de Romans, Gilles d’Orléans, and the Franciscan Guibert de Tournai in the thirteenth century all echoed Tertullian’s fourth-century call to women in his Apparel of Women (De habitu muliebri and De cultu feminarum) to “cast away the ornaments of this world if we truly desire those of heaven.”26 They reiterated Tertullian’s condemnation of women’s expensive clothes and decorative adornment as signs of their moral ruin and lasciviousness. Maurice de Sully in particular blamed women who walked with heads lifted up in order to be seen: “Celes qui . . . vont comme grue a petit pas, chiere levee que l’en les voie, cestes sont fornaises ardanz de luxure et sont mariees au deable et enfers est leur doaires, et si font meint ardoir entor euls par le jeu de luxure” (“Those women who . . . walk face uplifted as to be seen, these women are burning fires of licentiousness married to the devil, with hell as their dowry. They make many around them burn through their lustful tricks”).27
The narrator of the Escoufle skillfully weaves history with fiction in his description of Ysabel’s clothes. Her ornate attire flaunts the physical and sexual delights that are associated with the devil and which lead directly to hell. Her two-tone gown and her wide skirt distressingly betray the prevalent “anxiety over the deceptive excesses of elite women’s trailing gowns.”28 Her clothing and luxurious adornments are especially dangerous because they obscure social differences and conceal the natural body underneath the seduction of lavish clothing. Finally, the fact that she and Aelis walk luxuriously dressed, without any disguise (they are not cross-dressed) and with their heads lifted without any shame, desiring to be seen, recalls precisely those elements that were severely condemned by medieval theologians.29 The two women display a pride that is to be castigated, as it draws them into the public eye and links them to prostitutes.
Embroidery (prostitution) is only one of the multiple services proposed in the Montpellier workshop which includes also a beauty/barber shop (vv. 5508–11) and a literary salon (vv. 5524–29). In fact, soon, the primary and official function of the business as an embroidery workshop competes with the implicit and equally important additional services it renders.
We must be careful not to interpret the two women’s involvement in several different crafts as demanded by their economic well-being and their survival,30 since Aelis’s embroidery business is financially lucrative and it seems clear that Aelis had readily available resources that allowed her to set up the business in the first place. Aelis and Ysabel do not engage in the additional occupations for financial necessity; rather, these tasks appropriately complement the implicit (sexual) work provided under the banner of embroidery.
In point of fact, Aelis’s hairwashing business ought not be considered such an outlandish addition to the Montpellier business as we might think at first reading:
Si vit de ce qu’ele desert |
She lived from what she earned |
A laver les chiés as haus homes. |
Washing the head (hair) of aristocratic men. |
Ainc puis celi dont vos disomes |
Since we told you her story |
Feme si bien ne lava chief. |
No woman ever washed heads (hair) as well. |
Trop savoit bien venir a chief |
She knew how to accomplish |
De tot quanque feme doit faire. |
Everything that a woman had to do. |
(vv. 5508–13) |
Like the sexually ambiguous embroidery business, hairwashing invites at least two competing interpretations. First of all, it is one of the multiple services rendered by barber shops in the Middle Ages. And there is evidence that women worked as barbers in medieval towns, as indicated in the thirteenth-century list and regulation of Parisian guilds contained in Etienne Boileau’s Livre des métiers.31
Even though the narrator of the Escoufle only mentions Aelis’s hairwashing skills, medieval barbers did more than just that. In the medieval West, (male) barbers occupied an intermediate position between university trained physicians (medicus) and rural practitioners and healers. The very existence of women barbers represents a key surviving evidence of the role that women healers played in men and women’s health care and medicine in the Middle Ages. These barbers tended to the physical needs of lay people in a more manual, practical way and were hence often associated with surgeons.32 They took care of the hair, performed dental work, bled and worked on the visible parts of a person’s body, since only the medicus, with his university training, could delve into and understand the inside of the body. It is not clear in the Escoufle what specific tasks Aelis performed in her barber shop, in addition to hairwashing. It is possible that she also acted as a female surgeon or healer. If so, the depiction of Aelis’s work in the hairwashing/barber business could evoke the unparalleled opening up to women of medical teaching and practicing opportunities in Montpellier, following Count Guilhem VIII’s famous 1180 edict that encouraged any foreigner to come and practice medicine in that city.33 The literary Aelis may have profited, as some medieval European women likely did, from being able to take over one of the lower-level occupations that (male) barbers and surgeons used to render (hairwashing), but quickly vacated, following Guilhem VIII’s edict, in favor of higher-level occupations in their upward move on the medicus professional ladder.
Yet, this interpretation of Aelis’s hairwashing is not the only one suggested by the above lines. The insistence with which the narrator describes Aelis’s skilled hairwashing (vv. 5510–11) and ability to do everything that a woman did (vv. 5512–13) highlights the ambiguity of the business she established. While no detail is given as to what constitutes “tot quanque feme doit faire” (v. 5513), we might infer that these activities are related to hairwashing. Interestingly, in the medieval West, barber-surgeons were not only associated with hairwashing, they also worked in tandem with bathhouses, which themselves were often a coverup for places of prostitution.34 In other words, Aelis’s beauty salon/barber shop maintains, if not confirms the overall (sexual) ambiguity of the embroidery business.
The sexual nature of Aelis’s trade is manifest even in the very decoration of her household. Shortly after describing Aelis’s skillful embroidery of silk and her much-appreciated hairwashing, the narrator points to the pleasure (“delit”) that her clients receive from the adornments of her house, a description that one might mistake at first for a gratuitous detail concerning the comforts of Aelis’s house:
. . . et si grant delit |
. . . and her counterpane and her bed |
Enbelissent ml’t son ostel. |
That embellished her house |
(vv. 5515–17) |
Brought great pleasure. |
The narrator mentions only the most intimate features of Aelis’s house, the counterpane and the bed, and he does so immediately following the description of the embroidery and hairwashing services that Aelis provides. This juxtaposition leads the reader to wonder of what consists the “delit” that is mentioned at this juncture. Are the bed and counterpane pleasurable in an aesthetic sense because they are lavishly embroidered, made of the finest silk and hence give expression to Aelis’s skillful embroidery? Or are they pleasurable in a more physical, sensual, and intimate sense because of the function they serve when the clients visit Aelis? These questions remain unanswered, heightening the reader’s overarching uncertainty about the exact function of Aelis’s Montpellier business.
Similarly, the third official branch of Aelis’s embroidery workshop confirms the overall (sexual) ambiguity of the urban business and demonstrates the extent to which the social and economic space that Aelis develops in Montpellier is a highly unusual one, especially when read from a Western perspective. Not only does the house become the fashionable meeting place of bourgeois and knights:
Ele ot lués droit tot le repaire |
[The house] soon became the home |
Des borjois et des chevaliers. |
Of the middle class and knights. |
(vv. 5482–83) |
but it also becomes a successful literary salon where the uppercrust comes to mingle, to play chess and various board games, as well as to enjoy the oral entertainment (tales and romances) provided by Aelis:35
She entertained them well |
|
Si lor contoit romans et contes; |
And told them romances and stories; |
Des autres gius n’estoit nus contes, |
The other games that are mentioned in the tale |
D’eschés, de tables et de dis. |
[are] chess, board games, dice. |
(vv. 5524–27) |
The addition of storytelling to the embroidery and overall sexuality of Aelis’s business brings to mind the intimate link between sewing, desiring, and singing developed by the corpus known as the chansons de toile which will be composed some thirty years later (the chansons de toile are dated 1228–50).36 But while the chansons de toile will estheticize the relation between sewing, desiring, and singing, making them the focus of a lyrical arrangement and displacing them to a courtly context, the Escoufle demonstrates that three decades prior to their poetic expression, these elements were already part and parcel of the genre of the realistic romance and may thus have also been manifestations of the urban existence of some European women at the turn of the thirteenth century.
