1. Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Kathryn Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
2. The notion of a horizontal and a vertical reading of texts, as well as the entire section on intertextuality and the intersection of textual surfaces, is indebted to Julia Kristeva’s analysis of Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevsky’s intertextual poetics. By “horizontal reading” Kristeva points to the relation between author-reader; while “vertical reading” is the relation between a text and other texts. See both her Semiotica: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 145–46, and her Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 69. Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky can be found in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
3. This process of “écriture-lecture” is again described by Kristeva with reference to Bakhtin; see her Semiotica, 144.
Note to epigraph: Catharine MacKinnon, “Does Sexuality Have a History?” in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 121.
1. Peter Abelard, “contra naturam, hoc est contra naturae institutionem, quae genitalia feminarum usui virorum praeparavit, et e converso, non ut feminae feminis cohabitarent,” Expositio in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos I, in Patrologia cursus completus: Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841–66), 178:806; cited in Louis Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791,” Journal of Homosexuality 6, nos. 1–2 (Winter 1980–81): 14.
2. Anastasius is cited in John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 158.
3. “Vile affections” is the term that Saint Paul used in Romans 1:26 to speak of the pagans who reject God. While it is not entirely clear what Saint Paul meant by this phrase, it has been interpreted as same-sex behavior between women since Saint Ambrose (d. 397) and Saint John Chrysostom (d. 407). This interpretation was later repeated by Saint Anselm and Peter Abelard (d. 1142) in the twelfth century and by Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) and St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) in the thirteenth. See Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6–7.
4. Jean Gerson, Confessional ou Directoire des confesseurs (n.d., late fifteenth century), in Oeuvres completes de Jean Gerson, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Paris: Desclée, 1960), 1:85, cited in Brown, Immodest Acts, 19; emphasis mine.
5. Gregorio Lopez, Las Siete partidas del sabio rey Don Alonso el Nono, nuevamente glosadas por el licenciado Gregorio Lopez (1565; repr., Salamanca, 1829–31), 3:178, cited in Brown, Immodest Acts, 19; emphasis mine.
6. Cited in E. W. Monter, “La sodomie à l’époque moderne en Suisse romande,” Annales, ESC, 29 (July–August 1974): 1029 (in Brown, Immodest Acts, 166 n. 5); emphasis mine.
7. Not all law codes in the Middle Ages agreed that lesbians should be burned. The earliest European statute to mention the death penalty for lesbians is a thirteenth-century French law code (Orléans, 1260) which states that other penalties should be applied to the first two offenses with burning only as a third and final resort. On this law, see Brown, Immodest Acts, 13; for a brief overview of what theological, canonical, synodal, and penitential writings and law codes say (or do not say) about female homoeroticism, see Derrick S. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1975); Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Ulrike Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse and Religion in Medieval Germanic Culture,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 292–95. In his “Myth of Lesbian Impunity,” Louis Crompton has shown that in the Middle Ages, lesbianism was not perceived to be a lesser offense than male homosexuality and, likewise, was punishable by death. See also Edith Benkov, “The Erased Lesbian: Sodomy and the Legal Tradition in Medieval Europe,” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women, ed. Francesca Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 101–22; Marc Boone, “State Power and Illicit Sexuality: The Persecution of Sodomy in Late Medieval Bruges,” Journal of Medieval History 22, no. 2 (1996): 135–53; Helmut Puff, “Localizing Sodomy: The ‘Priest and Sodomite’ in Pre-Reformation Germany and Switzerland,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 2 (1997): 165–95. On attitudes toward lesbianism held by various European countries at different periods of medieval history, see Brown, Immodest Acts, 12–14. In the case of the eighteenth century, Theo van der Meer has pointed out that women punished by death for lesbian relations were usually found guilty of other offenses as well (religious inconstancy and heresy); see his “Tribades on Trial: Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-century Amsterdam,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 3 (1991): 424–45. See also Brigitte Eriksson, “A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records,” Journal of Homosexuality 6, nos. 1–2 (1980–81): 27–40.
8. Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 199.
9. Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse,” 293.
10. On the invention of the category “sodomy” in the twelfth century, see Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
11. The only theologians who included women in their consideration of sodomy were Hincmar of Reims (d. 879), Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, and his student Thomas Aquinas; see Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse,” 293.
12. These views have been developed by Joan Cadden in Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 224; Brown, Immodest Acts; Harry J. Kuster and Raymond J. Cormier, “Old Views and New Trends: Observations on the Problem of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 25 (1984): 587–610; and John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994).
13. The bibliography on male homosexuality in the European Middle Ages is growing rapidly. Except for Sautman and Sheingorn’s volume Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, which focuses explicitly on women, most of the articles in the other edited volumes on the queer Middle Ages address almost exclusively male homosexuality. See Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1995); Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, eds., Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Farmer and Pasternack, eds., Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages; Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds., Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Gerald Herman, ‘“The Sin Against Nature’ and Its Echoes in Medieval French Literature,” Annuale Medievale 17 (1976): 70–87.
14. Brown, Immodest Acts, 9; emphasis in original.
15. In Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, eds., The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), 191. The use of the term “lesbian” in this study will be discussed below.
16. This project thus confirms Steven Kruger’s observation regarding the pressing need to read medieval Arabic texts side by side with European ones: “Medieval thinking about the sexuality of Christians is crucially different from, and yet intimately intertwined with medieval constructions of the sexuality of . . . Muslims.” Steven Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Lochrie, McCracken, and Schultz, 159. The important role that Arabic sexological and medical writings had on Western European knowledge about sexual practices and eroticism has been discussed in Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexualité et savoir médical au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), chapter 3 in particular.
17. The concept of the “contact zone” was coined by Mary Louise Pratt in an influential article, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40.
18. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980). This position of constructionism was popularized by nineteenth-century doctors and scientists, such as Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, and Krafft-Ebing. See also Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977); David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990); John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1990); and David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). Even Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has followed this periodization in her Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) which focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while her Between Men: English Literature and the Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) begins with Shakespeare, thus with the Renaissance. Similarly, see Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981).
19. See John Boswell, “Towards the Long View: Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” Salmagundi 58–59 (Fall–Winter 1983): 89–113; Jordan, Invention of Sodomy; Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Stephen O. Murray and Kent Gerard, “Renaissance Sodomite Subcultures?” in Among Men, Among Women: Sociological and Historical Recognition of Homosocial Arrangements, ed. Mattias Duyves et al. (Amsterdam: Sociologisch Instituut, 1983), 183–96.
20. David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 44. In 1983 George Chauncey had already pointed out that the assumptions underlying the construction of homosexual identity “oversimplify the complex dialectic between social conditions, ideology, and consciousness which produced gay identities, and they belie the evidence of preexisting subcultures and identities contained in the literature itself.” See George Chauncey, Jr., “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance,” Salmagundi 58–59 (Fall 1982–Winter 1983): 115. More recently, Stephen Murray has called the modern denial of premodern homosexuality a case of nineteenth-century “special creationism” in his “Discourse Creationism,” Journal of Sex Research 32 (1995): 263–65.
21. Karma Lochrie, “Desiring Foucault,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 1 (1997): 9. A more extended critique of Foucault and his view of medieval studies may be found in her Covert Operations, 14–24.
22. Anna Klosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 13. Other critics resisting the dogmatic readings of Foucault’s History of Sexuality include Judith Bennett, Edith Benkov, Ruth Vanita, Tova Rosen, and Terry Castle, among many others.
23. Interestingly, even the index to J. N. Adams’s The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) does not have an entry for “tribades” or lesbians.
24. Sautman and Sheingorn, Same Sex Love and Desire, 13. See also Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
25. Sautman and Sheingorn, introduction to Same-Sex Love and Desire, 2.
26. Foucault himself had already pointed to the distinction between identity and consciousness in an interview that was translated by James O’Higgins, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Salmagundi 58–59 (Fall 1982–Winter 1983): 11–12.
27. The archaeological information is cited in Marie-Jo Bonnet, Les Deux amies: Essai sur le couple de femmes dans l’art (Paris: Editions Blanche, 2000), 17.
28. Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 3:141.
29. This terminology is provided by Bernadette J. Brooten in Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4–9, where she explains the different connotations of each of these terms. On female homosexuality in early Christianity, see also Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions. On female homosexuality in the Greek period, see Geneviève Pastre, Athènes et le “Péril saphique”: Homosexualité féminine en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Librairie “Les Mots à la bouche,” 1987).
30. Brooten, Love Between Women, 5.
31. Contrary to what one might think, the usage of the word “lesbian” in the sixteenth century does not seem to have been a result of the rediscovery of Sappho’s poetry. The first usage of the term “lesbian” in French occurs in Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, Vies des dames galantes (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1841). It would not become commonly used until the nineteenth century, at which time the term seems to have referred to acts rather than to a group of people. Its earliest usage in English dates from the 1730s. See Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668—1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993).
32. Brown, Immodest Acts, 17.
33. Judith M. Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, nos. 1–2 (2000): 1–24.
34. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60.
35. My work thus confirms Sautman and Sheingorn’s view that the history of lesbianism is linked to the history of all women’s struggles to assert independent lives (Same Sex Love and Desire, 11).
36. Other scholars have rejected the persistent distinction between medieval and modern. They include Judith M. Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 147–75, and “Confronting Continuity,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 3 (1997): 73–94; Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 87–108; Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, “The Pleasures of History,” GLQ 1, no. 4 (1995): 371–84; and Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages.
37. Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse,” 289.
38. A fourth promising area of research into medieval female same-sex practices may consider narratives of animal or monstrous spouses as spaces onto which Western anxieties about gender are displaced. Marie de France’s Lais and the Roman de Mélusine, for instance, propose powerful instances of the deployment of alternative family and sexual configurations, and of resistance to medieval binary hierarchies and dominant heterosexual discourses. Furthermore, despite scholarly investigations of the “scandalous” content of French fabliaux which have focused on the definition of gender and sexuality, few have examined the homoerotic dimension of many of these texts. Gerald Herman has briefly addressed the use of the term “sodomy” in two fabliaux (“Du Prestre et du Chevalier” and “Du Sot Chevalier”) in his “‘Sin Against Nature.’” Fabliaux such as Berengier au Long Cul, Les Quatre Souhais Saint Martin, and Le Sentier Batu would merit queering in the future.
39. Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Lochrie, McCracken, and Schultz, 195.
40. There is a large body of scholarship that investigates expressions of medieval lesbianism in the writings of mystics; in fact, it is probably the area that has contributed the most to our knowledge of medieval female homoeroticism. The following bibliography is not meant to be exhaustive. On the feminization of Jesus Christ, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). On the same-sex discourse of female mystics, see Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse”; Bruce Holsinger, “The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion in the Music of Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179),” Signs 19, no. 1 (1993): 92–125; Ann Matter, “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (1986): 81–93; Lochrie, “Mystical Acts,” 180–200; Kathy Lavezzo, “Sobs and Sighs Between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, 175–98; Amy M. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Simon Gaunt, “Straight Minds/‘Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography–La Vie-de-Sainte-Euphrosine,” GLQ 1, no. 4 (1995): 439–47; Brown, Immodest Acts; and Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and Bodily Movement in the Vitae of Thirteenth-century Beguines,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 10–23. The lives of saints (Sainte Douceline of Digne in particular) would benefit from future investigation into their representations of same-sex desire.
41. French literary texts (romances and plays) from the thirteenth century seem to have been particularly prone to such a theme. These texts typically stage a cross-dressed heroine; they describe her flight from ambiguous familial situations and her ability to adapt and succeed in new environments alone, especially with the help of a female friend. See Michelle Szkilnik, “The Grammar of the Sexes in Medieval French Romance,” in Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland, 1998), 61–88; Kathleen M. Blumreich, “Lesbian Desire in the Old French Roman de Silence,” Arthuriania 7, no. 2 (1997): 47–62; Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval France (New York: Garland, 1996); J. L. Welch, “Cross-Dressing and Cross-Purposes: Gender Possibilities in the Acts of Thecla,” in Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet (London: Routledge, 1996), 66–78; Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 319–44; Susan Crane, “Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 2 (1996): 297–320.
42. Susan Schibanoff, “Hildegarde of Bingen and Richardis of Stade: The Discourse of Desire,” in Same Sex Love and Desire, ed. Sautman and Sheingorn, 49–84, and Konrad Eisenbichler, “Laudomia Forteguerri Loves Margaret of Austria,” in Same Sex Love and Desire, ed. Sautman and Sheingorn, 277–304.
43. The most important article in this controversy is undoubtedly Angelica Rieger’s “Was Bieiris de Romans Lesbian?: Women’s Relations with Each Other in the World of the Troubadours,” in The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, ed. William D. Paden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 73–94.
44. The term Islamicate which I will use throughout this study was coined by Marshall G. S. Hodgson who defines it thus: “‘Islamicate’ would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.” See his The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1:59. The advantage of this term is that it highlights the social and cultural dimensions over the religious. For reasons of variety, I will be using other terms (Arab, Eastern, Oriental, Middle Eastern, the Levant, Mediterranean), even though I recognize the anachronism, limitations, and problems associated with each of these words. The same limitations apply to my use of the terms “Western,” “medieval France,” or “medieval Europe” throughout this study.
45. On the hybrid culture of medieval Sicily, see Karla Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250: A Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
46. The term “clash of civilizations” was coined by Samuel Huntington in a now-famous article by the same title published in Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49. It has given rise to a great number of critiques, most notably by Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” Nation 273, no. 12 (October 22, 2001): 11–13.
47. Funduks (as they were called in Arabic and imported as fondoco in European southern ports) were commercial towns in which Christian merchants lived during their trade with the Orient. The city of Montpellier, for instance, is known to have had an important presence in Antioch, Saint Jean of Acre, Tyre, and Alexandria. The participation of rulers in the establishment of funduks even while on crusades is amply documented (Guilhem of Montpellier was seeking to further his commercial interests in Palestine and Syria, as Jacqueline Liault has demonstrated [Montpellier, la médiévale (Nîmes: C. Lacour, 1990), 49–60]). On the funduks and their importance as spaces for cross-cultural exchange, see Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the crusades and cultural exchanges between East and West, see Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999).
48. There are a great many publications on the role that Arab sciences played in the development of the scientific fields in the West. The following references give just a glimpse of the material that is available. See John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993); Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (London: British Library, 1997); Charles Burnett, ed., La Transmission des textes philosophiques et scientifiques au moyen âge–Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny (Aldershot, Hampshire, U.K.: Variorum, 1994); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Alice Lasater, Spain to England: A Comparative Study of Arabic, European and English Literature in the Middle Ages (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1974); Monica Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Monica Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000).
49. Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. On the role of al-Andalus in the transfer of Arabic advances to medieval Europe, see also Thomas Glick, Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and Its Legacy (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1996).
50. On the role of muwasshahat and zajal on troubadour poetry, see A. R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and Its Relation with the Old Provençal Troubadours (Baltimore: J. H. Furst, 1946), and Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994) and The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). See also Brian A. Catlos, Victors and the Vanquished (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
51. Sahar Amer, Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
52. The resistance of the field of French literature to the implications of cross-cultural contacts between Western Europe and the Arab Islamicate world in the Middle Ages is likely due to the long history of colonialism, the persistence of Orientalist presuppositions, and the contemporary tension with the Maghrebian population in France. Most of the research conducted on cross-cultural relations between East and West in the Middle Ages is still conducted primarily either by scholars of Spanish or by social scientists (historians in particular). Notable exceptions are E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
53. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960). Nabil Matar has shown the persistence of such metaphors throughout Western colonization of the American Indians. See his Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 109–27; see also John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Thomas E. Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994).
54. On the construction of Islam as a religion that promotes sodomy, see Susan Schibanoff, “Mohammed, Courtly Love, and the Myth of Western Homosexuality,” Medieval Feminist Newsletter 16 (Fall 1993): 27–32; Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 278–82; and David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 172–83.
55. Hrosvit of Gandersheim, Hrotsvithae Opera, ed. Helene Homeyer (Munich, 1970), discussed in Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 18–22.
56. This composite view is based on the writings of authors such as Humbert de Romans, Guibert de Nogent, and Thomas Aquinas. These images are summarized in R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). Some medieval authors (such as Jacques de Vitry) attempted to explain sexual deviance in the Middle East by the hot climate of the region which promoted bestial behaviors; see Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 279 n. 32.