Just as she excels in needlework and hairwashing, Aelis stands out as an accomplished hostess of her salon. In fact, Emmanuèle Baumgartner has observed that the embroidery business in the Escoufle extends far beyond mere survival; it is rather “a process of social seduction, the means of attracting the favors of knights and bourgeois, of triumphing over the indifference or disdain of the high nobility, of demonstrating perhaps that it is better to be a desired çainturiere rather than an ignored noble woman.”37 I will suggest that in the Escoufle, Aelis goes even further, for she successfully constructs a new type of social identity, one that transcends traditional categories of nobility and familiar occupations (çainturiere). Aelis becomes a financially independent çainturiere who displays the social status of a desired noble woman. The male clients she receives in her salon all belong to the noble or bourgeois classes, placing her at the center rather than at the margins of the most sophisticated social categories of her society.38 Aelis achieves this idiosyncratic social state through her expertise at entertaining men (“deduit,” v. 5524), at storytelling (v. 5528), as well as her embroidery and hairwashing skills.
Aelis’s new social identity is defined by a constant search for pleasure. Our heroine’s primary concern throughout the Escoufle is indeed to “plaire” which means both to please and to give (sexual) pleasure or satisfy (sexual) desires:39 “Or est en[ten]tive la bele / De faire quanqu’a gens doit plaire” (“The beautiful [girl] was careful / To do whatever pleased people,” vv. 5532–33). The ambiguity of Aelis’s business is reflected in the ambiguity of the pleasures derived from the services received therein. The reader remains utterly unable to distinguish the satisfaction of intellectual needs (hearing stories, playing games) or the pleasures of esthetic and material possession (embroidery, hair-washing) from the fulfillment of physical or erotic desires.40 What the narrator continuously insists upon nevertheless is the fact that Aelis’s Montpellier urban household becomes the space par excellence of pleasure:
Il n’avoit a Monpellier tel |
There were none in Montpellier |
Ne de soulas ne de deduit. |
Equal to it in comfort and delight. |
(vv. 5518–19) |
and a few lines later:
Son afaitement, son deduit |
Everyone who frequented her |
Prisent ml’t cil qui l’ont hantee. |
praises her courtesy and her conduct |
(vv. 5536–37) |
We recognize here the same polymorphous meanings of the words “soulas” and “deduit” that we encountered when discussing in the previous chapter the development of the friendly/erotic relationships between Aelis and the three main female characters of the Escoufle. The word “hantee” in the above citation sustains the ambiguity of the vocabulary of pleasure, since it means not only “those who frequented or visited Aelis” but also “those who had sexual intercourse with her.”41 Once again, the type of pleasure received in Aelis’s household remains highly ambiguous and implicitly erotic. Just as it was not possible to draw a clear distinction between friendship and same-sex desire in the context of Aelis’s liaisons with Ysabel, the lady of Montpellier, or the countess of Saint-Gilles (Chapter 4), it is challenging now to distinguish the professional from the private, the material possession of lavishly embroidered goods or the intellectual pleasures of a literary salon, or even the esthetics of a well-dressed hairdo from the more intimate pleasures offered on the luxurious bed of a courtesan.
If Ruth Mazo Karras’s assessment is correct, that in the Middle Ages “the sexually active single woman was viewed in quite narrow terms–indeed, defined as a prostitute,”42 then the sexual connotations of Aelis’s services can only be interpreted as a coverup for prostitution and her as a prostitute. However, it must be emphasized that even though Aelis’s fictional embroidery business stages multiple similarities with prostitution and even though her three-part business recalls that of a medieval prostitute, the character of Aelis escapes such easy social and sexual categorization. At no point in the romance is Aelis called “meretrix” which is the word used to refer to a professional prostitute in the Middle Ages; at no point does she receive payment solely for her sexual favors; and no mention is made of a commercial sort of (hetero)sexual activity. Any potentially compromising form of sexuality remains implicit in the text and carefully couched in the other official services that the business offers (embroidery, hairwashing, game playing, storytelling).43
In fact, while strongly inviting a sexual reading, the romance continuously resists such an interpretation. When Aelis wakes up to find that Guillaume is no longer by her side during their escape from Rome, she calls herself a “menestrel” (v. 4673) which can certainly mean a prostitute, but this meaning competes with the word’s other less sexual connotations (itinerant singer or entertainer).44 And Aelis herself struggles in that very scene to actively dissociate herself from any potential link with prostitution. For shortly after calling herself a “menestrel,” she encounters a young man who tries to help her. She realizes at this very moment that the light clothing she is wearing (because of the heat, Aelis had taken off her outer garments while Guillaume was still with her and she had not put them back on) renders her situation especially compromising to anyone who would see them thus. Aelis hurriedly pulls her clothes over her thinly clad body:
Por ce k’aucuns nes truist ensamble |
So that no one who would find them together |
Ki i notast mal ou folie, |
Would think it evil or lewd, |
Ele se rafuble et relie, |
She gets dressed and laces [her clothes] |
Ml’t plorant et pensive et morne. |
While crying, thinking, and feeling wretched. |
(vv. 4832–35) |
Aelis voices here the associations that the medieval audience would have made regarding single women without family or male protection. Such women become socially naked in the eyes of others, thus vulnerable to unfounded slander and associated with prostitutes and women of loose morals.45 With Guillaume’s disappearance, Aelis (in parallel to medieval single women or prostitutes) becomes visible; her social identity is threatened, and she becomes the potential victim of sexual violence and social blame. As she puts her clothes back on, Aelis literally conceals her social nakedness underneath a physical protective layer (her clothes) that affirms her honor and dissociates her from negative social categorization. While the narrator of the Escoufle warns us against equating single women (Aelis) with prostitutes in this scene, he teases us into making precisely this equation when reading Aelis’s three-part Montpellier business.
In contrast to Ysabel, who is the object of the narrator’s undisguised contempt, Aelis’s social situation on the other hand is more complex. It falls somewhere in the middle of the high (professional) and low end of prostitution, far from the margins that medieval prostitutes were known to inhabit. Aelis’s particular form of prostitution partly fits the category of “clandestine prostitution” which refers to those women who practiced on their own rather than in any officially recognized brothel.46 In this sense, Aelis may be considered a full-time professional (embroideress) and occasionally a prostitute. But quickly, the question of financial need complicates such simple categorization since Aelis as we saw does not need the additional income to survive.47
If Aelis is not a prostitute in a commercial sense and not quite a clandestine prostitute, she may be a “sinful woman,” similar to Mary Magdalen according to Karras’s categories of prostitution.48 This interpretation is particularly appealing because Aelis’s religious intentions are moot at best. She does not go to church often and when she does, it is more out of a desire to increase her social recognition than an internal love or fear of God (vv. 5504–7).49 But the category of “sinful woman” again becomes quickly inapplicable to Aelis who is soon thereafter praised for her beauty (v. 5480) and her wisdom (vv. 5596–5601). The reader’s temptation to interpret Aelis’s behavior univocally as that of a prostitute (professional, clandestine, or sinful) once again collapses.