57. William Adam, cited in Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 282, and in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 144.
58. This is described in Michael Uebel, “Re-Orienting Desire: Writing on Gender Trouble in Fourteenth-century Egypt,” in Gender and Difference, ed. Farmer and Pasternack, 244–47.
59. Mattar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 109–27.
60. Sir Richard Burton, “Terminal Essay,” in The Book of the Thousand and One Nights and a Night (New York, 1886), 10:205–53. On Burton’s notion of the “Sotadic Zone,” see Stephen O. Murray, “Some Nineteenth-century Reports of Islamic Homosexualities,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, ed. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 204–21 and especially 211–17.
61. Le conte de Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris: Champion, 1983), vv. 2584–85, translation mine.
62. Like homosexuality in Western scholarship, most of the research on homosexuality in the Arabic tradition focuses on male homosexuality. There have been to my knowledge only two colloquia directly addressing the topic of medieval homosexuality in the Arabic tradition, both resulting in the publication of conference papers: Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, ed., Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam (Malibu, Calif.: Undena, 1979), and Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, eds., Islamicate Sexualities Studies: Translations Across Temporal and Geographical Zones of Desire (forthcoming). Only two papers (by Kathryn Babayan and Sahar Amer) in the latter collection address the question of lesbianism. The most important work conducted on medieval Arab male homosexuality is that of Everett Rowson, Franz Rosenthal, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Malek Chebel, Stephen O. Murray, and Will Roscoe. In Murray and Roscoe, eds., Islamic Homosexualities, one essay only deals with Arabic lesbianism; see Murray, “Woman-Woman Love in Islamic Societies,” 97–104. Unfortunately, Murray collapses medieval representations of lesbian practices with Orientalist and modern perspectives.
63. Galen’s view (like al-Kindi’s below) is reported in Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Nasr al-Katib, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, ed. Salah Addin Khawwam, trans. Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam (Toronto: Aleppo, 1977), 189. One observation regarding the title of this important work: Even though the English translation of this work uses the term “encyclopedia,” Ibn Nasr’s work is not an encyclopedia in the sense we understand such works to be today. A more accurate, or literal translation of the Arabic title (Jawami` al-ladhdha) would be “everything that is known about pleasure.” The title might also be a sexual pun since the term jawami`, plural form of jam`, derives from a root which means to link, to join, to unite, and also to have intercourse. The information cited about Galen and al-Kindi in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure cannot be corroborated by the surviving evidence from the medieval medical tradition. In a search for the roots hetairist-, dihetairist-, tribad-, and lesbiain the electronic version of Galen’s surviving Greek works held by the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Paris 5, there is no instance of any of those roots being used by him except “lesbia-.” As a matter of fact, Galen uses the word “lesbiazonton” only once as an example of a practice he finds repugnant. See Galen’s De simplicibus medicines X.1 in Claudi Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. C. G. Kuhn (Leipzig: Car. Cnoblochii, 1821–33), 12:249, http://194.254.96.21/livanc/?cote=45674×12&p=247&do=page. Al-Kindi’s best-known works focus on the physical sciences–mathematics, optics, meteorology–not biology or physiology. According to Baghdadi bookseller al-Nadim’s (d. ca. 990–998) Fihrist (The Catalogue), al-Kindi wrote 270 items, of which two dozen are medical titles–but none of al-Nadim’s titles seem very likely to contain the information we find in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, and most of them are known to be no longer extant; see al-Nadim, al-Fihrist, ed. Rida Tajaddud (Tehran: Yutlabu min Maktabat al-Asadi wa-Maktabat al-Ja`fari al-Tabrizi, 1971), 315 and passim. I would like to thank Michael McVaugh for helping me with this information concerning the medical tradition.
64. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 188.
65. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 189. The titles of Yuhanna Ibn Masawayh’s (John Mesué) works suggest an interest in women’s physiology. Among many others, al-Nadim attributes to him the following works: “Why Physicians Have Abstained from Treating Pregnant Women During Certain Months of Their Pregnancy” and “Treatment of Women Who Do not Become Pregnant,” al-Fihrist, 354.
66. One finds exactly the same references to the medical origin of lesbianism in Ahmad al-Tifashi’s Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab, ed. Jamal Juma`a (London: Riad el-Rayyis, 1992), chap. 11, which is devoted to lesbianism. This chapter is available in French translation by René R. Khawam, Les Délices des coeurs ou ce que l’on ne trouve en aucun livre (Paris: Phébus, 1981); it has been omitted however from the English translation of this work, The Delight of Hearts, trans. Edward A. Lacey (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1988). Other medical views on lesbianism included the size of the vagina. Social constructionist views of lesbianism were also evoked in the Arabic erotic tradition, most notably the desire to avoid adultery and the fear of begetting illegitimate children.
67. Though the Encyclopedia of Pleasure is the first extant erotic treatise in Arabic, it is not the first one to exist in the Arabic tradition. In his Fihrist, al-Nadim lists thirteen titles of erotic treatises or treatises on copulation (kutub al-bah) from Persia, India, and Arabia dating before the tenth century, none of which has survived. Two of the best-known (and most cited) titles that predate Ibn Nasr’s work are (1) Sihaq al-nisa’ zinan baynahunna [“Women’s Tribadism Constitutes Fornication Between Them”], which technically is a legal opinion, rather than an erotic treatise; it is ascribed to Syrian jurisprudent (faqih) Makhul (d. ca. 730–36); and (2) Abu al-Anbas al-Saymari, Kitab al-sahaqat [Book on Lesbians] (end of ninth century). See al-Nadim, al-Fihrist, 376, and Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition, CD-ROM, s.v.v. “Liwat” and “Sihak.”
68. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 88. This anecdote is reported in an earlier text, namely Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s tenth-century Kitab al-aghani [The Book of Songs], and is later repeated by others, such as al Raghib al-Isfahani (ca. 1000), cited in Everett Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 68. As in the West, the origin of homosexuality in the Arab world seems to be that it was “imported” from elsewhere. In the case of the Arabs, al-Jahiz popularized the idea that it spread to the Muslim world at the time of the Abbasids from the army life of the Khurasanians. According to G. E. von Grunebaum, writings about homosexuality coincided with a shift toward an urban setting and a shift of the political center of Islam towards the East; see “Aspects of Arabic Urban Literature Mostly in the Ninth and Tenth Century,” al-Andalus 20 (1955): 259–81.
69. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 88.
70. Al-Nadim, al-Fihrist, 366.
71. Such pedagogical training recalls the one evoked in the Kama Sutra.
72. The title of this work means literally “A Journey of the Hearts into what does not Exist in any Book.”
73. Interestingly, in his colorful survey of the sexual customs of the East, Allen Edwardes confirms the survival of such lesbian teachings among harem women: “In the restricted harem, esh-sheykheh-el-bezzreh (one who teaches the art of rubbing clitoris against clitoris) taught every girl in the Sapphic sciences.” Allen Edwardes, The Jewel in the Lotus: A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East (New York: Julian Press, 1959), 255. Even though rumors of lesbianism in Oriental harems have been regularly reported by Orientalist writers and travelers, they have never been observed or verified. We cannot thus entirely trust the association between harem and lesbian practices, but the parallel between al-Tifashi’s and Edwardes’s reports is striking.
74. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 201.
75. Mustafa Safwan, trans., Tafsir al-ahlam [The Interpretation of Dreams], by Sigmund Freud (1958; repr., Cairo: Dar al-Ma`arif, 1969); Jurj Tarabishi, trans., Thalathat mabahith fi nazariyyat al-jins [Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality], by Sigmund Freud (Beirut: Dar al-Tali`ah, 1983); and Muta al-Safadi, trans., Iradat al ma`rifah, al-juz’ al-awwal min tarikh al-jinsaniyya [The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 of The Will to Know], by Michel Foucault (Beirut: Markaz al-Inma al Qawmi, 1990). This section on the terminology of sexuality and heterosexuality in the contemporary Middle East is indebted to Joseph Massad’s article, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 361–85, especially 371–72.
76. On the connotation of these new terms for homosexuality in Arabic, see Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims,” in Progressive Muslims: Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 199–201.
77. Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” 192.
78. On the positive role that sexuality plays in the Qur’an, see Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, La Sexualité en Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986); Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983), and his La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Denoël, 1986). On the other hand, Franz Rosenthal warns that the description of Paradise as a sensual erotic Eden in Islam should not be taken to exclusively mean that sexuality was permitted on earth. He gives the example of the Zahirite Ibn Hazm who interprets such verses as pointing rather to “the disruptive potential of sexuality for the smooth functioning of the social order” in his “Fiction and Reality: Sources for the Role of Sex in Medieval Muslim Society,” in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. al-Sayyid-Marsot, 6.
79. Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Falita, Rushd al-labib ila mu`asharat al-habib, ed. Ahmad ben Mohamed al-Yamani (Talah: al-Mayah al-Jamahiriyah al-`Uzma, 2002), 127. The English translation provided here is from An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition, ed. Salah Addin Khawwam, trans. Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam (Toronto: Aleppo, 1977), 100.
80. Rowson, “Categorization of Gender,” 62. See also Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), chapter 5.
81. Although there was general agreement among Islamic jurisprudents that homosexuality was a major sin (kaba’ir), there was no consensus regarding its punishment which varied according to the school of thought (madhahib) followed: the Maliki school (which is the strictest one in this regard) considered liwat more serious than zina, thus deserving the harshest of hadd penalties (those defined in the Qur’an and the Sunnah and not left to the judge’s discretion), namely stoning to death for both partners. The Shafi`i school assimilated zina and liwat, and thus distinguished between married and unmarried homosexuals, between active and passive partners. It condemned partners accordingly to be stoned to death (if married) or lashed (if unmarried). The most “liberal” school, the Hanafi (a view later adopted by the Zahiri Ibn Hazm) prescribed a ta`zir punishment, that is a discretionary penalty aimed to punish, reform, and deter others, and amounted to no more than ten lashes and an imprisonment term. The sentence for sahq (lesbianism) varied also among different jurisprudents. Some viewed it as the least serious form of zina, and thus prescribed one hundred lashes; others did not penalize it at all, while Ibn Hazm prescribed the ta`zir punishment (ten lashes, and it remains unclear whether a prison term was also required or not). It must be noted that these punishments addressed liwat understood only as anal intercourse by a man. Kissing, caressing, tafkhidh, and the like, while considered reprehensible, were technically not liwat, and thus were not subject to these penalties. On the punishment of liwat and sahq in Islamic jurisprudence, see Camilla Adang, “Ibn Hazm on Homosexuality: A Case-Study of Zahiri Legal Methodology,” al-Qantara 24 (2003): 5–31; Rowson, “Categorization of Gender,” 59–62; Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” 216–19; Bouhdiba, Sexualité en Islam, 44–45; Khaled el-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 3 in particular.
82. This is what a poet (al-Raqashi) from the early Abbasid period wrote in a famous poem, cited in Rosenthal, “Male and Female: Described and Compared,” in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. J. W. Wright, Jr., and Everett K. Rowson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 48 n. 31.
83. The ghulamiyyat fashion appears to have been launched by Zubayda, wife of Harun al-Rashid and mother of Caliph al-Amin (patron of Abu Nuwas), in an effort to deter her son from his homosexual inclinations. Rowson points out that these cross-dressed women ought not be interpreted as evidence of lesbianism since their role was to compete with boys for the attention of men (“Categorization of Gender,” 68). While this may have been true in the case of Zubayda’s efforts, one cannot deny the fact that such cross-dressing must have been perceived as an especially liberating fashion for some medieval Arab lesbians. See Mas`udi, The Meadows of Gold: The Abbasids, trans. and ed. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (London: Kegan Paul, 1989), 390–91.
84. This is Everett Rowson’s conclusion in “Two Homoerotic Narratives from Mamluk Literature: Al-Safadi’s Law’at al-shaki and Ibn Daniyal’s al-Mutayyam,” in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. J. W. Wright, Jr., and Everett K. Rowson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 158–91.
85. Al-Mutamid’s verse is cited in Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, 196.
86. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, 200.
87. Boswell gives several examples of Muslims having Christian lovers in al-Andalus: al-Mutamin, eleventh-century Muslim king of Saragossa; al-Ramadi, a famous tenth-century poet (Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, 200).
88. There is a debate among critics as to whether Wallada indeed may be considered a lesbian. Philip K. Hitti has called Wallada “the Sappho of Spain” in his History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present, 9th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968). This view was repeated by Abu Khalil (“A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization,” Arab Studies Journal 1–2 [Fall 1993]: 34) and by Murray and Roscoe (Islamic Homosexualities, 99). However, Everett Rowson takes the opposite view, stating that there is not sufficient evidence to make an assertion about lesbianism in the case of Wallada. Rowson has summarized the debate in his forthcoming book on male homoeroticism in the medieval Arabic tradition. I would like to thank him for sharing his unpublished material on Wallada with me.
89. This is also Rowson’s assessment in “Categorization of Gender,” 74 n. 4.
90. Rosenthal, “Male and Female,” 30. Yahya Ibn Aktham was a well-known homosexual as evident in the enduring expression in medieval Arab writing of a luti (homosexual) as someone who “subscribes to the religion of Yahya Ibn Aktham.” See Rowson, “Categorization of Gender,” 61–62.
91. The definition of adab is a complex one and there is no equivalent genre in the West. In the Arabic Middle Ages, this encyclopedic genre of writings aimed at clarifying the rules of conduct of its own society, at imparting ethical attitudes and courtly manners in an entertaining style. Authors of adab draw heavily from prior writings which they reorganize. On the definition of adab, see André Miquel, La Littérature arabe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 66–68; Charles Pellat, Le Milieu basrien et la formation de Yahiz (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953); von Grunebaum, “Aspects of Arabic Urban Literature.” On the production of adab works on love during this period, see Jean-Claude Vadet, L’Esprit courtois en Orient dans les cinq premiers siècles de l’hégire (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1968); Lois A. Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Lois A. Giffen, “Love Poetry and Love Theory in Medieval Arabic Literature,” in Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development, ed. G. E. von Grunebaum (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1973), 107–24. On the linguistic virtuosity of adab, see Andras Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).
92. Rowson, “Categorization of Gender,” 52. On mujun as a literary genre, rather than a sociological phenomenon whose main features are sexuality and scatology, see Julie Scott Meisami, “Arabic Mujun Poetry: The Literary Dimension,” in Verse and the Fair Sex: Studies in Poetry and in the Representation of Women in Arabic Literature: A Collection of Papers Presented at the 15th Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, ed. Frederick de Jong (Utrecht: M. Th. Houtsma Stichting, 1993), 8–30; Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (New York: Penguin, 1994), 165–67.
93. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-aghani [The Book of Songs], ed. Abd al-Sattar Ahmad Farraj, 25 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1990). On Kitab al-aghani, see Hilary Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs: Compilation and the Author’s Craft in Abu l-Faraj al-Isbahani’s Kitab al-Aghani (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Ignazio Guidi, Tables alphabétiques du Kitab al-Agani (Leiden: Brill, 1900).
94. Al-Raghib al-Isfahani’s and al-Jurjani’s works have both been studied by Rowson in his “Categorization of Gender.” Al-Raghib al-Isfahani. Muhadarat al-udaba’ wamuhawarat al-shu`ara’ wa-al-bulagha’ [Lectures by the Literati and Conversations in Poetry and Eloquent Speech], 4 vols. (Beirut: Dar Maktabat al-Haya, 1961); Abu al-Abbas Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Jurjani, al-Muntakhab min kinayat al-udaba’ wa isharat al-bulagha’ [Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech], ed. Muhammad Shamsul Haq Shamsi (Hyderabad, India: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1983).
95. This is the perspective upheld by scholars such as Everett Rowson, Julie Meisami, Franz Rosenthal, and Paula Saunders.
96. On this tradition known as Rangstreit in the critical literature, see Ewald Wagner, Die Arabische Rangstreitdichtung und ihre Einordnung in die allgemeine Literaturgeshichte, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Jahrg. 1962, Nr. 8 (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1963). On these debates and the role of the parallel Greek tradition of syncrisis on Arabic dispute poems, see the collection Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medieval Near East, ed. G. J. Reinink and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (Leuven: Departement Orientalistiek, 1991).