Aelis’s Montpellier household business is not the sole sexually and socially ambiguous space that the heroine inhabits in the Escoufle. In fact, this social space and the complex social identity that Aelis acquires in the urban environment of medieval Montpellier give rise to a second equally alternative social arrangement. We will recall that in the romance, Aelis’s success in Montpellier leads to her acquaintance and “friendship” with the lady of Montpellier which in turn ushers her into the Saint-Gilles household. Invited there to become the countess’s “pucele” and “amie,” so that the countess could be “autel” (like) her husband, Aelis soon finds herself in the midst of a conspicuous social configuration. The exclusively female community which she had come to join quickly takes on novel traits, at least from a Western perspective. For contrary to what we might have expected, the count does not disappear from the romance, nor does he continue undisturbed his extramarital affair with the lady of Montpellier. Rather, he soon becomes an integral member of the all-female community of the countess’s entourage:50
Li cuens avoit une costume |
The count had a custom |
Qui li tournoit a grant deduit |
That brought him much pleasure. |
. . . . |
. . . . . |
En la cambre u sont les puceles; |
In the young girls’ room |
Si s’en va la jus avoec eles |
He goes and sits with them |
Mangier son fruit et aaisier. |
And eats his fruit and relaxes. |
(vv. 7016–23) |
The count regularly spends his evenings in the intimacy of the “puceles” quarters, and is said to derive pleasure (“deduit”) from their company. The use of the word “deduit” evokes the same ambiguity that characterized the alternative liaison between Aelis and Ysabel (Chapter 4), or between Aelis and her male clients in the Montpellier business discussed above. Just as it was not possible to discern the pleasures of female friendship from those of same-sex eroticism, it is equally impossible here to grasp the precise meaning of the count’s “deduit.” Such blurring of meanings places the count’s “pleasure” in the maidens’ company at the crossroads between casual friendship and sexual satisfaction. The count’s pleasure seems thus to be at once emotional, psychological, physical, and sensual.
Furthermore, and all the while evoking a gastronomical idiosyncracy, the count’s habit of eating his evening fruit (and pears specifically, as we are told, v. 7075) with the maidens invites a sexual reading of the scene, rendering it a literary heir to the prelapsarian moment of falling into sin. For the “pear” is often evoked in the Christian Middle Ages as a synonym for “apple,” the fruit of sin par excellence, such as in the contemporary Roman de la poire: “Des puis qu’Adan mordi la pome, / Ne fumes tel poire trovee” (“Never since Adam bit into the apple / has such a pear been found”).51 When we read in the Escoufle that the count derived pleasure from eating his evening pear in the maidens’ room, we are permitted to interpret this scene as indicating the inception of a new type of social structure within the economy of the text, where one (French) count obtains his pleasure (emotional and sexual) from the company of many women.
The sexual connotations of this scene and the role that Aelis plays therein become even more pronounced in the description of the remainder of the evening. This scene bears quoting in full:
Ml’t le savoit bien soulacier, |
The young beautiful Aelis |
La pucele bele Aelis. |
knew how to relax him well. |
(vv. 7024–25) |
|
Il se despoille por grater, |
He undresses in order to be scratched. |
Et n’i laisse riens a oster |
He removes everything |
Fors ses braies; nis sa chemise |
except his braies; the girl who surpasses |
Li a cele fors du dos mise |
the others with her beauty |
Ki les autres vaint de biauté: |
has removed his shirt from his back: |
I surcot qui n’est pas d’esté |
She dresses him with a winter coat |
Li revest por le froit qu’il doute. |
because of the cold that he fears. |
(vv. 7033–39) |
|
Ses soulas, ses deduis envoise |
[Aelis] charms with her tales and her entertainments |
Celes et ceus qui sont laiens; |
everyone who is there. |
(vv. 7044–45) |
|
Ele estoit toute desliie |
She was completely undressed: |
En i frés vair pliçon sans mances, |
She had a sleeveless fur-lined tunic |
[her arms] beautiful and fair |
|
De la chemise et bien tendans. |
[could be seen] from the shirt. |
Bien est rois qui ert atendans |
Whoever was privy to her love and her beauty |
A s’amor et a sa biauté. |
Can be considered a king. |
Ele a son destre bras geté |
She had placed her right arm |
Parmi l’emingaut du surcot |
under the collar of the count’s coat. |
Le conte, qui son cief li ot |
He had placed his head |
Mis par chierté en son devant. |
on her lap (bosom) out of affection (love) |
Que qu’il atent en deduisant |
while he waits for the fruit that is still not |
Le fruit qui n’ert encor pas cuis. |
cooked, enjoying himself. |
(vv. 7048–59) |
This scene tempts the reader into participating voyeuristically, along with the immediate audience of these lines (the countess and her puceles) in the intimate encounter between the count and Aelis.52 The latter, we are told, provides “ses soulas, ses deduis” not only to the count, her immediate partner in this scene, but also to all those present with them in the room (vv. 7044–45), including undoubtedly the medieval and contemporary audiences. Functioning as ocular witnesses to this bedroom encounter, each audience gazes at the central characters’ suggested nakedness,53 their intertwined positioning, and their ambiguous caresses. This scene is all the more titillating because it reverses the traditional hierarchy of (male) gaze and attending scopic pleasure. Here, the inscribed audience is made solely of women and it is they, rather than men, who are placed in the active position of gazing at the intimate couple. The (adulterous) heterosexual couple is henceforth reduced to the level of object of the female gaze and pleasure (v. 7044). By making the countess herself and at least two different audiences (an intra- and an extradiegetic one) from two different time periods (the Middle Ages and today) privy to this intimate scene, and by moving the private moment into the public eye, the narrator depicts a highly unusual social space within the medieval Western literary tradition. As we will see shortly, however, this scene is strongly reminiscent of common social interactions in the Arab Islamicate world, notably those taking place within the harem.
Equally important, the theatricalization of the intimate heterosexual encounter between the count and Aelis constitutes an early manifestation of “lesbian ghosting.”54 For all the while participating in the count’s “deduit,” the eye of the spectator is directed away from the figural center toward the spectral; that is, the other liaison staged outside the visual field. If the “figural” here is the heterosexual relation, the “spectral” is made up of the erotic union between Aelis and the countess of Saint-Gilles that I discussed in Chapter 4. This lesbian relation, known only to the female intradiegetic audience and the careful reader of the Escoufle, might be visibly absent from this particular scene, yet it is always present in the text and in the memory of the reader. The narrator skillfully displaces the visible part of the scene and urges us to do and undo representation by confronting the invisible. As a consequence, the audience must continuously negotiate between the visible and the invisible, the represented and the nonrepresented, the figural and the spectral. The heterosexual scene may hence be read as a visual erotic space in which the lesbian relation is at once visibly and invisibly spatialized. If the heterosexual relation is the only one that could be safely staged here, the lesbian relation constitutes nevertheless the most important extrascenic element that informs our reading of this scene. Aelis emerges clearly as a medieval example of the “ghost effect” analyzed by Terry Castle; she is “elusive, vaporous, difficult to spot–even when she is there in plain view, mortal and magnificient, at the center of the screen.”55 In the Escoufle, lesbianism is omnipresent at the very moment of its erasure from the text.
This scene allows the contemporary reader a rare glimpse into medieval intimate encounters, a look at an erotic space that is not exclusively heterosexual, if only because of the casual presence of a majority of women in the room.56 The portrayal of the count surrounded by several women (we do not know their exact number) and caressed by only one of them, the one judged by all to be the most beautiful one, while his lawful wife seems to be happily relegated to the margins along with her puceles as passive witnesses to the pleasurable scene, is astounding to say the least. And yet, the narrator describes this scene nonchalantly, as though the household is used to such encounters, if only since Aelis’s arrival in their midst.
Not least, this scene is unusual in the narrative economy of medieval (courtly) romance, because it runs counter to what medieval male clerics condemned for being a source of marital disharmony and social disorder. Aelis’s caressing of the count seems indeed to enact the “intolerable evil,” precisely that which one of the most influential clerics of the thirteenth century (Jacques de Vitry, d. 1240) feared in female maidservants, namely, of stealing her lord’s affection from his legitimate wife. Likewise, the count seems to personify one of those “miserable men” who “are exceedingly infected with this crime,” that is of putting their maids before their wives.57 The scene between Aelis and the count enacts therefore the threat that the introduction of female maidservants was thought to pose to medieval household stability, and it underscores male clerical anxiety about such practice.