97. Al-Jahiz’s Kitab moufakharati al-jawari wa al-ghilman [Boasting Match over Maids and Youths] has been translated into English by Jim Colville as “The Pleasures of Girls and Boys Compared,” in Sobriety and Mirth: A Selection of the Shorter Writings of al-Jahiz (London: Kegan Paul, 2002), 202–30; by William M. Hutchins, Nine Essays of Al-Jahiz (New York: P. Lang, 1989), 139–66, and into French by Malek Chebel, Ephèbes et courtisanes (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1997). His Tafdil al-batn `ala al-zahr [Superiority of the Belly to the Back] is located in British Museum OR. 3138, fol. 220B–227B, and it has been translated into English by William M. Hutchins, Nine Essays of Al-Jahiz, 167–73. The translation has come under criticism by A. F. L. Beeston. See A. F. L. Beeston, review of Nine Essays of Al-Jahiz, translated by William M. Hutchins, Journal of Arabic Literature 20 (1989): 200–209.
98. Ibn Falita, Rushd al-labib ila mu `asharat al-habib, chapter 10. The Arabic title differs from its English translation by Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam who give instead the heading of “On pederasty” to that chapter.
99. Surprisingly, there are a large number of popularized self-help books on sexual topics that are easily accessible on the streets of major cities in the Arab world. These books are often sold next to mosques, thus appear to be addressed to the conservative Muslim population.
100. Today, there is one artistic sculpture entitled The Encyclopedia of Pleasure and it takes its inspiration from the medieval Arabic text. This sculpture is made by Egyptian artist Ghada Amer and hers is the first and only work (in any media) devoted exclusively to this groundbreaking Arabic text. Her sculpture is the unprecedented gesture by an Arab (and an Arab woman) to save from oblivion this essential text and to resurrect a frank and nonjudgmental discussion around sexuality that until today continues to be absent in the East and oftentimes misguided in the West. Moreover, it is the subversive artistic production of an Arab woman artist to break the silence imposed upon eroticism in the Arab world and even in the West today. See Sahar Amer and Olu Oguibe, eds., Ghada Amer (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2002).
101. The English translation by Lacey is made from René Khawam’s French translation, and is not based on the Arabic text.
102. Edward A. Lacey, introduction to The Delight of Hearts, by Ahmad al-Tifashi, 8.
103. A similar approach characterizes French translations of al-Hawrani’s work by René R. Khawam, who omits certain sections of the medieval manuscript that he considers to be of lesser stylistic value (see his introduction to his translation of Les Ruses des femmes [Paris: Phébus, 1994], 14). Some recent French translations of medieval Arabic literary anthologies and sexological writings published by renowned French presses contribute to another set of problems. Even though they claim to be based on “original Arab manuscripts,” the translator does not provide basic critical information, such as the manuscript used or the name of the library holding the manuscript. This omission does not permit scholarly work or verification of these possibly important contributions. Such is the case of René Khawam’s translation of al-Tifashi’s Les Délices des coeurs; his translation also of al-Suyuti’s Nuits de Noces ou comment humer le doux breuvage des la magie licite (Paris: Albin Michel, 1972), or his translation of Ali al-Baghdadi, Les Fleurs éclatantes dans les baisers et l’accolement (Paris: Albin Michel, 1973).
104. In its theoretical outlook, my work is parallel to the goals of Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger in Queering the Middle Ages; they write in their introduction: “Queering the Middle Ages promises the recovery of cultural meanings that are lost, obscured, or distorted in work that either ignores questions of sexuality or attends only to hegemonic or heteronormative understandings of it” (xvi). Except for Gregory Hutcheson’s contribution, their collection of essays does not address the cross-cultural dimension with which Crossing Borders is concerned.
Note to epigraphs: Homi K. Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 209. Al-Jahiz, “The Pleasures of Girls and Boys Compared,” in Sobriety and Mirth: A Selection of the Shorter Writings of al-Jahiz, trans. Jim Colville (London: Kegan Paul, 2002), 203.
1. Other texts that belong to the genre of estate literature include La Bible by Guiot de Provins (ca. 1205), La Bible au Seigneur de Berzé and Le Besant de Dieu by Guillaume Le Clerc (ca. 1226), and Le Roman de Charité by Re(n)clus de Moilliens (early thirteenth century). For an overview of estate literature as a genre, see Charles-Victor Langlois, La Vie en France au moyen âge de la fin du XIIe au milieu du XIVe siècle, vol. 2, D’après les moralistes du temps (Paris: Hachette, 1925).
2. All references to Etienne de Fougères’s Le Livre des manières will be made to Anthony Lodge’s edition of the text (Geneva: Droz, 1979).
3. The role that the Anglo-Norman courts of Henry II have played in the transmission of Arabic material to the West in the Middle Ages has been amply demonstrated by numerous critics, including notably Alice Lasater, Spain to England: A Comparative Study of Arabic, European and English Literature in the Middle Ages (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1974); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (London: British Library, 1997); John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993); and Sahar Amer, Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
4. Metlitzki, Matter of Araby in Medieval England, 8–9.
5. See Metlitzki, Matter of Araby in Medieval England, and Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers.
6. Because in the Arabic tradition, lesbianism was considered a medical condition, it was often discussed in Arabic medical treatises which Western authors are known to have consulted, translated, and studied. Jacquart and Thomasset have traced the transmission of Arabic erotic material (by Qusta Ibn Luqa, Samau’al Ibn Yahya, al-Tifashi, Ibn Falita, among others) in Western medical writings (by authors of the Secretum Secretorum, Maimonides, Albert the Great, commentators of Avicenna, Michel Savonarole, and Guy Beaujouan, among others); see their Sexualité et savoir médical au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 121–92.
7. Etienne deals with bourgeois women in the preceding section of his poem depicting burghers. Bourgeois women are characterized by their debauchery and adulterous behavior (vv. 841–44). Etienne does not depict peasant women at all.
8. Robert Clark has observed that the placement of the lesbian in this intermediary position reverses the pattern Etienne had established earlier in his poem–from high to low–making this a “liminal moment” in the economy of the Livre des manières, “a turning point that marks the threshold between the lowest and the highest, the abject and the holy.” Robert L. A. Clark in his “Jousting Without a Lance: The Condemnation of Female Homoeroticism in the Livre des manières,” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Francesca Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 159.
9. I have borrowed the English translation of these stanzas from Robert L. A. Clark in his “Jousting Without a Lance,” 166–67.
10. Clark, “Jousting Without a Lance,” 164.
11. I will examine the phallocentrism of the Yde and Olive texts in Chapter 3.
12. The originality of Etienne’s depiction of lesbianism has been pointed out by Robert Clark (“Jousting Without a Lance”). It has been echoed by Jacqueline Murray who writes: “The uniqueness of the discussion and the literary devices de Fougères employed to describe female sexuality make this one of the most important medieval descriptions of lesbianism” (Jacqueline Murray, “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible,” in The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage [New York: Garland, 1996], 204). Similarly, Anthony Lodge, in his 1979 edition of this text, asserted: “This is the only allusion to sapphism in medieval French literature” (35 n. 12; translation mine). And yet, despite the rarity and obvious importance of this section, Lodge ends up undermining the value of these stanzas, as he does not bring up the question of lesbianism in his outline of the text, writing only that in the text “some women go so far as to commit acts against nature” (27; translation mine).
13. Langlois, La Vie en France, 25 n. 2; translation mine.
14. Langlois, La Vie en France, 6.
15. Lodge, introduction, 34.
16. Etienne’s text has been preserved in a single manuscript, held at the Municipal Library of Angers (Maine-et-Loire), MS 304 (295). For a description of the manuscript, see R. Anthony Lodge’s introduction to Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, 9–12.
17. The two problematic words are “trutennes” and “eu” in stanza 277. I will discuss both below.
18. Lodge, introduction, 15–16.
19. On attempts to identify this author, see Franz Rosenthal who claims he may have been a tenth-century author who lived from 1036 to 1124 (“Male and Female: Described and Compared,” in J. W. Wright, Jr., and Everett K. Rowson, Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 25). In the same article, Rosenthal cites other possible identifications of Ibn Nasr al-Katib suggested by other critics all of them unverifiable (45 n. 7). The problem of identification is compounded by the fact that this author’s last name al-Katib means “the writer,” “the scribe,” or “the secretary,” leaving us at a loss in figuring out whether this is a last name or a professional attribute.
20. On the genre of mujun literature and on kutub al-bah, see Chapter 1.
21. On the organization of al-Jurjani’s work, see Everett Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 50–79. For a sense of the type of euphemisms recorded by al-Jurjani, consider the example of adultery, whose common Arabic metaphors are “to let down the curtain,” or “riding between the wrist-bracelet and the ankle-bracelet.” Chastity is rendered as “turning back the toucher’s hand.” Homosexual relations are “you took my boy away . . . and deprived my monk of his monastery.” These examples are translated into English in Rowson’s article (56); additional examples can be gleaned from the same article.
22. On women’s jousting and fencing in the thirteenth-Century Tournoiement des dames, see Helen Solterer, “Figures of Female Militancy in Medieval France,” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 522–49; on a comparable analysis focusing on the German tradition of Das Frauenturnier, or The Ladies’ Tournament (ca. 1300), see Sarah Westphal-Wihl, “The Ladies’ Tournament: Marriage, Sex and Honor in Thirteenth-Century Germany,” Signs 14, no. 2 (1989): 371–98. On the use of the mortar as a metaphor for the vagina in the early modern period, see Francesca Sautman, “‘Des vessies pour des lanterns’: Villon, Molinet and the Riddles of Folklore,” Neophilologus 69, no. 2 (1985): 161–84, and Malcolm Jones, “Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art II: Sexist Satire and Popular Punishments,” Folklore 101, no. 1 (1990): 69–87.
23. Eroticism as a martial scene was a very common metaphor throughout the Islamicate world. Not only do we encounter it in Ibn Nasr’s Encyclopedia of Pleasure and al-Jurjani’s work, but we also find it in tenth- and eleventh-century Andalusian poetry, such as poem 278 of Ibn Khafajah (1058–139). On this poem, its military metaphors and their prevalence in Arabic literature, see Arie Schippers and John Mattock, “Love and War: A Poem of Ibn Khafajah,” Journal of Arabic Literature 17 (1986): 50–68.
24. Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Nasr al-Katib, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, ed. and annotated Salah Addin Khawwam, trans. Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam (Toronto: Aleppo, 1977), 191. All future references to the Encyclopedia of Pleasure will be made to this translation. I have also consulted two Arabic manuscripts of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure–Istanbul MS Fatih 3729 and Dublin MS Chester Beatty 4635–I would like to thank Everett Rowson for generously making them available to me.
25. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 193 and 73.
26. Al-Jurjani’s Arabic text has survived only in an abridged anonymous form edited by Muhammad Shamsul Haq Shamsi, al-Muntakhab min kinayat al-udaba’ wa isharat albulagha’ (An Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech) (Hyderabad, India: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1983), 108. The English translation of this passage is from Rowson, “Categorization of Gender,” 65.
27. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 196.
28. Arabic quotations of Ahmad al-Tifashi’s text come from the Arabic edition by Jamal Juma’a, Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab (London: Riad el-Rayyes, 1992), 246. All translations are mine. As I mention in Chapter 1, there only exists one complete French translation of this important work by René R. Khawam, Les Délices des coeurs ou ce que l’on ne trouve en aucun livre (Paris: Phébus, 1981; earlier incomplete edition, 1977). The passage quoted is on p. 262 of this French translation. An English translation of this work by Winston Leyland and Edward A. Lacey, The Delight of Hearts, or, What You Will Not Find in Any Book (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1988), was based on the French translation by Khawam, but only those sections dealing with male homosexuality are included. The chapter on the lesbian that is of interest here therefore does not exist in English.
29. Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (Paris: Vieweg, 1888–1920), s.v. “escoer.”
30. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 188.
31. The problems of relying on a dictionary when attempting to understand wordplay, puns, and sexual innuendos in medieval texts has been pointed out by Sheila Delany in her “Anatomy of the Resisting Reader: Some Implications of Resistance to Sexual Wordplay in Medieval Literature,” Exemplaria 4, no. 1 (1992): 19. Similarly, Laura Kendrick has discussed the editorial decisions and thus censorship that occurs in dictionaries which consequently do not permit the validation of subversive readings. See Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 200, and Ross G. Arthur, “On Editing Sexually Offensive Old French Texts,” in The Politics of Editing Medieval Texts, ed. Roberta Frank (New York: MAS Press, 1991), 19–64.
32. Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Falita, Rushd al-labib ila mu`asharat al-habib, ed. Ahmad ben Mohamed al-Yamani (Talah: al-Mayah al-Jamahiriyah al-`Uzma, 2002), 131. An earlier incomplete edition (chs. 9–11 only) of this work had been done by Mohamed Zouher Djabri, and accompanied by a German translation. It was submitted as a Ph.D. dissertation at the School of Medicine, University Friedrich-Alexander, Erlangen-Nuremberg, 1967. This edition was based on three of the many known manuscripts of the work: Gotha 2038; Paris, BN, Arabe Sloane 3051; and Berlin, Ahlwardt 6390. An English translation of this work is available under the title, An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition, ed. Salah Addin Khawwam, trans. Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam (Toronto: Aleppo, 1977).
33. It is certainly also possible that Etienne de Fougères wrote (or intended to write) “srutennes,” not “trutennes.” The Arabic word s/r/t occurs on numerous occasions in all of the Arabic homoerotic treatises that I consulted. It means “navel,” and it has a sexual connotation throughout the Arabic homoerotic tradition. It may well be that there is a scribal error in the Livre des manières due to a nonrecognition of a foreign word. Such an error would be consistent with a general tendency toward errors on the part of the scribe, a tendency that all editors of this manuscript have recognized.
34. Al-Tifashi, Nuzhat al-albab, 238 (translation mine); Délices des coeurs, 252.
35. Al-Tifashi, Nuzhat al-albab, 238 (translation mine); Délices des coeurs, 252–53.
36. Al-Tifashi, Nuzhat al-albab, 243 (translation mine); Délices des coeurs, 258.
37. Aside from the knowledge we have about Western translators who went to study in Spain, for instance, and who clearly had adequate knowledge of Arabic, there is some indication in various medieval French romances that perhaps a few individuals in courts may have also learned Arabic. Such is the case of la Fille in the romance La Fille du Comte de Ponthieu who learned to speak “Sarrasinois” once she found herself sold to a Muslim ruler. We can assume that she remained bilingual even after she returned to France at the conclusion of the romance.
38. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, eds., Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 6. This important collection of essays sheds important light on the linguistic diversity of Henry II’s courts. Interestingly, none of the authors addresses the role of Arabic therein.
39. The term “polyglossia” was coined by Mikhail Bakhtin who defines it as “the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 431. The citation about the death of myths as a consequence of polyglossia is on p. 68.
40. Anthony Lodge has pointed out that Etienne de Fougères combines humor with a serious tone and that he inserts in his text some episodes that are reminiscent of the fabliaux (introduction, 34–35).
41. The notion of the contact zone and the reading practice it involves come from Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 37. While Pratt focuses on the relations between European, Andean, and Spanish societies, I believe that her ideas are useful in thinking about the contacts between Arabic and French literatures in the Middle Ages.
42. The question of the language and authority (and lack thereof) of subaltern groups is powerfully argued in Gayatri Spivak’s classic article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
43. Al-Tifashi, Nuzhat al-albab, 237–38 (translation mine); Délices des coeurs, 251–52.
44. Etienne de Fougères’s ambiguous metaphors may thus be likened to the strategic use of ambiguity in the homoerotic writings of mystics in medieval Germany, as Ulrike Wiethaus has pointed out. Such ambiguity/obscurity may have allowed both the expression and the masking of lesbian sexual practices. See Ulrike Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse and Religion in Medieval Germanic Culture,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 288–321.