This interpretation must be qualified, however. For the presence of Aelis in the Saint-Gilles household does not seem to have created marital instability. To the contrary, her entry into the Saint-Gilles household served to “cure” the count of his adulterous liaison with the lady of Montpellier, as well as to dispel the moral ambiguity of this affair. Coinciding indeed with Aelis’s move to Saint-Gilles is the narrative closure of the tale of illicit love between the count of Saint-Gilles and the lady of Montpellier (this relationship is completely silenced in the remainder of the romance). Aelis’s arrival has also replaced the adultery outside the home with an adultery within the home, perceived to be somehow less threatening because it institutes an unexpected harmony between the couple.
What results from the preceding discussion is that Aelis’s social function does not become clearer after her move from Montpellier to Saint-Gilles. The social space that Aelis creates in Montpellier and in the Saint-Gilles household is not a new “integration into the collective” as Danielle Régnier-Bohler has suggested; it is not simply a reconstruction of the old structure, a new gynecaeum.58 It is rather a new construction, a reconfiguration of the private and social spaces characteristic both of medieval Western European society and of French romance. Aelis’s situation and living arrangements in Montpellier and Saint-Gilles demonstrate a level of female sexual, economic, and social autonomy far beyond those of female characters depicted in other courtly and realistic romances of the period.
Aelis’s literary depiction further demonstrates that the status of unmarried, independent women living and working by themselves in medieval towns without any male control escaped easy categorization. In fact, there may have been no place and no name in medieval Western European literary culture for a single woman who is no longer a virgin, who is involved in a same-sex relation with another woman, and who continues to maintain erotically suspicious liaisons with men. She resembles a prostitute, yet is not associated with the conventional traits of prostitutes. Karras’s remark that sexually active single women were viewed “in quite narrow terms” in the Middle Ages and quickly collapsed with prostitutes aptly applies to Aelis at the same time that this character escapes such a univocal characterization.59
Aelis’s social identity is full of paradoxes. First, Aelis lives as a business-woman in a large city (Montpellier), yet, she does not appear to subsist fully in an urban environment; rather, her lifestyle mirrors that of aristocratic courtly ladies as well as their occupations. Second, she is involved in a same-sex relation with Ysabel as I demonstrated (Chapter 4), yet she remains at the heart of her (heterosexual) household-court as a desired domna. Third, Aelis lives as a single woman (with Ysabel), thus outside established social norms and independent of male or family control, yet no one attempts to control her sexuality or her behavior. Fourth, she is independent, prosperous, and she receives men in her house; yet she is not described as a marginal woman and her house is not located at the periphery of society, but at its center. She is independent, creative, displays many “manly” characteristics;60 yet the romance emphasizes her femininity through the focus on sewing and playing of amorous (erotic) games.61 In this sense, Aelis maintains the gender tension already portrayed through Chrétien de Troyes’s female characters (the unmarried ones in particular) who are depicted at once as “privileged and displaced, subject and object.”62 But Aelis also expands this gender tension into what we might call a “social tension” which is a space at the crossroads of court and city, where she is both a single desiring woman and a desired beloved (a domna), an aristocratic lady and a businesswoman, a heterosexual prostitute and a lesbian lover. Even as the romance entices us to read fiction as history, it undermines the discourses of history with their established clerical systems of classification and their promotion of a monocultural social identity. The questions posed by the romance are: Who is Aelis? Where does she fit in the medieval Western social fabric? If these questions remain unanswered when the Escoufle is read solely from a Western perspective, new interpretations emerge when we examine Aelis’s social identity through the lens of medieval Islamicate sociocultural traditions.
If Aelis’s social standing as it is depicted in both Montpellier and Saint-Gilles is innovative in the context of medieval Western literature and society, it acquires a new meaning when read against the backdrop of Arab Islamicate urban culture and social customs. Aelis’s household in Montpellier and the complex amalgam of activities she engages in both there and in Saint-Gilles are strongly reminiscent of three Middle Eastern cultural and literary traditions, all intimately tied to silk clothing and gold embroidery, namely, the traditions of zarf (courtliness), of qaynas (singing slave-girls), and of homosexual refinement. These three cultural practices are important because they demonstrate the significant role that some women from the Middle East and Islamicate cultures (slave-girls especially) played in the public sphere, in the development of the literary and artistic sensibility of their society, and to some extent also in the economic and political dealings of their times.63 I will begin by describing each of these practices in order to show the extent to which the social spaces that Aelis inhabits in the Escoufle may in fact be read as Western literary reconstructions and hybridizations of these Islamicate sociocultural traditions.
Zarf has been commonly translated as “refinement,” “stylishness,” or “courtliness.” It is a cultural practice that began in Medina (Saudi Arabia) during the pre-Islamic and Umayyad eras, spread to the urban centers of Baghdad under the Abbasids from the eighth to the tenth century, and extended to the Islamic caliphate of Spain (al-Andalus) in Córdoba and Seville during the reign of the party-kings in the tenth century. This tradition promoted a nexus of behaviors that included an overarching sophistication at the levels of clothing, gastronomy, language, home decoration, as well as an intellectual atmosphere in which participants engaged in debates related to love, recitation of poetry, singing, dance, and storytelling. It was also a tradition that encouraged the development and circulation of the literature of mujun or libertinage that I have discussed in Chapter 1. Women, and especially slave-women (jariya, pl. jawari), played an especially prominent role in zarf through the literary salons that they held and to which they invited not only members of the aristocracy, but increasingly also the wealthy bourgeoisie, enriched by trade and international commerce.64
Much has been written on the development of zarf throughout the Islamicate world. The most important source of our knowledge of this movement remains undoubtedly Kitab al-zarf wa al-zurafa’ (Book of Refinement and of Refined People), also known as Kitab al-muwashsha’ composed by a tenth-century grammarian from Baghdad, Mohammed Ibn al-Washsha’ (d. 936).65 In it, he describes at length how the zurafas (refined, courtly men) and mutazarrifat (refined, courtly ladies), those who subscribe to zarf behavior, adorn their homes with poetry that is sculpted on their house entrance doors, windows, ceilings, beds, tables, and sofas or use verses that have been luxuriously embroidered with gold and precious stones to decorate pillows, curtains, clothing, belts, rings, and even shoes. Throughout the Middle Ages, some women pushed the embroidery fashion so far as to use their own body as cloth. They thus painted a few lines of poetry with henna or a mixture of perfumes around their necks, on their feet, on their hands or on their cheeks.66 Ibn al-Washsha’ gives in his treatise a few famous examples of the types of verses sculpted by zurafas on apples: “I come from the lover (male or female) / and I am given to the (male or female) friend.”67 Another famous example derives from Princess Wallada (d. 1087 or 1091; daughter of Umayyad caliph al-Mustakfi in Muslim Spain) who unquestionably stands as the prototype of the unparalleled refinement of the Andalusian aristocracy in the eleventh century, of women’s emancipation therein, and unsuspected sexual freedom. Wallada openly entertained two male lovers (Ibn Zaydun and Ibn `Abdus) and one female lover (Mohja) and had the following two verses embroidered with gold thread on either side of her coat collar: “By God, I am fit for greatness, and stride along with great pride” and “I allow my lover to reach my cheek, and I grant my kiss to him who craves it.”68