45. Jeri Guthrie, “La Femme dans Le Livre des manières: Surplus économique, surplus érotique,” Romanic Review 79 (1988): 254.
46. Robert Clark distinguishes between marginality and liminality and argues that lesbians in Etienne’s text are associated with the latter rather than the former (“Jousting Without a Lance,” 163–64).
47. Clark, “Jousting Without a Lance,” 165.
48. Obscenity has been defined as “the counter-code to whatever orthodoxy prevails” by Renatus Hartogs and Hans Fantel, Four Letter Word Games: The Psychology of Obscenity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 20.
49. On the use of Latin to express obscenity, see Jan Ziolkowski, ed., Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 10–11. On the tendency of editors to expunge from medieval French texts all sexual vocabulary deemed obscene, see Ross G. Arthur, “On Editing Sexually Offensive Old French Texts.”
Note to epigraphs: Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Diacritics 24, no. 2 (1994): 223, emphasis in original. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 110.
1. I am using the term “explicit” depictions of lesbianism to refer to literary representations such as we find in Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières and in his use of military rhetorical devices and metaphors (Chapter 2).
2. Michèle Perret, “Travesties et transsexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine,” Romance Notes 25, no. 3 (1985): 328. See also Christiane Marchello-Nizia and Michèle Perret, “Une Utopie homosexuelle au quatorzième siècle: L’île sans femmes d’Agriano,” Stanford French Review 14, nos. 1–2 (1990): 233.
3. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that a number of women chose to cross-dress in the medieval and premodern world both in the East and the West. In the West, the surviving documents point to an interplay of spiritual, political, social, and even medical factors that account for the existence of female transvestism. If women who cross-dressed were viewed positively in the literature depicting the lives of saints, since they were perceived to be attempting to emulate men and hence attain a higher level of being, they were viewed with suspicion in the social and political contexts because their cross-dressing threatened the established social order and questioned social and gender hierarchies. In this regard, Joan of Arc is perhaps the most prominent example of a medieval transvestite whose threat was so great that it could only be resolved by fire. In the medieval Middle East, surviving legal edicts indicate that some women may have cross-dressed in urban settings especially during the Mamluk period in the middle of the thirteenth century. On prohibitions against donning male attire in this context, see Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, “Femmes dans la ville Mamluke,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 2 (1995), 151–52. There is also evidence that suggests that women donned male (warrior) attire when they participated in the Crusades (European sources tending to be more reticent on the subject, however, in contrast to Arabic ones). Nevertheless, it appears that when depicting women dressed as knights and fighting in battles alongside men, most medieval authors (Muslim and Christian alike) condemned their behavior and viewed it as “unnatural.” On women’s participation in the Crusades, see James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1095–1274 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds., Gendering the Crusades (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001); Megan McLaughlin, “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval Europe,” Women’s Studies 17 (1990): 193–209; Helen Nicholson, “Women on the Third Crusade,” Journal of Medieval History 23, no. 4 (1997): 335–49. For a useful overview of cross-dressing in the Middle Ages, see Vern L. Bullough’s chapter on “Cross Dressing and Gender Role Change in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 223–42.
4. Cross-dressing (both literal and metaphorical) is an important textual strategy in fabliaux, especially notable in Berengier au long cul, and Trubert by Douin de Lavesne. Marian miracle plays from mid-fourteenth-century France and the Robin Hood plays from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England have been shown to be sites of cultural negotiations of gender and social roles. Representative examples of miracle plays which stage cross-dressed heroines include: Miracle de Théodore and Miracle de la fille d’un roy (which we will examine in detail below). Evidence of cross-dressed female monks/saints is abundant beginning with Thecla (first century, contemporaneous to Saint Paul) and especially from the middle of the fifth to the start of the sixth century: Anastasia, Apollonaria, Athanasia, Euphrosyne, Hilaria, Theodora; on these female saints, see John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism,” Viator 5, no. 1 (1974): 1–32. For a summary of the life of famous transvestite saints from the second to the fourteenth century, see the “Hagiographic Appendix” in Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996), 131–41.
5. Heldris de Cornuälle, Le Roman de Silence: A Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Verse-Romance, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1972); Tristan de Nanteuil, chanson de geste inédite, ed. K. V. Sinclair (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971). The story of Grisandole is part of the The Vulgate Version of Arthurian Romances Edited from Manuscripts in the British Museum, III, L’Estoire de Merlin, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1910), 300–312.
6. The names of these earliest cross-dressed women in the Islamicate tradition are: ‘Azza al-Mila’, Umm Sa`id al-Aslamiya, and the daughter of Yahya ben al-Hakam. They are said to ride and race horses and show their ankle bracelets. On the hadith tradition addressing cross-dressing and early women transvestites, see Habib Zayyat, “Al-Mar’a al-ghulamiyya fi al-Islam” [The Ghulamiyya in Islamicate Culture], al-Machriq 50 (1956): 153–57. See also Everett K. Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina,” Journal of the American Oriental Society III (1991): 671–93.
7. On Abu Nuwas’s ghulamiyyat poetry, see Ewald Wagner, Abu Nuwas: Eine Studie zur arabischen Literatur der frühen `Abbasidenzeit (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965); Philip F. Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005); Vincent Monteil, trans., Abu Nuwas: Le Vin, le vent, la vie: Poèmes traduits (Paris: Sindbad, 1979). The Arabic literary tradition of ghulamiyyat has its historical counterpart in the documented fashion of dressing young girls as boys (at times with painted mustaches) in ninth-century Baghdad at the court of al-Amin (one of Harun al-Rachid’s sons and patron of mujun poet Abu Nuwas). This tradition, instituted by Queen Zubayda in an attempt to “cure” her son (al-Amin) of his homosexuality, was quickly imitated by all urban women, and became a fashion in Baghdad. See Mas`udi, The Meadows of Gold: The Abbasids, trans. and ed. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (London: Kegan Paul, 1989), 390–91.
8. These Arabic folk and epic romances likely circulated in some early form in the eighth and ninth centuries, though they were written down between the fourteenth and sixteenth century. There is a great deal of borrowing between the One Thousand and One Nights and Arabic folk romances. On their interaction, see Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Penguin, 1994), 88–89; on cross-dressing in the One Thousand and One Nights, see Irwin, Arabian Nights, 159–77; on Arabic folk and epic romances, see M. C. Lyons, The Arabic Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-Telling, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an overview of women warriors in the Arabic tradition, see Remke Kruk, “The Bold and the Beautiful: Women and ‘fitna’ in the Sirat Dhat al-Himma: The Story of Nura,” in Women in the Medieval Islamic World, ed. Gavin R. G. Hambly (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 99–116; “Clipped Wings: Medieval Arabic Adaptations of the Amazon Myth,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 1, no. 2 (1994): 132–51; “Warrior Women in Arabic Popular Romance: Qannasa Bint Muzahim and Other Valiant Ladies,” Journal of Arabic Literature 24 (1993): 213–30 (pt. 1), and 25 (1994): 16–33 (pt. 2).
9. To my knowledge, there is only one additional Old French text that associates cross-dressing with female same-sex marriage: the mid-fourteenth-century story of Blanchandine developed in the epic of Tristan de Nanteuil. I will not examine this text here.
10. The story of Yde et Olive is the third of five texts that make up the entire poem of Huon de Bordeaux: La Chanson d’Esclarmonde, La Chanson de Clariet et Florent, La Chanson d’Yde et Olive, La Chanson de Croissant, and La Chanson de Godin.
11. This work is part of Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personages, a collection of forty plays, performed on a yearly basis in Paris from 1339 to 1382 (except in the years of the urban insurrections of the 1350s) by the Parisian goldsmiths’ guild. They are preserved in only one luxury manuscript (Paris, BN, fr. 819–820).
12. This fifteenth-century French prose text of Yde et Olive was written for three nobles at the court of Charles VII in 1454 (interestingly, in the midst of Joan of Arc’s rehabilitation) and printed in the early sixteenth century. It was translated into English prose in the first half of the sixteenth century by Sir John Bourchier (Lord Berners) and entitled The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux (reprinted in 1570 and in 1601); it was reedited by S. L. Lee in 1882–84 (London: N. Trübner), and reissued (New York: Kraus Reprint) in 1975 and 1981.
13. The story of Iphis and Ianthe is in Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 229–33. On the classical sources of Yde and Olive, and on the relation of this text to Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, see Nancy Vine Durling, “Rewriting Gender: Yde et Olive and Ovidian Myth,” Romance Languages Annual 1 (1989): 256–62.
14. Nabia Abbott, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Night’: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8 (1949): 129–64. The existence of Alf layla wa layla, considered to be a translation of the Persian Hazar afsaneh [One Thousand Tales] is also attested in al-Nadim’s Fihrist which represents a key source for our knowledge of tenth-century Islamicate culture. See Bayard Dodge, ed. and trans., The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2:713–14. The tenth-century chronicler Mas`udi also records the existence of a Persian text of the Nights, and an Arabic translation; cited in Nabia Abbott, “Ninth-Century Fragment,” 150.
15. Al-Qurti cited in René Khawam, ed. and trans., Les Mille et une nuits (Paris: Phébus, 1986), 1:26. On the availability of this collection in Fatimid Egypt, see Nabia Abbott, “Ninth-Century Fragment,” 132 and 151–52.
16. See especially Alice E. Lasater, Spain to England: A Comparative Study of Arabic, European and English Literature in the Middle Ages (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1974), and Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
17. On the original nucleus of stories, see Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 1:532–54.
18. I have used the following editions of the Yde and Olive texts. All citations to the thirteenth-century verse epic La Chanson d’Yde et Olive are from the latest edition of the text, namely, Barbara Anne Brewska’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive I, Croissant, Yde et Olive II, Huon et les Géants, Sequels to Huon de Bordeaux, as Contained in Turin MS L.II.14, an Edition” (Vanderbilt University, 1977), 406–48. There exists an earlier edition of this epic by Max Schweigel, Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive: Dreifortsetsungen der Chansun von Huon de Bordeaux, nach der einzigen Turiner Handschrift (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1889). The play Miracle de la fille d’un roy is part of Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, ed. Gaston Paris and Ulysse Robert (Paris: Firmin et Didot, 1876), 7:2–117. The French prose text of Yde et Olive is part of Les Prouesses et faictz du trespreux noble et vaillant Huon de Bordeaux, pair de France et Duc de Guyenne, ed. Benoist Rigaud (Lyon, 1587), fols. 166v–178r. I accessed it electronically at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (www.bnf.fr/). All references will be made to these editions and all translations are mine, unless noted otherwise.
19. While this incestuous plan is the king’s own idea in the verse and prose epic versions, it is advice given to him by his barons in the play. On the relation between the incest motif and the later lesbian episode, see Diane Watt, “Read My Lips: Clippying and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167–77.
20. There is no name change in the play or prose versions.
21. In the play, Ysabel arrives in Greece where she fights the Turks and the Saracens on behalf of the emperor of Constantinople.
22. The emperor of Constantinople in the miracle play.
23. Their conversation is witnessed by a monk placed there as an observer of their wedding night by the emperor of Constantinople in the miracle play.
24. Critical attention to the Yde and Olive stories include Diane Watt, “Behaving Like a Man? Incest, Lesbian Desire, and Gender Play in Yde et Olive,” Comparative Literature 50, no. 4 (1998): 265–85; Watt, “Read My Lips”; Jacqueline de Weever, “The Lady, the Knight, and the Lover: Androgyny and Integration in La Chanson d’Yde et Olive,” Romanic Review 81, no. 4 (1991): 371–91; Durling, “Rewriting Gender”; Robert Clark, “A Heroine’s Sexual Itinerary: Incest, Transvestism, and Same-Sex Marriage in Yde et Olive,” in Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland, 1998), 889–905.
25. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11. Some may argue that the “third term” can function as a stabilizing metaphor instead, as is evident in the concept of the Trinity for instance. Given the context of cross-dressing, however, I find Garber’s destabilizing notion particularly useful as it permits a discussion of the queering possibilities of the medieval text.
26. This is the main point of Watt’s important article “Behaving Like a Man?” My approach, however, differs from hers.
27. Garber, Vested Interests, 16.
28. In the miracle play, despite her cross-dressing and her self-presentation as a soldier in search of a master (vv. 1720–21), Ysabel continues to be portrayed as a noble person and is viewed by others around her as someone from a higher social standing.
29. Yde et Olive, v. 6629. In the fifteenth-century prose version, we find a parallel statement: “l’Allemant mena Ide en son hostel pour le servir nonobstant que autresfois ait esté servie” (“the German took Ide to his house so that she could serve him as she was served in the past”), Prouesses et faicts, 324.
30. Yde et Olive, vv. 2054–55. The sudden change in Yde’s linguistic register is reminiscent of that of the Lady of Esclavon in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval.
31. Yde et Olive, v. 6784 and v. 6777, respectively.
32. Prouesses et faicts, 325.
33. The occurrence of the term “putains” in these contexts can be gleaned from the list of usage compiled by Tobler-Lommatsch in his Altfranzösiches Wörterbuch (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1967), s.v. “putain.”
34. Garber, Vested Interests, 32.
35. Perhaps not surprisingly considering the genre of miracle plays, the expression of Olive’s desire is utterly absent from Miracle de la fille d’un roy.
36. Prouesses et faicts, 327. This love at first sight has no equivalent in the epic or play.
37. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Norton, 1969); Ibn Dau’ud al-Isfahani, Kitab al-zahra, ed. A. R. Nykl and I. Tuqan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); Ibn Hazm, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love, trans. A. J. Arberry (London: Luzac, 1953).
38. I have translated the Old French “volentiers” by “enjoyed.” The word literally also means “voluntarily” which hints at the active role that Olive plays in the gaze, and in the intimacy that will develop between the two women.
39. In the fifteenth-century prose text, this is how this scene is rewritten: “Olive qui aux creneaux estoit avoit bien veu et regardé les tresgrandes prouesses que Ide avoit fait en la bataille, dont elle l’aima tellement en son coeur que tout luy soubrioit de ioye, et dist si bas que nulle personne ne le l’entendit. A cestuy-la donne m’amour, laquelle ne fut oncques octroyee à home vivant: mais est bien droit et raison qu’à Ide mon amour soit octroyee et donnee, ainsi et par telles paroles se devisoit Olive à par elle.” (“Olive who was at the window had seen and observed the great acts of prowess that Ide had done in the battle. This led her to love him so deeply that all was joyous to her. She spoke to herself so low that no one heard it: ‘I give my love to him, a love that was never given to any living man. But it is only right that I should give my love to Ide.’”) Prouesses et faicts, 330.
40. The physical dimension of Olive’s desire is missing in the fifteenth-century prose text.
41. For the sexual meaning of the word “joie” in Old French writings, see Pierre Bec, Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours (Paris: Stock, 1984), 236.
42. The erotic charge of military prowess is a notion that was established in the medieval West with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mid-twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae; The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1969), 206. The Ovidian dictum militat omnes amans (every lover wages war) has had a great influence on the concept of love in the Middle Ages. On the relation between Ovid and French romance, see Eugene Vance, “Le Combat érotique chez Chrétien de Troyes: De la figure à la forme,” Poétique 12 (1972): 544–71; see also Nancy Huston and Sam Kinser, A L’amour comme à la guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1984).
43. Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot ou le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Champion, 1983), v. 6036; translation mine.
44. Only Yde and the reader are privy to the ambiguity raised by the cross-dressing and to the threat posed by Olive’s growing attachment.
45. Alexandre Leupin, “Ecriture naturelle et écriture hermaphrodite: Le De planctu Naturae d’Alain de Lille, un art poétique du XIIe siècle,” Diagraphe 9 (1976): 119–41.
46. The evolution in the status of marriage in the twelfth century has been well described by Georges Duby, Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre (Paris: Hachette, 1981). Duby terms the aristocratic form of marriage, “la morale des guerriers” and the church-sanctioned marriage, “la morale des prêtres.” See also James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
47. Prouesses et faicts, 333; the thirteenth-century verse text of Yde et Olive remains more implicit in its depiction of the marriage festivities (vv. 7144–46), while the dramatic rendition gives no information on the subject.
48. Interestingly, none of the critics who have analyzed the Yde and Olive stories address the religious emphasis in the texts.
49. Watt’s reading is more resolutely on the side of reciprocal erotic feelings between Yde and Olive; see Watt, “Read My Lips,” 173.
50. There is a very large bibliography on the use of erotic expression in religious writings both in Islam and in Christianity. In Islam, sufi (mystic) literature has been read as a space where the expression of the love for God fuses with homoerotic sentiments. See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975) and her “Eros–Heavenly and Not So Heavenly–in Sufi Literature and Life,” in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot (Malibu: Undena, 1979), 119–41. In Christianity, see Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Ulrike Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse and Religion in Medieval Germanic Culture,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 288–321; Ann Matter, “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (1986): 81–93; Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 180–200; Kathy Lavezzo, “Sobs and Sighs Between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1995), 175–98.
51. This is Robert Clark and Claire Sponsler’s conclusion in “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 341. It is also Watt’s overall conclusion in both articles cited above.
52. The deceptive nature of sight has become a topos in medieval literature by the thirteenth century. This topos was a logical development from the famous opposition between historia (sight, truth) and fabula (language, lie) developed by Cicero and popularized by Macrobius, Isidore of Seville, William of Conches, Bernardus Silvestris, Peter Abelard, and Alain of Lille among many others.
53. I am using the translation provided by Robert Clark (Clark and Sponsler, “Queer Play,” 325).
54. Clark and Sponsler, “Queer Play,” 326.
55. Yde et Olive, v. 7164; Prouesses et faicts, 334.
56. Yde et Olive, v. 7171; Prouesses et faicts, 334.
57. Yde et Olive, v. 7190; Prouesses et faicts, 334.
58. Yannick Carré, Le Baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age: Rites, symboles, mentalités à travers les textes et les images, 11e–15e siècles (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1992).
59. Yde et Olive, v. 6368. The same terms are repeated lines later at vv. 6409–10, v. 6423, and v. 6523. These words are also used in Prouesses et faicts, 319. No kissing or hugging is invoked in the Miracle de la fille d’un roy, either between father and daughter (the incest motif is absent from the miracle play) or between the two women.
60. The overtly sexual meaning of these words is also explicitly stated by the narrator of the prose text; see Prouesses et faicts, 320.
61. Watt, “Read My Lips,” 169.
62. Our reading of Yde and Olive thus lends support to Sautman and Sheingorn who invite critics to scrutinize anew the vocabulary of sexual practice in order to recover alternative meanings in the glossary of emotional attachment. See Francesca Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, eds., Same Sex Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 27. See also Judith Butler, “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 122.
63. These lines are absent from both the miracle play and the prose text.
64. The ambiguity of “the way it pleases me” is highlighted by the fact that the barons laugh at Olive’s response (v. 7200). The same scene is depicted in Prouesses et faicts, 324.
65. Contrary to Ysabel, Yde/Ide does not reveal her social class, however.
66. Prouesses et faicts, 334
67. It is indeed worth noting with Jacqueline de Weever that the grammatical gender instability that had been prevalent thus far in the epic ceases at this point. See de Weever, “The Lady, the Knight, and the Lover,” 388. It is also important to remember that from the church fathers’ point of view, transvestism was tolerated only as long as the woman remained cross-dressed and no one knew about the cross-dressing. On this subject, see Vern Bullough’s chapter on cross-dressing in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage, 227–31 in particular.
68. The term appears indeed in Prouesses et faicts, 335. Not surprisingly, the word is used by the king himself, although it is reported in indirect discourse.
69. The Buggery Act will establish it as such in England in 1533.
70. The threat of capital punishment is voiced in the thirteenth-century verse epic, vv. 7251–52; Prouesses et faicts, 335. On the capital punishment of lesbians in the Middle Ages, see Louis Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791,” Journal of Homosexuality 6 nos. 1–2 (Winter 1980–81): 11–25.
71. Yde et Olive, vv. 7261–72; Prouesses et faicts, 335.
72. “Ide et Olive s’allerent coucher ensemble et firent leur deduit, tellement qu’en icelle propre nuict ils engendrerent le beau Croissant.” (“Ide and Olive went to bed together and they made love, so much so that in that very night they conceived the beautiful Croissant”), Prouesses et faicts, 336.
73. This has been particularly well articulated in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
74. Ovid’s tale of “Iphis and Ianthe” describes in detail the growth of the penis on Iphis’s body. For a different reading, see Watt, “Behaving Like a Man?” 281.
75. Yde et Olive, vv. 6503–21.
76. Only in the miracle play does Ysabel state that she rejoices at the miracle. This is what she replies to Saint Michael who announced to her that God will intervene: “Le cuer m’avez, sire, esjouy” (“Sire, you have rejoiced my heart”), v. 2933. In this case, however, it seems that Ysabel’s happiness and relief are due to Saint Michael’s announcement that God will not let her down and will reward her for her infinite faith in him. Her happiness appears thus to be due to the news that God will help her, rather than to the sexual transformation that has not yet occurred, and that she still does not know about.
77. Watt, “Behaving Like a Man?” 274. This interpretation applies equally to the prose text. The question of lineage and genealogy in Yde and Olive is especially important because it appears to respond to the most pressing issue invoked in condemnations of sodomy in the Middle Ages, namely, its nonreproduction, and its role in bringing about the end of life (and of the world). That sodomy is a crime against humanity is precisely what Lavinie accuses Enéas of in Enéas, roman du Xlle siècle, ed. J. J. Salvedra de Grave (Paris: Champion, 1925–31), vv. 8596–98.
78. Garber, Vested Interests, 223; emphasis in original.
79. Yde et Olive, v. 7309.
80. It is interesting to note that although the end of the Yde and Olive II section informs the reader of this large family engendered by the now successfully transgendered Yde, the end of the Yde and Olive I section had pointed out that Yde and Olive will not have any other children, besides Croissant (“Ydé n’Olive n’orent nul enfant plus” [“Yde and Olive did not have any other children”], v. 7297).
81. The double marriage at the end of the play could, theoretically at least, be considered incestuous. On the relation between incest and female homoeroticism, see Watt, “Behaving Like a Man?” On incest in the Middle Ages, see Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 2001).
82. Michelle Szkilnik, “The Grammar of the Sexes in Medieval French Romance,” in Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland, 1998), 61–88.
83. The entire Huon de Bordeaux cycle seems heavily indebted to the Arabic storytelling tradition of the One Thousand and One Nights, and this topic merits a separate study in the future.
84. Francesca Sautman, “What Can They Possibly Do Together? Queer Epic Performances in Tristan de Nanteuil,” in Sautman and Sheingorn, Same Sex Love and Desire, 209. However, she does not compare specific echoes between the French text and the Arabic tale from the Arabian Nights as I do here. The subject of naming, while important in French romance, has only been examined in relation to Latin sources. On the role of naming, see Michèle Perret’s remarks in her “Travesties et transsexuelles,” 336–40 and her note 10 especially.
85. One might argue that because the verse epic Yde and Olive is written in a Picard dialect (with some East Frankish and Walloon forms), it is associated with Northern Europe and is thus unlikely to have come into contact with the Arabian Nights. However, there is a growing body of evidence that documents commercial and religious links between Northern France and the Mediterranean since at least 1087. Michel Rouche, “L’Age des pirates et des saints (Ve–Xie siècles),” in Histoire de Boulogne-sur-mer, ed. Alain Lottin (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983), 48.
86. In the fifteenth-century prose rendition of the text, the narrator explains the name of Croissant thus: “on le nomma Croissant pource qu’en celuy iour la lune fut veüe en croissant” (“he was named Croissant because that day the moon was seen waxing”), Prouesses et faicts, 336. Sautman points out that the name of Croissant appears “under another guise” in the contemporary Baudoin de Sebourc, though she does not specify which (“What Can They Possibly Do Together?” 226 n. 43).
87. Literally, the name “Croissant” would have been rendered in Arabic as “Hilal,” not “Qamar” (full moon); it is associated, however, with the general semantic field of “moon.”
88. Ibn Nasr al-Katib, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, ed. Salah Addin Khawwam, trans. Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam (Toronto: Aleppo, 1977), 192.
89. It is indeed through Qamar al-Zaman’s work as a gardener during his separation from Boudour, and his sale of vats full of olives that he will come to be recognized by the cross-dressed Boudour. In the tale from Arabian Nights, olives thus play a very crucial role in ensuring the recognition and reunification of the heterosexual couple.
90. Marjorie Garber, “The Chic of Araby: Transvestism, Transsexualism and the Erotics of Cultural Appropriation,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 237.
91. This character was nicknamed al-Zarqa’ and would have lived in the pre-Islamic era (Ibn Nasr al-Katib, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 86 n. 100).
92. This is recounted in the epic text vv. 6935–39; Prouesses et faictz, 328.
93. The comparison drawn here between Yde and Scheherazade invites the provocative question as to whether the Arabic storyteller can herself also be considered a lesbian. This question merits further investigation.
94. References to The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour come from Muhsin Mahdi’s Arabic edition entitled Kitab alf layla wa layla (The Book of alf layla wa layla), 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 1:591. Mahdi’s edition has been translated by Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 1995). However, Haddawy did not translate The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour as it appeared in Mahdi, but combined it with material from two key nineteenth-century printed editions, Calcutta II (1839–42) and Bulaq (1835). For this reason, I am providing my own translations of Mahdi’s Arabic text.
95. Mahdi, Kitab alf layla wa layla, 592.
96. I am using the term “redactor” when speaking about the “authorship” of the Arabian Nights for reasons of convenience, as outlined by Andras Hamori, “A Comic Romance from the Thousand and One Nights: The Tale of Two Viziers,” Arabica 30, no. 1 (1983): 38 n. 1. The term “redactor” has been further developed by David Pinault who writes: “Each redactor will doubtless have benefited from the creativity of oral reciters who transmitted and embellished the given tale before it was committed to writing. . . . The term redactor indicates that person who stands at the end of this chain of oral and textual transmission, that person responsible for the shape in which the story reaches us in its final written form in a given manuscript or printed text.” See his Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 16.
97. Garber, “Chic of Araby,” 229.
98. On oral performance as a privileged moment of creation, see Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). While Lord focuses on Homer, his theoretical framework is helpful in understanding the complexity of the Arabian Nights, its oral existence in the Middle Ages, about which we have limited knowledge, and its written record.
99. Although Mardrus claims to have translated the Bulaq (1835) and Calcutta II (1839–42) editions of Alf layla wa layla, a close reading of his text and a comparison of his translation with both the Bulaq and the Calcutta II editions reveals that he added many details and scenes absent from these earlier renditions.
100. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 261–62.
101. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 235.
102. Ibn Nasr, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 236.
103. We will recall that the same association between heterosexual wedding night and violence had also been made in the French verse epic, as we saw earlier (v. 7191).
104. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 31.
105. One Thousand and One Nights, ed. and trans. into French by Joseph Charles Mardrus; trans. into English by Pomys Mathers (Yugoslovia: Dorset Press, 1964), 2:67.
106. There is a tendency in contemporary scholarship (both in the East and the West) to consider Mahdi’s Arabic edition of Alf layla wa layla as the most “authentic” version. However, we must not forget the fact that the manuscript he used is simply the sole surviving one in the Middle Ages and that other renditions of Alf layla wa layla most certainly existed, though they left no written trace. We must also keep in mind the oral nature of this work which prohibits us from considering any of the surviving texts of the Arabian Nights as “definitive.” On the relation between oral performance and the written text, see Lord, The Singer of Tales, chapter 6 especially.
107. Some may argue that lesbianism is permitted in the Arabic tale precisely because of the cultural practice of the harem. Until today, however, the Western-held association between lesbianism and harem culture, though certainly possible because the harem is an all-female community, has still not been established definitively.
Note to epigraph: Saint Augustine, cited in Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8.
1. Jean Renart, Escoufle, ed. Franklin Sweetser (Geneva: Droz, 1974), v. 9073. All references will be made to this edition and all translations are mine. The Escoufle is one of three texts attributed to the same author (Jean Renart), including the Lai de L’ombre (ca. 1217) and the Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (ca. 1228). Presumed to have been composed first, the Escoufle is still considered by critics to be the least complex of Jean Renart’s literary productions and has thus perhaps consequently been the most neglected of his works.
2. On the symbolism of the kite, see the very useful article by Baudouin van den Abeele, “L’Escoufle; Portrait littéraire d’un oiseau,” in special issue, ed. Brian Levy and Paul Wachers, Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society 1 (1988): 5–15.
3. In the Escoufle, the lovers’ separation leads exactly to 3,105 lines of adventures (from v. 4602 to v. 7707).
4. On the importance of the paratext, see Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), and Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner, Seuils de l’oeuvre dans le texte médiéval (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002). Critics who have given a prime role to prologues and epilogues in the works of Jean Renart include Jean-Charles Payen, “Structure et sens de Guillaume de Dole,” in Etudes de langue et de littérature du Moyen Age offerts à Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1973), 483–98.
5. Roberta Krueger, “Transforming Maidens: Singlewomen’s Stories in Marie de France’s Lais and Later French Courtly Narratives,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 148.
6. Although the exact definition of the genre of the “realistic romance” has generated much controversy, most critics agree that it is one that portrays “real” social spaces and incorporates a number of characters who (according to some) could be historically identified. Texts belonging to this genre give an especially prominent role to women, to female close relations, and to the heroines’ move across domestic, urban, and courtly settings in order to surmount various types of obstacles (social, familial, psychological). For this reason, realistic romances have also been dubbed “feminocentric.” For a definition of the genre of the realistic romance, see Rita Lejeune, “Jean Renart et le roman réaliste au XIIIème siècle,” in Grundriss der Romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Jean Frappier and Reinhold Grimm, vol. 4, Le Roman jusqu’à la fin du 13e siècle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1978), 400–453, and John W. Baldwin, “‘Once There Was an Emperor . . .’: A Political Reading of the Romances of Jean Renart,” in Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole, ed. Nancy Vine Durling (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 45–82. G. Charlier, speaking of the “realistic” nature of Jean Renart’s romances, writes: “Feudal life is described as is, not only by its most glittering features, but also by its most modest facets, in its daily routine.” “L’Escoufle et Guillaume de Dole,” in Mélanges de philologie romane . . . offerts à Maurice Wilmotte (Paris: Champion, 1910), 1:93, translation mine. The term “feminocentric” romance was coined by Nancy K. Miller in The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), and used by Nancy Jones with reference to Jean Renart’s romances in “The Uses of Embroidery in Jean Renart: Gender, History, Textuality,” in Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, ed. Nancy Vine Durling, 13–44.
7. The key role that the kite plays in the Escoufle has long puzzled critics in their quest for antecedents. In the introduction to his nineteenth-century edition of the romance, Paul Meyer, first editor of the Escoufle, noted the thematic parallel in the use of the thief-kite between this text and other earlier medieval romances, such as Guillaume d’Angleterre, attributed to Chrétien de Troyes. In addition, Meyer pointed to the multiple similarities between Jean Renart’s Escoufle and an Old German tale, der Busant, including the theme of the kite that is caught and destroyed by the hero. He concluded however that both the Escoufle and der Busant (today believed to have been composed slightly later) were likely written independently, presumably with a common source, one that has so far not been identified. See Paul Meyer’s introduction to the Escoufle (Paris: SATF, 1894). Others, while recognizing the fact that the Escoufle is part of an alternative tradition to the matters of Rome, Brittany, France, and even Byzantium, have not examined the relation of this romance to the matter of Araby, as I propose to do here; See Nancy Jones, “Uses of Embroidery,” 15.
8. On the intimate relation that develops between Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous, see Chapter 3.
9. I am using this term here as an extension of the meaning given to it by Alison Adams to speak about the less obvious allusions to the Tristan and Ysolde legend in the Escoufle. See her “Jean Renart’s l’Escoufle and the Tristan Legend: Moderation Rewarded,” in Rewards and Punishments in the Arthurian Romances and Lyric Poetry of Mediaeval France: Essays Presented to Kenneth Varty on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 3. Several other critics have examined the intertextual references between the Escoufle and Tristan and Yseut, including L. Sudre, “Les Allusions à la légende de Tristan dans la littérature du Moyen Age,” Romania 15 (1886): 534–57, and Rita Lejeune, “La Coupe de Tristan dans l’Escoufle de Jean Renart,” in The Medieval Alexander Legend and Romance Epic, Essays . . . David J. A. Ross, ed. P. Noble, L. Polak, and C. Isoz (New York: Kraus International, 1982), 119–24.