Without overgeneralizing the particular case of Wallada and the degree of women’s social and sexual freedom in medieval Islamicate societies, it remains clear nevertheless that Middle Eastern women played a significant role in the development of zarf, of courtly customs and good manners not only within the Arabian peninsula and at the Abbasid courts in Iraq but also without, expanding the tradition of zarf to all major cities of the medieval Islamicate world in the East and in the West (Seville and Granada). Some of these women belonged to the Umayyad aristocracy, such as Sukayna Bint al-Husayn (d. 744), granddaughter of the Prophet, or Aisha Bint Talha (d. 718).69 Both were famed for their extraordinary beauty, sharp intelligence, and quick wit. Both married multiple times, and were actively involved in politics and poetry. In addition, both were at the center of literary salons and of aristocratic courts and led discussions on astronomy, history, literature, and fashion, as well as religious matters. Some historians even report that these women pronounced judgments in matters of love and that their literary salons functioned in ways similar to those that will be headed four centuries later in France by Marie de Champagne and described by Andreas Capellanus.70
Most of the information about the mutazarrifat, those women promoting zarf and engaged in its growth and development, concerns slave-girls (jawari), and especially singing slave-girls, or qaynas. In his famous Risalat al-qiyan (Epistle on Singing-Girls), al-Jahiz (d. 868) defends the tradition of owning slave-singers by tracing the important role they played in the pre-Islamic era through the rise of Islam and the Prophet’s time.71 The origin of zarf and of literary salons, according to al-Jahiz, is to be found in the tradition of ziyarat (visitations), when men and women met to discuss various matters. During the ziyarat, “there was no veil between men and women. And since the veil did not exist, men and women did not just look at each other stealthily, but came together to discuss and stayed late together.”72 Al-Jahiz also notes, “the gaze they exchanged was not considered shameful or illicit during the pre-Islamic era or under Islam.”73
Some of the most successful singing slave-girls (qaynas) have left traces in the historical records of the period. A few were prominent poets of the Abbasid period in Basra (Iraq), the most trustworthy transmitters of the oral repertoire, and the most accomplished performers and entertainers. At times, they even had their own singing schools and owned slaves.74 The best known remain undoubtedly the three leading slave-girls of the Abbasid period, namely, `Inan (d. 841), Fadl (d. 875), and `Arib (d. 890), all of whom are cited in Abbasid historian, poet, and musicologist Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s (897–972) tenth-century Kitab al-aghani (Book of Songs).75 `Inan, according to al-Isfahani, was a slave-girl raised and educated in Saudi Arabia. Not only was she beautiful, but she was “well educated, a good poet, and quick witted. She vied and contended with the master (male) poets of the period and she could hold her own among them.”76 Similarly, Fadl al-Sha`ira, or Fadl “the Poetess,” was “considered to be the epitome of beauty, [who] set the standards for Arab singers for centuries to come,” and she held her own literary salon till her death.77 This is how Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani depicts her: Fadl “was beautiful physically and in demeanor; she was well versed in literature, eloquent, notable for her quick, witty answers. She was accurate in her poetry rendering and there was no other woman poet who surpassed her in poetic eloquence.”78 Kitab al-aghani describes `Arib, one of the most famous poets, performers, and music instructors of the Abbasid period, in strikingly similar terms: “`Arib was a skilled singer, and a good poetess. She was a good calligrapher, was well-spoken, and possessed the utmost in loveliness, beauty, and gracefulness. She had a beautiful figure, was an excellent lutenist, and reached perfection in craft [of composition], knowledge of the modal system [modes and strings] and in the narration of poetry and literature.”79 In the pages devoted to her in Kitab al-aghani, `Arib is also praised for her skills at chess and backgammon, and she is identified as one of the prominent ghulamiyyat in al-Amin’s Abbassid court (r. 809–13).80
Qaynas were not only literate, extremely well-educated slave-singers, they were also especially appreciated for the multiple pleasures they brought their audiences, and for the stimulation of three specific senses: sight, hearing, and touch. Al-Jahiz writes:
Don’t they offer men a variety of pleasures not combined anywhere else? . . . As soon as we discuss slave-singers, we note that three senses are associated, [and this without taking into account] the heart which is the fourth. [These are]: sight and [the pleasure of] gazing at a beautiful and desirable slave; . . . hearing and the pleasure of he who without any trouble enjoys alone the pleasure brought upon by the musical instrument; touch and the sexual desire as well as the desire for bah [sexual intercourse]. As soon as the qayna begins to sing out loud, all eyes turn to her intensely, all ears turn towards her. . . . Any intercourse with slave-singers is associated with the greatest seductive danger.81
Qaynas (like Japanese geishas and Greek hetaira) were educated to provide entertainment through various skills: music (singing, composition, performing on a musical instrument), dancing, storytelling, and sexual pleasure. Eroticism was considered to be an integral part of the education of a qayna and was given equal attention as music or intellectual skills. In fact, al-Jahiz goes so far as to assert that the lack of chastity is an integral part of the character of a qayna, of her education and her business.82
Intellectual skills and game playing were also essential to a qayna’s repertoire, for the more skills she had, the more diverse the pleasures she could offer, and the more highly prized she was. The best-known literary qayna is undoubtedly the slave-girl Tawaddud (Showing Winning Love), also known as “Sympathy the Learned,” eminent heroine of a tale from the One Thousand and One Nights.83 In this story, the slave-girl is legendary not only for her beauty, singing skills, and game playing, but also and especially for her knowledge of all the known sciences of the time, including grammar, poetry, music, religious law, theology, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and medicine. This qayna is depicted excelling in scholarly discussions and surpassing the knowledge of (male) scholars patronized by the court. What Arab and Muslim historical and fictive women such as Tawaddud, `Arib, ` Inan, Fadl, and others like them demonstrate is that singing slave-girls were not only defined by their sexuality, but were also well-educated young women, gifted poets, composers, and performers who became the great artists of their period and the repositories of its oral tradition. The role and function of qaynas resonate clearly with Aelis’s sexually ambiguous Montpellier business. The social space in which Aelis evolves recalls that which qaynas inhabit, while not being reducible to it, as we will see shortly.
Qaynas participated actively in the literary salons of their period, or what in Arabic is called majliss (plural majalis). In Arabic, the term majliss has an added specific meaning that highlights the pleasure taken in intellectual debates and sensual encounters. Fatima Mernissi defines majliss as follows: “The word majliss comes from the verb jalasa, which means to sit down with the idea of relaxing motionless for some time, for the sake of pure enjoyment. The word majliss means a group of people with similar interests who meet in an attractive place, such as a garden or a terrace, for the sheer pleasure of conversing together and having a good time.”84 George Dimitri Sawa, in his study on music performance in the early Abbassid era specifies that the pleasure of the majliss was the pleasure of learning together, and contributing to “discussions and debates on music, history, theory, criticism, and aesthetics.”85 It is precisely the pleasure, sensuality, and intellectual atmosphere that permeated these majalis that echo in Aelis’s embroidery business/literary salon in Montpellier.
Slave-singers, despite (or rather, because of) their social status as slaves, played a significant role in the medieval Islamicate world not only because they were freer to express themselves (in contrast to freeborn women), but also because of their superior intellectual skills and extraordinary beauty. Freed slaves especially could potentially achieve lucrative careers; some in fact rose to the top levels of society, marrying caliphs and kings.86 In other words, and despite the well-rehearsed legal and religious prohibitions against Muslim women circulating in public urban spaces, one of the greatest achievements of medieval Muslim women lies precisely in their ability to circulate simultaneously in the private and public spheres and hence to cross socioeconomic borders. A slave-woman could gain financial means, prestige, and at times even respectability through her beauty, poetic and intellectual skills, and especially through her ability to conceive (umm walad). She could become part of a ruler’s harem which was considered to be a promotion in Islamicate society, since it is often from within the harem that many women exerted considerable sovereignty.87 It is thus misleading to read the harem (from an Orientalist and Western perspective) exclusively as a space of confinement and of subordination for women in medieval Islamicate societies. Without promoting the return of the harem or denying the obvious injurious connotations of such a cultural practice, it must nevertheless be recognized that within the context of the medieval Islamicate world, the harem was for many women also the space of social promotion, liberation, and political agency.
The most significant example of a slave who came to occupy politically and socially powerful positions from within the harem is undoubtedly that of Shajarrat al-Durr (d. 1259) or “Tree of Pearls,” concubine of al-Malik al-Salih Ayyub, the last Ayyubid ruler of Egypt in the middle of the thirteenth century. After giving him a son, he gave her freedom, and she was pronounced Sultana of Egypt in 1249. She took on two titles: “Ismat al-dunya wa al-din” (“the Blessed of the earthly world and of the faith”) and “Umm Khalil” (“Mother of Khalil,” her son who died in infancy).88 She may have ruled Egypt for only four months (November 1249 to February 1250), but her rule marked the official demise of the Ayyubids and the establishment of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt which was to last for more than two centuries in Egypt and Syria (it would end only with the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1516). In the few months that Shajarrat al-Durr was sultana of Egypt, she had coins minted in her name and the Friday khutba (sermon) pronounced in her glory: “May Allah protect the Beneficent One, Queen of the Muslims, the Blessed of the Earthly World and of the Faith, the Mother of Khalil al-Musta`simiyya, the Companion of Sultan al-Malik al-Salih.”89 No official document left the palace without her signature.
Shajarrat al-Durr is best remembered for the unprecedented role that she played in the sixth crusade. When her first husband, al-Malik al-Salih Ayyub died on November 23, 1249, Shajarrat al-Durr concealed his death while waiting for the recall of her son and heir, Turanshah, from Iraq. She forged the late sultan’s signature on official documents in order to maintain political and military stability. She defeated the French king, Saint-Louis, on February 19, 1250, at Mansura and ransomed him for one million bezants. Shajarrat al-Durr put an end to the crusaders’ presence in Egypt, regained Damietta, and restored peace in Egypt. Yet, despite the extraordinary position she held in both Egyptian, Mediterranean, Western, and world political history, Shajarrat al-Durr’s role has been downplayed by both Western and Arab chroniclers.90
In her Forgotten Queens of Islam, Fatima Mernissi has shown how the qaynas’ intellectual proficiency not only permitted some to “climb the social ladder, but also raise their value in the slave market, and thereby subvert the ruling male hierarchy altogether.”91 And indeed it was the qaynas’ beauty and intellectual skills that determined their price. Functioning as veritable commercial commodities and as “symbols of status,” they were equivalent to “fine copies of the Quran, silk gowns, rare perfumes and crafted hilts.”92 Not surprisingly, some drew exorbitant prices. According to Jamal Eddine Bencheikh, a contemporary critic, the price of a first-class qayna in the eleventh century was 3,000 dinars. This sum is meaningful when compared to the yearly pension of a famous poet (such as Andalusian Ibn Zaydun, d. 1070), which was 500 dinars, and the daily salary of a construction worker (one dinar).93 Some qaynas, such as Hubsiyya, `Awm’s slave, drew 120,000 dinars.94 Finally, al-Ma’mun, Harun al-Rashid’s son and future caliph of Baghdad, did not hesitate to pay 1,000 dinars for a slave who was not only eloquent, and skilled in music and poetry, but who was also a superior chess player. For al-Ma’mun, playing chess sharpened his mind and prepared him for war, but playing chess with a woman had an added sensual pleasure that allowed him to combine the delights of the body with those of the mind and soul.95
The transfer of the zarf tradition from Saudi Arabia to Baghdad and later to al-Andalus is associated with qaynas, slaves, and the exchange of human gifts between ruling monarchs of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and the Umayyads in Islamic Spain. Such is the case of Qamar, a singing slave-girl bought in the Middle East and sent as a gift for Prince Ibrahim al-Haggag of Seville. She played an important role in the transmission of sophisticated courtly etiquette, refined conduct, and good manners from the Islamicate East to the Islamicate West.96
In addition, the development of zarf in the Islamicate courts of Spain cannot be dissociated from the fierce desire of Andalusian courts to emulate and surpass the artistic, intellectual, and courtly achievements of their Baghdadi counterparts, as well as their social, military, and political successes.97 Already since the ninth century, when the Iberian peninsula was becoming a refined urban society, Andalusian princes were prepared to pay any price to ensure that their own courts could compete with the most sophisticated ones in the East. And this is precisely what Abd al-Rahman II (822–52) did when he invited Baghdadi singer and musician Ziryab (d. 857) to introduce to his Córdoban court the ideals of zarf and to launch new fashions and new etiquettes in the areas of gastronomy, clothing, poetry, and music.98 Ziryab is also credited for opening the first beauty salon in Córdoba where he taught new hairstyles and makeup and encouraged the use of toothpaste. Córdoban society thus learned everything that was fashionable in rival Abbasid courts. “Until his death in 857, [Ziryab] was an important influence in the transmission of Eastern Islamic culture to the outpost of Western Islam in al-Andalus.”99 His extraordinary achievements were continued by his daughter Hamduna who became a famous Andalusian singer and taught music.
As should be evident by now, the Arabic tradition of zarf is not a set of behaviors that defines a specific social class, but rather it cuts across all social classes: it characterizes some members of the aristocracy as it does singing slave-girls. It is not gender specific as it may be practiced by men as well as women. Finally, it is not exclusive to heterosexual relations but is regularly observed by (male) homosexuals as well, as Ahmad al-Tifashi describes in his famous thirteenth-century erotic treatise, The Delight of Hearts: “To have an elegant house that is for his own use only and of which he safely keeps the key. He must then place cages full of doves, cages full of birds which fly and sing gracefully. He will also place a chess board, books of poetry and of passionate love stories, volumes of illustrated legends and works on magic.”100
The (male) homosexual, according to al-Tifashi, possesses and creates a private space in which intellectual and esthetic pleasures dominate. Not only does his house harbor volumes of literature, of (pseudo-)science (magic), of chessboard games, but it also rings of the music of birdsong, thus deepening the overall sensory pleasures of the space. Although the word zarf is not used throughout this description of the main traits of the homosexual, the details provided correspond nevertheless to the elegance, refinement, and sophistication inherent to the tradition of zarf described above, indicating that in the Arabic literary tradition, the (male) homosexual is a zarif by definition. In addition, because zarf is a code of conduct that is followed both by men (zurafas) and women (be they mutazarrifat, qaynas, or ghulamiyyat), we may argue that medieval Arab courtly ladies were at times also lesbians; in other words, it is likely that mutazarrifat, like qaynas and ghulamiyyat, lived in homes decorated with a similar taste to that of elegant men (zurafas), and that they evolved in private quarters filled with the same sensory and intellectual pleasures as those of the male homosexuals depicted by al-Tifashi.101
Rereading the development of Aelis’s urban embroidery business against the backdrop of the zarf tradition, of qaynas, and of (male and female) homosexual refinement is very useful because it permits us to better understand how the Arabic tradition of courtly manners becomes rewritten by Western hands. Let us begin by noting the remarkable parallels between the adornment of Aelis’s Montpellier residence and that which characterizes the dwellings of zurafas and homosexuals in the Arabic tradition. Even though The Delight of Hearts depicts the home of a male homosexual, the Escoufle reproduces much of its decorative features but situates it in the context of a lesbian household. Like the home of a typical zarif or mutazarrifa in the Islamicate literary tradition, Aelis’s household displays extraordinary elegance, both physical and intellectual. Not only does it echo of storytelling (vv. 5524–27), it even has birdcages hanging from the windows, just like the domicile of the homosexual zarif in the Arabic tradition:
En bien vii kages ou en viii |
Seven or eight birdcages |
Pendent li oisel as fenestres. |
Hang from her windows. |
(vv. 5520–21) |
In addition, Aelis’s quarters provide entertainment to her guests/clients, consisting of various games, including chess: “D’eschés, de tables et de dis” (“chess, board games, dice,” v. 5527). The reference to chess in the context of Aelis’s Montpellier cross-cultural business is especially important as it highlights once again the integral role that Arabic material culture played in the medieval West. Not only is chess present in the description of the house of the homosexual as described by al-Tifashi, but chess is also known to have been a game in which ghulamiyyat excelled in the medieval Islamicate tradition.102 Equally significant is the fact that chess was a game that reached Western Europe precisely from its contacts with the Arabs and Muslims in the eighth century. Originally an importation from the Far East, chess was introduced first to Persia in 650 A.D., and with the spread of Islam, it reached North Africa and Spain (711) and penetrated into France during the military campaigns between the Moors and Charles Martel (688–741).103 The presence of chess in Aelis’s household (like that of silk) signals therefore the transfer of cultural traditions from the Far and Middle East to the West, as well as the integration of Arabic social customs (zarf, ghulamiyyat, qaynas, lesbian or lesbian-like courtly manners) within French romance.