10. E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
11. Ingrid Perbal, “L’Orient dans les soieries du musée de Cluny,” Qantara (Fall 2004): 19.
12. Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173–81 and 199–203 especially.
13. See Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Medieval Silks in Montpellier: The Silk Market ca. 1250–ca. 1350,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 117–40; Alexandre André Germain, Histoire du commerce de Montpellier antérieurement à l’ouverture du port de Cette, 2 vols. (Montpellier: Imprimerie de Jean Martel, ainé, 1861); Louis Thomas, Montpellier, ville marchande: Histoire économique et sociale de Montpellier des origines à 1870 (Montpellier: Librairie Vallat, Librairie Coulet, 1936); Wilhelm Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1959); and Louis de Mas Latrie, Traités de paix et de commerce et documents divers concernant les relations des chrétiens avec les Arabes de l’Afrique septentrionale au Moyen-Age, 2 vols. (New York: B. Franklin, 1963).
14. While still in the meadow, Aelis has a brief encounter with a young man who stumbles upon her as she is waking up and discovering Guillaume’s disappearance. This occurs before she leaves the meadow and enters the city.
15. Heldris de Cornuälle, Le Roman de Silence: A Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Verse-Romance, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1972), vv. 2496–688.
16. The threat Aelis feels as a single woman in an urban setting recalls indeed that which many maidens experience in courtly romances, as depicted for example in the customs of Logres. These traditions, portrayed in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot ou le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Champion, 1983, vv. 1295–316), indicate that while a maiden traveling alone would bring shame upon a knight who dishonors her, she instantly becomes the property of the man who can defeat the knight who accompanies her without incurring any blame. On the customs of Logres and the precarious status of women in Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, see Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 39–41.
17. Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (Paris: Vieweg, 1888–1920), s.v. “jesir,” and “lis.”
18. This rule (tentatively attributed to Waldebert of Luxeuil) is translated by Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg in The Ordeal of Community (Toronto: Peregrina, 1993), rule 14, “How they should always sleep in the schola,” 92–93.
19. Brown, Immodest Acts, 8. The same rule had been already dictated by Donatus of Besançon in the seventh century under rule 65, “How they ought to sleep.” See McNamara and Halborg, trans., The Ordeal of Community, 67.
20. Brown, Immodest Acts, 8.
21. The best known example of a woman who conflates these categories is the maiden in the Chevalier de la Charrette who explains to Lancelot the customs of Logres, who helps the knight, all the while staging her own rape (vv. 1195–280).
22. On such damsels in medieval romance, see Krueger, “Transforming Maidens,” 164–65.
23. On the term “feminocentric,” see n. 6 above. On female heroines in Jean Renart’s corpus, see Frédérique Le Nan, “De Quelques ̰pérégrines’ ou la mobilité des dames dans l’oeuvre présumée de Jean Renart,” Revue des langues romanes 104, no. 1 (2000): 47–70.
24. G. T. Diller, “L’Escoufle: Une Aventurière dans le roman courtois,” Le Moyen Age 85, no. 1 (1979): 34–43. Critics who have read the romance in nonsexual terms include Linda Clemente, who has noted that in the world that Aelis builds for herself after her separation from Guillaume, she “matures without love,” adding that Aelis relinquishes “her old identity, moves into a new world, an unknown city. Her entrance into this world is also her entrance into a world unadorned by love. . . . Love no longer inhabits or forms the guiding principle of her life.” See her “Aelis’ Introspective Silence in the Feminist World of Jean Renart’s Escoufle,” Cincinnati Romance Review 10 (1991): 31 (emphasis mine). She also writes that the entire romance may be read as “a manual for how to succeed without love” (32). Even though she recognizes the ambiguous intimacy that Aelis develops with Ysabel and the fact that this same-sex relation satisfies Aelis’s need for affection, Clemente never uses the word “love” to describe this intimacy. Similarly, while Nancy Vine Durling points to Aelis’s self-reliance and her “ingenuity,” and while she observes how “the energetic sensuality of the young lovers [Aelis and Guillaume] is described with refreshing clarity and candor,” she remains silent on the entire middle episode of the romance recounting Aelis’s intimate friendships (Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, 2). Roberta Krueger reads Aelis and Ysabel’s bond as a “deep intimate friendship,” though not necessarily a same-sex one (“Transforming Maidens,” 172–73).
25. Diller, “L’Escoufle: Une Aventurière dans le roman courtois,” 37.
26. The question as to whether Aelis’s decision to form relationships with women after Guillaume’s disappearance is due to a defense mechanism (as Diller maintains) or reflects an independent will is difficult to resolve. The fact that she forms multiple intimate bonds with women complicates the picture further. The multiple theories on the “causes” of homosexuality pertain to the discussion at hand: Are Aelis’s same-sex relations socially induced, or are they innate?
27. My work on the Escoufle thus supports Judith Bennett who states a similar conclusion in her “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, nos. 1–2 (2000): 1–24.
28. The wide definition of aberrant sexualities in the Middle Ages will be expanded in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. See Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), and James A. Brundage, “Sex and Canon Law,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 33–50.
29. A. Grisay, G. Lavis, and M. Dubois-Stasse, “La Jeune fille,” in les Dénominations de la femme dans les anciens textes littéraires français (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1969), 157–87.
30. Susan Mosher Stuard, “Single by Law and Custom,” in Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen, 106. On the status of ancillae, see also Charles Verlinden, “Le Mariage des esclaves,” in Il matrimonio nella società altro medievale (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Altro Medioevo, 1977), 2:569–601.
31. The conventional medieval system of classification was made up of three sexual orders: virgins, wives, and widows. In addition, both Jacques de Vitry and Gilbert de Tournai composed sermons for male and female servants who stood outside the three commonly accepted social categories in the Middle Ages. See Jean Longère, “Deux sermons de Jacques de Vitry Ad Servos et Ancillas,” in La femme au Moyen Age, ed. Michel Rouche and Jean Heuclin (Maubeuge: Publications de la Ville de Maubeuge, 1990), 261–97, and Sharon Farmer’s discussion in “‘It Is Not Good That [Wo]man Should Be Alone’: Elite Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris,” in Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen, 86–95 and especially her n. 41 on p. 101.
32. The use of the word ancele to refer to Ysabel goes hand in hand with the word meschine employed several times with reference to her. According to Godefroy, one of the meanings of meschine is precisely a servant. Interestingly, this term can also at times mean concubine (Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “meschine”).
33. Jacques de Vitry and Humbert of Romans believed firmly in the threat posed by female servants and hence collapsed the categories of female servants and prostitutes. See Farmer, “Elite Responses,” 88–90. We will return to this question in Chapter 5.
34. Medieval church legislation believed that “if the free party–that is, the husband–understood and consented to marriage with an unfree woman, the marriage was valid.” See Stuart, “Single by Law and Custom,” 119. The question of the rights of slaves to marry was discussed in canon law under the heading of “error of condition.”
35. This is parallel to Yde’s condition to obtain Olive’s consent to marry prior to concluding their marriage in the verse epic of Yde et Olive, as we saw in the last chapter.
36. Stuard points specifically to the laws of Walter of Mortagne that gave the right to unfree women to marry regardless of the master’s consent and that permitted an ancilla to escape if she was prevented from cohabiting with her husband. These ideas found their way into the text Dignum est of Pope Hadrian IV, later compilations of papal letters, Bernard of Pavia’s Breviarium extravagantium, and Gregory IX’s 1234 Decretales (Stuard, “Single by Law and Custom,” 118).
37. Without developing the social argument or lesbian possibilities that I propose here, Krueger reaches a similar conclusion and points to the “benefits of female friendship” in the Escoufle and the way “poor women can elevate themselves by association with wealthy women or noble households” (“Transforming Maidens,” 174–75).
38. For a different reading, see Jones, “Uses of Embroidery,” 32.
39. This is an actual legal category in the Middle Ages, as Stuard demonstrates in “Single by Law and Custom.”
40. My reading of the Escoufle supports Wiethaus’s observation that the medieval discourse on same-sex attraction focuses on kissing and caressing, rather than on genital activity. See Ulrike Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse and Religion in Medieval Germanic Culture,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 295.
41. The same strategy is used in women’s devotional writings (such as Hadewijch’s) as analyzed by Wiethaus in “Female Homoerotic Discourse,” 291.
42. On homosexuality mimicking and undermining heterosexuality, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31.
43. On the notion of “exclusivity in affection” in monastic contexts, see Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse,” 298–306.
44. The sexual connotations of the relationship between Aelis and Ysabel becomes even more pronounced when contrasted to the development of the friendship between Fresne and Rose in Renaut’s Galeran de Bretagne (ca. 1216). If Renaut is rewriting the Escoufle (as some critics have claimed), I would argue that he is doing so by downplaying all sexual ambiguity and by obscuring evidence of same-sex eroticism between women from his text.
45. Aelis’s visit to the lady of Montpellier is not entirely devoid of business interests, of course. In fact, it may also be viewed part of a well thought-out marketing strategy by a skilled businesswoman in her attempt to draw valuable prospective new customers. It could be read as a calculated bribery whose veritable aim is to entice the lady of Montpellier into speaking to her, in fact to force her to get acquainted with her (the word “devra” is used, vv. 5564–65). For Aelis, becoming acquainted with the lady of Montpellier is vital to the success of her business, for thanks to the lady’s social status and purchasing power, Aelis is faced with the very real potential of increasing her own economic wealth and her social status. The lady of Montpellier can also bestow upon Aelis much needed social recognition if she were to speak to her in church as other ladies do.
46. Although she does not discuss the Escoufle, or mention the “friendship gift,” Judith Kellogg’s work on the gift has been very helpful and my reading throughout this section owes much to her analysis. See her Medieval Artistry and Exchange: Economic Institutions, Society and Literary Form in Old French Narrative (New York: Peter Lang), 1989.
47. This is what E. Jane Burns has shown in her Courtly Love Undressed, 40.
48. The notion that friendship entails the equality of the partners is a leitmotiv well attested since Cicero. It referred regularly, however, to friendship between men, rather than between women. The question of female friendships has been studied by scholars of the Renaissance, moreso than by medievalists. See, for instance, Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981); Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendships: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); and Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
49. The same automatic transfer had occurred earlier in the romance when Aelis received the ring from her mother. As soon as she accepted it, she mentally intended to give it to Guillaume as a token of her love (v. 3838). And we will recall that as soon as Guillaume received the ring, he lost it to the kite.
50. The key here is the fact that the liaison is heterosexual. Friendship between women is allowed as long as it is overshadowed (and thus protected by) a heterosexual relation, be it legitimate (marriage) or not (adultery). This invites a comparison. Which one was considered more dangerous or threatening in the Middle Ages: adultery or lesbianism? It appears that in both the West and in the Islamicate world, it was adultery.
51. Although church literature often reiterated the notion that marriage included companionship–arguing that since Eve was created from Adam’s rib, she was neither his servant nor his master, but should stand by his side as his companion–there remained a heavy emphasis on the fact that the husband was the lord and master of his house. As a man, he was considered the “head” and woman the “body.” See Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Routledge, 1983), 65–68; R. H. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Talk Back (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
52. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “per.”
53. The timely exit of the servants reminds one of the discreet departure of the servants during Aelis and Guillaume’s last private meeting in the emperor’s palace (vv. 3373–81). Such parallels between the description of intimacy in heterosexual contexts and in same-sex contexts reveal the extent to which, in the Escoufle, same-sex relations are developed along the model of heterosexuality.
54. Diller does not discuss the eroticism of this scene; he explains Aelis’s refusal to stay longer with the lady of Montpellier as her desire to remain faithful to her love for Ysabel (“L’Escoufle: Une Aventurière dans le roman courtois,” 40).
55. Ahmed Ibn Souleiman, Le Bréviaire arabe de l’amour, trans. Mohamed Lasly (Arles: Editions Philippe Picquier, 1998), chap. 21, p. 121. On the questionable authorship of this text, see Lasly’s introduction. The Return of the Sheikh to His Youth is now considered not to have been an original work, but rather a translation and compilation of earlier Arabic sexological treatises.
56. On Arabic as the language of the obscene, see my discussion in Chapter 2.
57. If at this point in the romance, the count of Saint-Gilles is wearing the belt embroidered with the coat of arms of the count of Montpellier, at the end of the romance, he will exchange this coat of arms with that of Guillaume.
58. The important association between sewing and loving in the chansons de toile has a vast bibliography. For a recent overview as well as a striking new interpretation, see Burns’s Courtly Love Undressed, chapter 3.
59. It is interesting to ponder the use of the term lait in Old French texts. The same term is used by Jean Renart in his defense of the romance title in the epilogue (Escoufle, v. 9073), as we discussed at the beginning of this chapter. It is also the same term that Etienne de Fougères uses to describe lesbians in his Livre des manières (v. 1097; see Chapter 2). Could the adjective lait have been used to refer to alternative sexual practices?
60. These code words function similarly to the use of Arabic in Old French texts as we saw earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 2.
61. It is important to draw a parallel here with the character of Enide, who is also depicted as a friend and lover in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide (ed. Mario Roques [Paris: Champion, 1973]). While such a double function was innovative in the context of the depiction of medieval marriage, the establishment of female relations as friends and lovers is equally novel in the context of representations of female friendships in medieval secular literature.
62. The difference between Jaufre Rudel and the princess of Tripoli (or Conrad and Lienor) is social too, though this dimension is never discussed by critics who only take into account the geographical separation.
63. It is unclear who toutes refers to exactly. Does it refer only to Aelis and the countess, or does it also include Ysabel? whichever it may be, our proposed interpretation remains unchanged.
64. The associations man-spirit and woman-body have been discussed extensively in scholarship. See among many others Shahar, Fourth Estate, 66.
65. On courtliness being depicted as the joining of the hands of a man and a woman, see E. Jane Burns, “Refashioning Courtly Love,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 125. The notion of joining the hands of two women is especially transgressive when one remembers that it is precisely one of the prohibitions made in the rules and regulations of female communities, such as the seventh-century rule of Donatus of Besançon. See rule 32 in McNamara and Halborg, trans., The Ordeal of Community, 51.
66. The erotic connotations of the women’s kisses recall the scene in Robert de Blois’s thirteenth-century romance, Floris and Lyriopé, in which Floris, cross-dressed as his twin sister Florie, kisses the unsuspecting Lyriopé. The latter, believing she is being kissed by her female friend, comments on the fact that she has never heard of two women kissing and loving each other in this way: “Onques mais n’an oï novales / Que s’entremassent dous puceles” (vv. 1010–11); in Robert de Blois, Floris et Lyriopé, ed. Paul Barrette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Roberta Krueger points to the literary gaming present in this scene of Floris and Lyriopé, writing that it “is surely to titillate more than it is to instruct.” See her “Constructing Sexual Identities in the High Middle Ages: The Didactic Poetry of Robert de Blois,” Paragraph 13 (1990): 121. It is the same arousing kiss that we encounter in the Escoufle between Aelis and the countess; kissing is a highly satisfying experience for the two women.
67. Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
68. The strategy that consists of rendering something unacceptable into something acceptable is also at work in the pastourelle where rape becomes authorized. See Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 104–21.
Note to epigraph: Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 17.
1. All references to Jean Renart’s Escoufle are made to Franklin Sweetser’s edition (Geneva: Droz, 1974), and all translations are mine.
2. On Aelis’s intimate relation with Ysabel, and other women, see Chapter 4.
3. Roberta Krueger, “Transforming Maidens: Singlewomen’s Stories in Marie de France’s Lais and Later French Courtly Narratives,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 173
4. Roberta Krueger, “Constructing Sexual Identities in the High Middle Ages: The Didactic Poetry of Pierre de Blois,” Paragraph 13 (1990): 105–31.
5. Ysabel’s transgression of social lines is one manifestation of two other similar social transgressions in the romance: (1) the threat posed by the serfs who had been elevated to the level of advisors by the emperor of Rome and who end up betraying him; and (2) the debate surrounding the appropriateness of a marriage between Guillaume, son of a count, and Aelis, daughter of an emperor. Only in the case of Ysabel do clothes play a role in the confusion of social rank. This may be attributed to the fact that social promotion may have been considered a more significant threat to medieval society when it was the promotion of a woman rather than a man.
6. E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 37.
7. James A. Brundage, “Sumptuary Laws and Prostitution in Medieval Italy,” Journal of Medieval History 13 (1987): 343–55.
8. This double transgression of the personal and the social is another one of the destabilizing elements introduced by the kite in the romance that I discussed in the previous chapter. The kite often had a social meaning in the Middle Ages and was associated with those who attempted to change their social state and to trick others into believing they were part of a social class to which they did not belong. In this sense, Ysabel might be considered to be a representative of the social function of the kite in the romance. See Baudoin van den Abeele, “L’Escoufle, portrait littéraire d’un oiseau,” in special issue, ed. Brian Levy and Paul Wachers, Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society 1 (1998): 5–15.
9. Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Les Brodeuses et la ville,” 50 rue de Varenne. Supplemento italo-francese di nuovi argomenti, 3rd ser., supl. no. 43 (1992): 94. See also A. Adams, “Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle and the Tristan Legend: Moderation Rewarded,” in Rewards and Punishments . . . Essays Presented to Kenneth Varty, ed. Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy (Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 1–7.
10. Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History ofWomen in the Middle Ages, translated by Chaya Galai (London: Routledge, 1983), 200; see also Baumgartner, “Les Brodeuses et la ville,” 90.
11. This is precisely what Fresne tells the abbess of Beauséjour in Galeran de Bretagne moments before her departure from the convent (Renaut, Galeran de Bretagne, ed. Lucien Foulet [Paris: Champion, 1925], v. 3881). For other literary examples of women and embroidery, see Baumgartner, “Les Brodeuses et la ville,” 90, Nancy Jones, “Uses of Embroidery in the Romances of Jean Renart: Gender, History, Textuality,” in Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole, ed. Nancy Vine Durling (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 21–22, and Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 86–87.
12. The most compelling example of the use of embroidery to empower women is that of Lienor in Guillaume de Dole who embroiders a belt that will prove both her innocence and the lies of the seneschal who accused her of illicit sexual relations; it is this very belt that will ultimately permit her social ascent and marriage to the emperor. See Helen Solterer, “At the Bottom of the Mirage, a Woman’s Body: Le Roman de la Rose of Jean Renart,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 213–33. See also Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 87.
13. Krueger “Transforming Maidens.” Aelis thus also prefigures the character of Oiseuse in Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose as discussed by Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 77–80.
14. Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 29.
15. Farmer, Surviving Poverty, 23; see also Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier,” in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 117.
16. Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years After Marian Dale,” in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 12. Judith Bennett and Maryanne Kowaleski also point out that “in most medieval towns and cities, even the most skilled female trades and crafts never formed gilds” (18).
17. Aelis’s remarkable achievements are evident when compared to Marian Dale’s finding that most skilled townswomen were married to gild members (Dale, “The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century,” Economic Historical Review 4 [1933]: 324–35). Similarly, Shahar has pointed out that independent female merchants who engaged in trade (both foreign and domestic) in the Middle Ages were spinsters, married women, or widows (Fourth Estate, 195). Aelis of course is none of these. As far as the town of Montpellier is concerned, André Gouron has noted that of all guilds, only the caritat des fourniers (a type of baker guild) seems to have included women. See André Gouron, La Réglementation des métiers en Languedoc au Moyen Age (Geneva: Droz, 1958), 245–46; Reyerson, “Women in Business,” 117–44; and Jones, “Uses of Embroidery.” While Jones argues that Renart downplays the economic value of Aelis and Ysabel’s embroidery (31), I will demonstrate the opposite.
18. Aelis’s business stands in marked contrast to Fresne’s embroidery in Galeran de Bretagne, a romance to which the Escoufle (composed some twenty years earlier) has often been compared.
19. Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (Paris: Vieweg, 1888–1920), s.vv. “joiaux,” “ouvraigne.”
20. Judith Bennett has observed that despite the semantic association of hetaira (Greek for “courtesan”) with hetairistria (term used by Plato and others for same-sex female love), the relation between lesbianism and prostitution has not been discussed by medievalists, in contrast to the work done on this association for the modern period. See her “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, nos. 1–2 (2000): 11–12. On embroidery workshops serving as undercover prostitution houses, see Shahar, Fourth Estate, 206–9. The association between Aelis and prostitution is only hinted at by G. T. Diller who calls Aelis a “courtisane aventurière” (adventurous courtesan) in his “L’Escoufle: Une Aventurière dans le roman courtois,” Le Moyen Age 85, no. 1 (1979): 39 and 43. The association between embroidery and prostitution in this romance is all the more striking because it sharply contrasts with the teachings of Western Christianity which have traditionally linked embroidery to the Virgin Mary, virtue, chastity, and industry, see Jones, “Uses of Embroidery,” 18–21, 27.
21. Farmer, Surviving Poverty, 23. Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 65–66, 103; Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); James A. Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” in Bennett et al., Sisters and Workers, 79–99.
22. Shahar, Fourth Estate, 206–9. Nancy Jones points out a similar association between embroidery and sexuality (though not necessarily prostitution) in Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole. She writes that Lienor’s claim to have been raped by the seneschal while embroidering is based upon the idea that in the Middle Ages the embroideress is “inherently tempting to male eyes because of her apparent passivity and self preoccupation.” “Uses of Embroidery,” 26.
23. On the meaning of “feme” in the Middle Ages and all the various terms that are used to speak about women, see A. Grisay, G. Lavis, and M. Dubois-Stasse, Les Dénominations de la femme dans les anciens textes littéraires français (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1969), 56–68.
24. Grisay et al., Les Dénominations de la femme, 63.
25. I am using the word “initiated” with qualification since despite the use of the word “pucele” in the earlier part of the romance, it is questionable whether Aelis’s relationship with Guillaume is entirely asexual. But this question falls outside the limits of the present study.
26. Tertullian, “The Apparel of Women,” in Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), 148. On the influence of Tertullian on twelfth- and thirteenth-century clerics and theologians, see Michel Zink, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 (Paris: Champion, 1982).
27. Zink, La Prédication en langue romane, 373; translation mine.
28. Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 40.
29. Their ostentatiousness contrasts with Frene’s attempt to go unnoticed in Galeran de Bretagne (vv. 4162–65).
30. Shahar notes that a 1364 royal decree in England recognized women’s right to engage simultaneously in several crafts to finance their households, in contrast to men (Fourth Estate, 197). Even though the Escoufle was composed some 150 years earlier and in a different sociopolitical milieu, what we know about medieval Montpellier seems to suggest that the situation was no different on the Continent in the early thirteenth century and that women had to work at several jobs in order to provide for their families.
31. Etienne Boileau, Le Livre des métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, xiiie siècle, ed. René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1879), 208–9. The information about barbers is included with the category “Surgeons” (“Des Cirurgiens”).
32. Monica Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” in Bennett et al., Sisters and Workers, 44 and n. 9 especially. See also Stephen R. Ell’s article “Barber” in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1982–89). I would like to express my gratitude to Michael McVaugh for many valuable conversations on medieval medicine.
33. Jacqueline Liault, Montpellier la médiévale (Nîmes: C. Lacour, 1990), 218–19; Jean Baumel, Histoire d’une seigneurie du Midi: Naissance de Montpellier (985–1213) (Montpellier: Editions Causse et Cie, 1969), 64.
34. Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society, 98–99. Brundage discusses how canon law (and Gratian’s Decretum in particular) warned Christians against frequenting bathhouses because of the moral threat they posed, in his “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” 95.
35. While Fresne in Galeran de Bretagne, like Aelis, excels in embroidery, singing, and game playing, it is important to note that her singing and game playing are situated outside the embroidery business, not part of it: Fresne works during the day; she plays the harp and sings in the mornings and at night, and she plays chess during the holidays. The segmentation of Fresne’s life and activities aims at highlighting the nonsexual nature of her actions and at removing any ambiguity at the level of vocabulary or skills depicted. In Galeran de Bretagne, written some twenty years after the Escoufle, the activities of embroidery, singing, and game playing become associated with the private sphere, and disconnected from the sexual meaning they hold in Jean Renart’s romance.
36. I would argue that singing in the chansons de toile is equivalent to Aelis’s storytelling. On the chansons de toile, see Michel Zink, ed., Les Chansons de toile (Paris: Champion, 1977), and Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, chap. 3. On the relation between poetic skills and cloth work, see Jones, “Uses of Embroidery.”
37. Baumgartner, “Les Brodeuses et la ville,” 94; translation mine.
38. If anyone in the Escoufle fits the description of medieval prostitutes given by critics (Brundage, Karras, Otis, Kettle), it is Ysabel, Aelis’s companion: she is young, unmarried, lives in the home of her employer (Aelis); she is an immigrant to the city; she is an unskilled worker who sews towels and wimples (v. 5454) rather than embroidering lavish silks.
39. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “plaire.”
40. The danger of the association of tales with sexuality was already noticed by canonists who threatened men with excommunication if they were found conversing with women of suspect morals, since these talks could lead to greater intimacy. In the thirteenth century, Jacques de Vitry had even spoken against brothels sharing premises with scholars’ halls and thus competing for the clerics’ attention. See Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” 88–89, 95.
41. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “hante.”
42. Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 129.
43. This ambiguity might be due to the fact that medieval canonists themselves since Saint Augustine (ca. 354–430) had a very ambiguous attitude toward prostitution, which was considered to be preferable to the general spread of licentiousness; see Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” 84.
44. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “menestrel.”
45. On the association between single women and prostitution, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, “At the Margin of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe,” in Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Vickie L. Ziegler (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 1995), 1–17; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 140–58; Sharon Farmer, “‘It Is Not Good That [Wo]man Should Be Alone’: Elite Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 87; see also her Surviving Poverty, Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” 129.
46. Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” 132.
47. Brundage explains that the basic criteria for the legal and theological definition of prostitution is “promiscuity and gain” in his “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” 81. Shahar has argued that medieval society only had very scattered cases of women who worked without being in financial need; Margery Kempe is one of them. See Fourth Estate, 195.
48. Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” 133.
49. Aelis’s religious attitudes stands in contrast to that of Fresne in Galeran de Bretagne.
50. My reading contrasts with Linda Clemente’s view that after her separation from Guillaume and within the Saint-Gilles household specifically, Aelis’s life is marked by an all-feminine space in which “men play very minor roles.” See her “Aelis’s Introspective Silence in the Feminist World of Jean Renart’s Escoufle,” Cincinnati Romance Review 10 (1991): 29.
51. Tibaut, Le Roman de la poire, ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Paris: SATF, 1985), vv. 453–54; translation mine.
52. Diller calls the count “le vigoureux libertin” (the vigorous libertine) in his “L’Escoufle: Une Aventurière dans le roman courtois,” 36. Aelis herself seems to be acutely aware of the compromising relationship she has developed with the count, vv. 7600–601.
53. The nakedness of both Aelis and the count are clear in this scene, despite the fact that the count continues to wear his “braies” and Aelis continues to wear her “chemise.” On the naked connotations of this attire in the Middle Ages, see E. Jane Burns’s analysis of clothing in “Ladies Don’t Wear Braies: Underwear and Outerwear in the French Prose Lancelot,” in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, ed. William W. Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 152–74.
54. The notion of “lesbian ghosting,” like that of the “spectral” used in this section, have been coined and analyzed by Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian.
55. Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 2.
56. Contrary to medieval fabliaux and farces, French romance is rarely explicit in its depiction of sexual relations, even heterosexual ones, euphemistically referring to them under the rather polysemantic umbrella “surplus.”
57. “Intollerabilis malicia . . . Hoc crimine ualde infecti quidame miseri qui ancillas suas licet turpiores uxoribus preponunt, quamuis sint pulchriores.” Jacques de Vitry, cited in Jean Longère, “Deux sermons de Jacques de Vitry Ad Servos et Ancillas,” in La femme au Moyen Age, ed. Michel Rouche and Jean Heuclin (Maubeuge: Publications de la Ville de Maubeuge, 1990), 294.
58. Danielle Régnier-Bohler, “Geste, parole et clôture: Les Représentations du gynécée dans la littérature médiévale du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” in Mélanges . . . Alice Planche (Nice: Belles Lettres, 1984), 399.
59. Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” 129.
60. It must be noted that these manly traits do not include masculine roles such as riding horses or hunting in which cross-dressed heroines typically engage (Silence, Yde).
61. These two activities (sewing and loving) specifically define the female role of famous heroines such as Silence in the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, vv. 2496–688. Heldris de Cornuälle, Le Roman de Silence: A Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Verse-Romance, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1972).
62. Krueger, “Transforming Maidens,” 161.
63. The important role that some women played at times in the public sphere in the medieval Islamicate world has often not been sufficiently taken into consideration because of the long-standing assumption that they were veiled and hence hidden from the public. This has not always been the case in Islamic history, as Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, for instance, pointed out in her “Femmes dans la ville Mamluke,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 2 (1995): 145–64. On Muslim women’s economic contributions, see Maya Shatzmiller, “Women and Wage Labour in the Medieval Ialamic West: Legal Issues in an Economic Context,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40, no. 2 (1997): 174–206, and Huda Lutfi, “Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa’ as a Source for the Social and Economic History of Muslim Women During the Fifteenth Century A.D.,” Muslim World 7, no. 2 (1981): 104–24.
64. More has indeed been preserved about the contributions of slave-girls, rather than of aristocratic, freeborn women in the Islamicate Middle Ages because they were at greater liberty to express themselves. Freeborn women, on the other hand, were often veiled and kept outside the public sphere.
65. Ibn al-Washsha’, Kitab al-muwashsha’, ed. R. E. Briinnow (Leiden: Brill, 1886). This work has been translated into French by Siham Bouhlal, under the title Le Livre du brocart (Paris: Gallimard, Connaissance de l’Orient, 2004). Siham Bouhlal explains the title al-Washsha’ chose for his book thus: Because the washi is the person who weaves and designs silk cloth and embroiders it with gold, the title of the treatise, Kitab al-muwashsha’, is a metaphor that consists in showing the reader beautifully composed motifs (as those displayed on a cloth) that can be appreciated on either side (introduction, 10; translation mine). Another important medieval source on zarf is Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti’s al-Mustazraf min akhbar al-jawari [Courtly Tales of Slave-Girl Stories], ed. Ahmad Abd al-Fattah Tammam (Cairo: Maktabat al-Turath al-Islami, 1989). On zarf, see Malek Chebel, Traité du raffinement (Paris: Payot, 1995), and Mhammed Ferid Ghazi, “Un Groupe social: ‘Les Raffinés’ (Zurafa’),” Studia Lslamica 11 (1959–60): 39–71; Lois A. Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Jean-Claude Vadet, L’Esprit courtois en Orient dans les cinq premiers siècles de l’hégire (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1968), 317–51; al-Bashir Majdub, Al-zarf bi-al-`Iraq fi al-`asr al-`Abbasi [Courtliness in Iraq During the Abbasid Period] (Tunis: Nashr wa-Tawzi` Mu’assasat `Abd al-Karim Bin `Abd Allah, 1992).