Furthermore, the services that Aelis provides in her new business bear revealing resonances with those of the qaynas, even though Aelis is neither a slave nor a singer. Yet, her extraordinary beauty, her storytelling abilities that invite everyone to listen to her, the cost of her services, and the overall eroticism of the business suggest a salon that attempts to emulate those of the medieval Middle East or al-Andalus. Even Aelis’s hairwashing services call to mind the graciousness of Middle Eastern beauty salons (perhaps such as those inaugurated by Ziryab in Córboba), rather than the services provided by lower-class women in France at the time. Hairwashing in the context of the Escoufle is associated with the elegance, the refinement typical of mutazarrifat, giving Aelis’s business the prestige of Middle Eastern Islamicate culture and sophistication.
Aelis occupies a social function in Montpellier intriguingly reminiscent of that of qaynas or of aristocratic mutazarrifat in medieval Islamicate culture. Her literary salon entertains, gives pleasure, and privileges the three senses that are the hallmark of the qaynas’ sphere of activity. Aelis indeed provides visual pleasure since all those present delight in the contemplation of her beauty:
Et cil cui si bel oel ravisent |
And those whom her eyes notice |
Cuident ester ml’t plus que conte. |
Consider themselves better than counts. |
(vv. 5490–91) |
Aelis also treats her clients to the joys of touch not only through her embroidery but also through her hairwashing services:
Ainc puis celi dont vos disomes |
Since we told you her story |
No woman ever washed heads (hair) as well. |
|
(vv. 5510–11) |
Finally, similar to a Western Scheherazade who elevates the pleasures from storytelling to the level of sexual fulfillment,104 Aelis offers her audience auditory (and sexual) gratification through her captivating storytelling skills:
Tant lor disoit de ses biax dis |
She told them so many of her beautiful stories |
Que tos les fait a li entendre. |
That she made them trust her. |
(vv. 5528–29) |
While the character of Aelis shows multiple parallels to that of qaynas, we must be careful not to reduce her to this category. Perhaps the most important distinction (in addition to the fact once again that Aelis is neither a slave nor a singer) is that qaynas always worked for a master and brought financial advantages and social prestige to someone else. Aelis on the other hand, it must be emphasized, is independent; she works for herself and is her own mistress. In addition, Aelis’s Montpellier business, even as it mirrors the cultural and social activities that characterize qaynas and mutazarrifat, remains an adulterated form of zarf, if only because the erotic meaning of her work remains implicit throughout.
We may thus say that while Aelis is unlike traditional medieval Western courtly ladies, and unlike medieval European working urban women or prostitutes as I showed above, she is not reproducing Islamicate social traditions either (be it that of mutazarrifat, qaynas, or female homosexuals). Rather, she takes elements from both Eastern and Western traditions and stands as an original example of a new cross-cultural social category, one that combines the social standing and refinement of some women in the Islamicate world with some of the stereotypes of the courtly lady. She emerges as neither one nor the other but gives a new meaning to both.
Rereading the Escoufle through the lens of Arabic literature, culture, and social customs permits us to shed new light on the unusual social space created by Aelis’s move to the Saint-Gilles household. Just as it was possible to reinterpret Aelis’s prostitution-like activities in terms of a well-established, fashionable, respected, and most often successful Middle Eastern social category (the qaynas and mutazarrifat), I would like to propose a rereading of Aelis’s involvement in the Saint-Gilles household not just as a sinful act by an evil maidservant who steals the affections of a husband from his lawfully wedded wife (as Western clerics would have it), but rather as a manifestation of Western fantasies and reconstruction of an Eastern harem in the midst of Western society. For after all, the scene in the Saint-Gilles household that I examined above, namely, the portrayal of one man (the count of Saint-Gilles) involved in an explicitly sexual encounter with one woman (Aelis), under the happy and blissful gaze of many other women, immediately brings to mind the Eastern harem, at least as construed by the (medieval and contemporary) Western European imagination.105
It is no exaggeration to say that the Oriental harem represents one of the West’s most recurring fantasies of the East. At the same time, the harem, still today, remains the least understood social structure of the Arab Islamicate world. In medieval French literature, representations of harems often occur in texts that promote an ideology of religious crusade and feudal conquest. Sharon Kinoshita has shown how the Eastern harem was rewritten by Western (male) authors as an earthly heaven, with all the lure of Saracen exoticism which tempted (male) heroes with “stasis and luxurious abandon.”106 Medieval French texts that incorporate a harem within their narrative most often describe the series of obstacles that (male) heroes have to penetrate and overcome in order to reach and save their beloved from an all-powerful polygamous husband (La Prise d’Orange and Floire and Blancheflor being perhaps two of the best-known examples). These French literary texts usually end with the reunification of the lovers and the conversion of the Saracen (oftentimes the woman, but not always) to Christianity. The Saint-Gilles household, it must be pointed out, does not describe such a harem, and the episode between the count and Aelis is divorced from the ideology of crusade and conversion that typically accompanies depictions of harems in Old French texts.107
The Saint-Gilles household differs also substantially from historically documented Middle Eastern harems. In Arabic, the term harem literally means that which is forbidden; it has quickly come to refer to the social space in which women were enclosed and by extension to the physical area of the household that was set off as a distinctly female space and occupied by wives, concubines, female relatives, and female servants. If in the West such a space was quickly imagined to be the very site of eroticism, of luxury, as well as of lesbian sexualities, and was cited as the “living” proof both of Islamic backwardness and of the subordination of Muslim women, such a perspective does not correspond to recent scholarly findings, as we saw earlier.
It is clear that neither the Old French view of the harem with its crusader ideology nor the potentially liberating perspective of the harem fully corresponds to the scene in the Saint-Gilles household portrayed in the Escoufle. For once again, what we have in the Escoufle is not an Eastern harem per se, but rather, I submit, an Eastern harem as imagined by the medieval West. The Saint-Gilles household proposes an intriguing new and creative construction that does not rely on the crusading/conversion associations that we are accustomed to from other Old French texts. It is novel also because it differs from the Western tradition of concubinage which was viewed with increasing ambivalence by church fathers since Augustine and well into the sixteenth century. If at times concubinage was tolerated by some canonists, it was only because it was understood to be exclusive of marriage. The situation depicted in the Saint-Gilles episode suspiciously combines marriage and cohabitation and hence dangerously points to an imported tradition, coming from the East.108
In addition, when the count’s habit of eating pears nightly in the room of the puceles (the harem?) is read against the backdrop of the Arabic love tradition, this detail acquires new meaning, and the scene a more erotic connotation. For eating a pear like eating an apple does not evoke prelapsarian sin in Islamicate culture but reflects rather a healthy sexuality.109 In the important tradition of the erotic symbolism of fruit characteristic of the Mediterranean Basin, Middle Eastern culture, and Islam, fruit is associated with Paradise, rather than with sin.110 Poems describing fruit as metaphors of love were prominent since Abu Nuwas’s eighth-century poetry and appear in al-Jahiz’s ninth-century treatise on qaynas: “Women may be compared to perfumes and apples that we present to one another.”111 Other similar examples may be found in literary writings, such as the lines inserted in the tale of Nour in the One Thousand and One Nights, where each fruit is associated with a specific erotic function. This is what is written about pears in this tale:
O young maidens, still virgins and a bit acid to the taste,
O young ones from Mount Sinai, from Ionia, from Aleppo.