66. These decorations provide us with early examples of body art.
67. Al-Washsha’, Le Livre du brocart, 244; translation mine.
68. On Princess Wallada, see Devin Stewart’s entry “Ibn Zaydun,” in Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Al-Andalus, ed. Maria Rosa Menocal and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 308. See also David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); Antonio Arjona Castro, La Sexualidad en la España musulmana (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1985), 25. Arabic sources on Wallada include Ali Ibn Bassam al-Shantarini (d. 1147), al-Dhakhira fi mahasin ahl al-jazira [Positive Attributes of the Andalusians], ed. Ihsan Abbas (Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1979), vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 429–33; Shihab al-Din Abu al-Abbas al-Maqqari (d. 1632), Nafh al-tib min ghusn al-Andalus al-ratib [The Wafting Scent of the Dewy Andalusian Branch] [Analectes sur l’histoire et la littérature des Arabes d’Espagne], ed. R. Dozy et al. (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1967), 2:536–68; Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Nuzhat al-julasa’fi ash`ar al-nisa’ [Salon Members’ Journey into Women’s Poetry], ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (Tunis: Dar al-Ma`arif lei Teba`a wa al-Nashr, 2004), 83–94 (on Mohja) and 101–6 (Wallada); Umar Rida Kahhalah, A`lam al-nisa’ fi `alamay al-`Arab wa-al-Islam [The History of Women in the Arab and Islamic Worlds] (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risala, 1977), 5:287–90. On the role of Andalusian women poets in Islamic Spain, see Wiebke Walther, Women in Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Marcus Wiener, 1993), 144–48; Mahmud Sobh, Poetisas arabigoandaluzas (Granada: Disputación Provincial, n.d.); Teresa Garulo, Diwan de las poetisas de al-Andalus (Madrid: Hyperion, 1985); María Jesús Rubiera Máta, Poesía feminina hispanoárabe (Madrid: Castalia, 1989).
69. On these women and others like them (Hafsa of Granada, Hamda Bint Ziyad), see Aisha Bewley, Muslim Women: A Biographical Dictionary (London: Ta-Ha, 2004), Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-aghani [Book of Songs], ed. Abd al-Sattar Ahmad Farraj, 25 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1990); on Sukayna, see Kitab al-aghani, 16:93–118; on Aisha Bint Talha, see Kitab al-aghani, 11:165–85. See also al-Maqqari, Nafh al-tib min ghusn al-Andalus al-ratib, 2:536–76. Also useful is Arie Schippers, “The Role of Medieval Andalusian Arabic Story-Telling,” in Verse and the Fair Sex: Studies in Poetry and in the Representation of Women in Arabic Literature: A Collection of Papers Presented at the 15th Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, ed. Frederick de Jong (Utrecht: M. Th. Houtsma Stichting, 1993), 139–52; J. M. Nichols, “Arabic Women Poets in al-Andalus,” Maghrib Review 4 (1979): 114–17.
70. Ghazi, “Un Groupe social,” 43. That these Muslim women pronounced judgments in their literary salons is revealed in Kitab al-aghani, in the sections devoted to Sukayna and Aisha Bint Talha; it is also mentioned (and additional examples are given) in biographical dictionaries of Muslim women written in the Middle Ages, such as Nisa’ al-khulafa’ [Women of the Caliphs] by Ibn al-Sa`i (1196–1275), ed. Mustafa Jawad (Cairo: Dar al-Ma`arif, 1968). An overview of the biographies of such women is gleaned from Hilary Kilpatrick, “Some Late `Abbasid and Mamluk Books about Women: A Literary Historical Approach,” Arabica 42 (1995): 56–78.
71. Al-Jahiz is one of the most important prose writers of the ninth century, during the Abbasid period. He was born in Basra (Iraq), which was at the time one of the greatest cultural centers of the Islamic world. Al-Jahiz represents one of our most valuable sources for our knowledge of the history of Islamic culture.
72. Al-Jahiz’s Risalat al-qiyan survives only in one manuscript, Istanbul MS Damad 949, folios 177v.–188v. The Arabic text has been edited and translated into English by A. F. L. Beeston, The Epistle on Singing-Girls of Jahiz (Warminster, Wilts.: Aris & Phillips, 1980), and into French by Charles Pellat under the title “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses de Gahiz,” Arabica 10 (1963): 121–47 (quotation on p. 126; translation mine).
73. Al-Jahiz, Risalat al-qiyan, trans. Pellat, “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses,” 126; translation mine.
74. Suzanne Meyers Sawa, “The Role of Women in Musical Life: The Medieval Arabo-Islamic Courts,” Canadian Women’s Studies: Les Cahiers de la Femme 8 (1987): 94.
75. On Kitab al-aghani, see Hilary Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs: Compilation and the Author’s Craft in Abu al-Faraj al-Isbahani’s “Kitab al-Aghani” (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Ignazio Guidi, Tables alphabétiques du “Kitab al-Agani” (Leiden: Brill, 1900). Information about qaynas is also found in biographical dictionaries of Muslim women written in the Middle Ages, such as Ibn al-Sa`i’s Nisa’ al-khulafa’, for instance. While al-Sa`i discusses primarily aristocratic women, al-Suyuti (1445–1505) treats slave girls from all sections of society as he focuses specifically on zarf in his al-Mustazraf min akhbar al-jawari.
76. On `Inan, see Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-aghani, 22:521; translation mine. See also Ibn al-Sa`i’s Nisa’ al-khulafa’, 47–53, and al-Suyuti, al-Mustazraf min akhbar al-jawari, 38–46.
77. Fadl as described in Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (New York: Washington Square Press, 2001), 123.
78. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-aghani, 19:257; translation mine. The life of Fadl is also related in Ibn al-Sa`i’s Nisa’ al-khulafa’, 84, al-Suyuti, al-Mustazraf min akhbar al-jawari, 50–55, and Ghazi, “Un Groupe social,” 48. On the role of qaynas in the Islamicate tradition, see Walther, Women in Islam, 151–53; Lutfi, “Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa”; and Ahmad Abd ar-Raziq, La Femme au temps des Mamlouks en Egypte (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1973).
79. On `Arib, see Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-aghani, 21:58, translated in Suzanne Sawa, “Role of Women in Musical Life,” 94. See also Ibn al-Sa`i’s Nisa’ al-khulafa’, 55–63, al-Suyuti, al-Mustazraf min akhbar al-jawari, 36–37, and Matthew S. Gordon, “`Arib al-Ma’muniyah (797–890),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 311, Arabic Literary Culture, 500–925, ed. Michael Cooperson and Shawkat Toorawa (New York: Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, 2005), 85–90.
80. The ghulamiyyat are those slave girls dressed as boys (at times with painted mustaches) in al-Amin’s court whom his mother had introduced in order to turn her son away from homosexuality and toward heterosexuality. This tradition of dressing girls as boys became a veritable cultural fashion in Baghdad and was imitated by aristocratic and bourgeois women under the Abbasids in the ninth century. See Habib Zayyat, “Al-mar’a alghulamiyya fi al-Islam” (The Ghulamiyya in Islamicate Culture), al-Machriq 50 (1956): 153–92, and Philip F. Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005).
81. Al-Jahiz, Risalat al-qiyan, trans. Pellat, “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses,” 141; translation mine.
82. Al-Jahiz, Risalat al-qiyan, trans. Pellat, “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses,” 145; translation mine.
83. The tale of Tawaddud or of Sympathy the Learned begins on the 270th night, in Mardrus’s translation of the Arabian Nights; see One Thousand and One Nights, ed. and trans. into French by Joseph Charles Mardrus; trans. into English by Pomys Mather (n.p., Yugoslovia: Dorset Press, 1964), 2:142–69.
84. Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 130–31.
85. George Dimitri Sawa, Music Performance and Practice in the Early Abbasid Era (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989), 20.
86. Al-Jahiz gives a long list of such women; see Pellat, “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses,” 132.
87. See Lutfi, “Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa,” 115–24, and Chapoutot-Remadi, “Femmes dans la ville Mamluke.” It must be noted that the harem is not an Islamic invention, as Orientalist thought might suggest; rather it is a social custom of the upper class that was inherited from the Greco-Roman tradition, after the spread of Islam. For a critique of Eurocentric representations of the harem, see Leila Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (1982): 521–34; Emily Apter, “Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem,” Differences 4, no. 1 (1992): 203–24; Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Culture of Travel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). This reevaluation of the harem must also include scholarship on the solitary confinement of upper-class Western women; see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
88. On Shajarrat al-Durr, see Fatima Mernissi, Forgotten Queens of Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 98; John Glubb, A Short History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Dorset, 1969), 202–10; Umar Rida Kahhalah, A`lam al-nisa`fi `alamay al-`Arab wa-al-Islam, 2:286–90; al-Suyuti, al-Mustazraf min akhbar al-jawari, 33; Ahmad Abd ar-Raziq, La Femme au temps des Mamlouks en Egypte, 292–93. Another example is that of Mongol Princess Tandu in the ninth century. See Lutfi, “Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa’,” 122–23.
89. Mernissi, Forgotten Queens of Islam, 90.
90. Similarly, Byzantine women played important, yet often occulted, political roles especially during the crusader period. One example is that of Zoe, Empress of Constantinople, whose exile in 1042 at the hands of her lover, Michel V, resulted in a revolution in the harem, led entirely by women. This story is likely to have been known in the West since a portrait of Zoe appears in the Church of Saint Sophia which was regularly visited by European pilgrims and travelers. Krijnie Ciggaar has argued that the political role played by women at the time of Zoe’s exile in the eleventh century represents the intertext for the scene in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès when one thousand noble women intervened against Western doctors who were attempting to find out whether Fénice was truly dead or feigning it. See Krijnie Ciggaar, “Encore une fois Chrétien de Troyes et la ‘matière Byzantine’: La Révolution des femmes au palais de Constantinople,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 38 (1995): 267–74.
91. Mernissi, Forgotten Queens of Islam, 134.
92. Gordon, “`Arib al-Ma’muniyah,” 87.
93. “L’Exigence d’aimer,” interview of Jamal Eddine Bencheikh by Fethi Benslama and Thierry Fabre, in “De l’Amour et des Arabes,” special issue, Qantara: Magazine de l’Institut du Monde Arabe 18 (January–February 1996): 23.
94. This information regarding the price of qaynas is cited in Pellat, “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses,” 145. Neither the slave nor her owner has been identified. Similarly, Suzanne Sawa gives the example of `Ulayyah Bint al-Mahdi’s mother who was purchased for 100,000 dirhams; see her “Role of Women in Musical Life,” 94.
95. Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 125.
96. Ghazi, “Un Groupe social,” 50.
97. The Umayyad state of Spain has been described by Lévi-Provençal as an “exact, if smaller copy” of the Abbasid system from the early ninth century onward. Evariste Lévi-Provençal’s work on Muslim Spain remains an unparalleled resource, La Civilisation arabe en Espagne (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). See also Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), and Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1065–1135 A.D. (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
98. On Ziryab, see Jésus Greus, Ziryab: La Prodigiosa historia del sultan andaluz y el cantor de Bagdad (San Lorenzo de El Escorial: Editoria Swan, 1987); Jamal al-Din Muhsin, Udaba’ baghdadiyun fi al-Andalus (Baghdadi Authors of al-Andalus) (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Nahda, 1962).
99. Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 44.
100. Ahmad Ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi, Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab, edited by Jamal Juma`a (London: Riad el-Rayyes, 1992), 141; Les Délices des coeurs ou ce que l’on ne trouve en aucun livre, trans. René R. Khawam (Paris: Phébus, 1981), 130 (translation mine).
101. Zayyat demonstrates this indeed to be the case of the ghulamiyyat in his “al-Mar’a al-ghulamiyya.”
102. Zayyat, “al-Mar’a al-ghulamiyya,” 166.
103. On the history of chess, see Harold J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Recent scholarship suggests that chess may have originated in China in the second century B.C.E. (rather than in India as was traditionally believed), and reached India only thereafter; see Sam Sloan, “A History of Chess,” www.samsloan.com/origin.htm.
104. Storytelling and sexual pleasure are intimately linked throughout the Arabian Nights. One of the most famous examples may be the tale of the “Three Women of Baghdad” which is attested in the earliest recension of the Nights. This is the tale of seemingly respectable businesswomen who combine merrymaking and storytelling with sexual gratification.
105. My interpretation of the Saint-Gilles household as an Eastern harem is in contrast to Danielle Régnier-Bohler’s reading of it as a gynaceum.
106. Sharon Kinoshita, “The Politics of Courtly Love: La Prise d’Orange and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen,” Romanic Review 86, no. 2 (1995): 279; see also her Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
107. If this particular episode does not support a crusader ideology, some critics have argued that the Escoufle as a whole might in fact do precisely that. They have submitted that because of its dedication to Baudoin, count of Hainaut, the Escoufle may have been composed to encourage the count to go on crusade; and indeed Baudoin VI will participate in the fourth crusade. See John Baldwin, “‘Once There Was an Emperor. . . .’: A Political Reading of the Romances of Jean Renart,” in Durling, Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, 51–64.
108. It is important to note that the word “soignentage” (concubinage) is never used to refer to the relation between Aelis and the count, even though it is used once before in the romance to describe Aelis’s relation with Guillaume at the moment when she is eloping, v. 3912.
109. In the Escoufle, we find other instances of eating (fruit), such as when the narrator describes Aelis and Guillaume’s attempt to hide their love for each other by pretending to eat fruit (vv. 4324–29; 4450–57), or when the emperor and his wife eat fruit prior to the wife’s manipulation of her husband to put a stop to their daughter’s marriage with Guillaume (vv. 2863–75).
110. See David Waines, “Food and Drink,” in Encyclopedia of the Quran, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 2:216–23. See also Arie Schippers, “Hebrew Andalusian and Arabic Poetry: Descriptions of Fruit in the Tradition of the ‘Elegant’ or Zurafa,” Journal of Semitic Studies 33, no. 2 (1988): 219–32.
111. Cited in Pellat, “Les Esclaves-Chanteuses,” 125; translation mine.
112. “Tale of Nour,” in One Thousand and One Nights, ed. and trans. into French by Joseph Charles Mardrus; trans. into English by Pomys Mathers, 3:299; cited in Malek Chebel, Encyclopédie de l’amour en Islam: Erotisme, beauté et sexualité dans le monde arabe, en Perse, et en Turquie (Paris: Payot, 1995), 271. I would like to thank Kenny Levine for help in translating these lines.
113. The refinement in eating manners is described in al-Washsha’ `s Kitab al-muwashsha’, chaps. 29–30 and 33.
114. The count’s gesture is in opposition to Aelis’s promise to Ysabel to provide for her needs and to give her some of her fortune (vv. 5279–83). Aelis never promises to share her fortune with Ysabel.
115. Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
116. Diller situates the return to heterosexuality a bit later in the text, namely at the moment when the count realizes that he is in fact the cousin of Guillaume’s father (v. 7748); see his “L’Escoufle: Une Aventurière dans le roman courtois,” 36.
117. Castration was considered to be the legitimate punishment for repeat offenders of adultery and illegitimate sexual encounters. The most famous medieval man who suffered this very punishment is undoubtedly Peter Abelard after his relationship with Heloise.
118. This is only a temporary stop to alternative sexual relations in the Escoufle, however, since Ysabel accompanies Aelis in her new heterosexual household. She is not married off at the end of the romance as Rose, for instance, is by Fresne in Galeran de Bretagne.
Note to epigraph: Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 36.
1. This is the way Julia Kristeva describes Bakhtin’s contribution to structuralism with regard to his work both on Dostoevsky and on medieval carnival and farce. See Julia Kristeva, Semiotica: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 144; translation mine.
2. Shulamith Shahar has shown how the economic role played by women in medieval towns was silenced by the didactic literature of the period which was interested primarily in the sexual chastity of women and their duties towards their husbands. The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Routledge, 1983), 196–97.
3. The notion of hybrid textuality has been used by critics with reference to Jean Renart, but with a completely different meaning. By it, they have meant the lyric insertions in the romance of Guillaume de Dole. See the collection of articles in Nancy Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997).
4. This is the main point developed by Edward Said in his Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and which contributed to the development of the field of postcolonial studies.
5. Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988): 65.
6. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 70.
7. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 81. She adds a few lines later: “In the context of the hegemony of the Western scholarly establishment in the production and dissemination of texts, and in the context of the legitimating imperative of humanistic and scientific discourse, the definition of ‘the third-world woman’ as a monolith might well tie into the larger economic and ideological praxis of ‘disinterested’ scientific inquiry and pluralism which are the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the ‘non-Western’ world” (82).
8. Mohanty points out: “Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged) first world. . . . I am suggesting, in effect, that the one enables and sustains the other.” “Under Western Eyes,” 82; emphasis in original.