Your beautiful hips, balanced,
Hanging from a very fine waist, you who are waiting
For your lovers who will eat you, have no doubt about it.112
If fruit is associated with sexuality in the Arabic literary tradition, it is a positive sexuality, not a negative one evocative of original sin. It is also a sexuality associated with the tradition of the zurafas and their refined eating manners.113 In the context of Arabic literature, eating fruit implies the stimulation of the senses (taste, smell, touch, sight) which are considered to be especially crucial in the awakening of the appetites and of sexual arousal in particular. In the Escoufle, eating fruit in the company of maidens becomes thus a sensual detail that highlights the erotic connotation of the evenings that the count spends with the maidens.
The interpretation of the Saint-Gilles household as a harem-like social structure is buttressed by an analysis of the way the count stages Aelis’s invitation to his household. The count’s seemingly innocent suggestion to his wife that she invite Aelis to join their court as a “pucele,” a lady-in-waiting, is especially interesting because it reenacts another scene from The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour from the One Thousand and One Nights. At the end of this Arabic text and as discussed in Chapter 3, once Boudour is reunited with her husband, Qamar al-Zaman, not only does she abdicate in his favor but she offers him her wife (Hayat al-Nefous) as a second wife. Such a proposition was viable because of the cultural context of the entire tale (the harem) which allowed Qamar al-Zaman to be legally wedded to two wives. And in fact, the lesbian relationship between Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous was permitted to continue, despite Qamar al-Zaman’s return and the affirmation of heteronormativity, precisely because under Islamic laws, Qamar al-Zaman could marry both women. The Arabic tale ended with the lesbian relation embedded in the polygamous household of the harem.
In striking parallel to this Arabic tale, the count’s proposition to his wife to take Aelis as her “pucele” unwittingly echoes Boudour’s offer to her husband (Qamar al-Zaman) to take Hayat al-Nefous as a second wife. And similarly to the Arabic tale, the count’s suggestion to his wife in the Escoufle authorizes (unintentionally perhaps) the development of the same-sex relation between Aelis and his wife (Chapter 4). In other words, the count sanctions the same-sex relation in the same way as Boudour had sanctioned the heterosexual relation between her husband and Hayat al-Nefous. Moreover, just as Boudour’s invitation to Qamar al-Zaman to marry Hayat al-Nefous had transformed her monogamous same-sex household into a polygamous one, the count’s invitation to have Aelis join his wife utterly reconfigures the heretofore adulterous Saint-Gilles household into both a same-sex one (the lesbian relation between Aelis and the countess) and a cross-cultural harem.
There seems to be an awareness in the Escoufle that the establishment of a harem (an importation from the East) and the erotic involvement between the count and Aelis might lead to sociopolitical and economic disaster. This is implicit in the way the count welcomes Aelis to the Saint-Gilles household. After kissing her, he promises that:
. . . jamais n’avrons andui rien |
. . . We both will never hold anything |
Ki ne soit vostre tous jours mais. |
That will not be also always yours. |
(vv. 6156–57) |
The count pledges to Aelis a particular kind of relationship, one founded upon the mutual sharing and division of all possessions. This promise is provocative because it greatly surpasses the required largesse that structured medieval society. Gifts given by a lord were important because they revealed the giver’s fortune, his economic power, as well as his personal qualities; they contributed to increasing his public stature, especially when his gifts were generous. Pledging to freely give Aelis half of his possessions the first time he ever meets her is a gesture that exceeds largesse and goes beyond the generous welcome in which this pledge is couched.114
If we take the count’s promise literally, sharing everything with Aelis evidently includes partaking of her sexual favors since Aelis is actively intimate not only with the countess, but also with the count. It could also be taken to suggest implicitly that Aelis might become a competing heir to the count’s inheritance. Given the fact that the Saint-Gilles couple is childless, introducing Aelis as a sexual partner has indeed the potential to become particularly destabilizing for the family lineage. The promise to share everything therefore poses a potentially considerable threat to the economic bases of Western Europe and to its system of wealth based upon family continuity, legitimate procreation, and cultivated lands.115 Associating Aelis with the Saint-Gilles household represents not simply the introduction of new alternative personal relations within a (presumably) monogamous couple, but also the incorporation of cultural and economic structures, threatening both because of their perceived Eastern origins and their disruption of Western European laws concerning procreation and legitimate succession.
The impending sociopolitical and economic disaster that the novel social structure enacts in the erotic encounter between the count and Aelis is averted by the narrator who skillfully shifts the focus of this highly subversive scene and reorients it toward legitimate heteronormativity. This scene quickly becomes an important turning point in the entire romance, as it ushers in the reunification of Aelis and Guillaume. It is at the very moment when the erotic content and cross-cultural dimension of the scene are at their peak that the count conveniently remembers the story that his falconer had told him earlier that day about the young man (who turns out to be Guillaume) who had gone hunting with him and his especially violent treatment of a kite:
En trestous les autres deduis |
And while [Aelis] serves him and holds him naked, |
Li est des fauconniers menbré, |
and in the midst of all the other amusement |
Mais de l’escouffle desmenbré |
He remembered the falconer |
Ki fu ars une a une piece |
and the dismemberment (castration) |
N’orra il la verté a piece |
Of the kite that was completely burned |
Que qu’ele le sert et tient nu. |
He is determined to hear the truth about it. |
(vv. 7060–65) |
The sudden intrusion of the count’s recollection reorients the developing erotic and cross-cultural scene toward a normative form of sexuality and signals the onset of Western narrative resolution.116 The count’s memory stands clearly as a veritable juncture in the romance that serves to introduce the falconer’s tale and to usher in Guillaume himself, precipitating the recognition scene between Aelis and Guillaume.
The rhyming past participles “menbré” and “desmenbré” (vv. 7061–62) in the above lines are noteworthy for they masterfully unite the count’s recollection (“menbré”) to the violence of Guillaume’s action toward the kite (“desmenbré”). More important, the wordplay in these lines highlights the thematic focus on the eroticism of the scene, while pointing to the potential violence that could result from the questionable erotic liaison between Aelis and the count and the harem-like structure their relationship introduced. In Old French, the word “menbré” not only means to remember, but refers also to the male sexual organ, while “desmenbré” means both to dismember and more specifically to dismember the only male sexual organ worth mentioning, the phallus. The count’s recollection thus becomes a deft reminder of the only legitimate phallus that ought to occupy this scene, namely, Guillaume’s. It also points to the very real punishment that could result for the count from his illegitimate sexual encounter with Aelis, that is, castration.117 The linguistic irruption of the phallus (“menbré”) and the threat of its dismemberment (“desmenbré”) utterly put an end to all narrative developments on same-sex desire and female attachments,118 as they silence alternative social structures in the Escoufle dangerously reminiscent of the East, including suspicious liaisons evocative of harems. They preface the reunification of the legitimate heterosexual couple (Guillaume and Aelis) and the crowning of the heroes in Rouen and in Rome.
Rereading Aelis’s household business through the lens of Arabic courtly culture allows us to qualify our earlier interpretation concerning Aelis’s association with prostitution. It now becomes possible to situate her services within a new larger social context of courtliness, refinement, elegance, and sophistication. While medieval Western society did not offer women a viable category between single woman and prostitute, the Arabic tradition permitted them to occupy a respectable place between these social extremes. It afforded them a social position in which they could be at once single and sexual without being prostitutes, independent workers and courtly ladies, businesswomen and storytellers, sexual beings and admired ladies.
As it escapes easy labeling, Aelis’s lesbian social identity may hence be more fruitfully viewed in terms of its hybridity. This hybridity is no longer interlinguistic or intertextual as was the case of other Old French lesbians discussed in earlier chapters, but it is primarily intercultural, sitting at the crossroads between European and Middle Eastern cultures and forming an intriguing conjunction of Arabic courtly motifs and Western urban and courtly elements. Such a cross-cultural combination places Aelis, one of the early forgotten lesbians of medieval French literary history, at the center and at the margins of medieval European society.