Last year, I got a particularly good Christmas gift. After literal years of to-ing and fro-ing (read: a crip pregnancy and parenting-whilst-crip, on my end), Danièle Cybulskie, Blake Gutt and I finally got to sit down together and record an episode of the Medievalist Podcast in December 2023. Chatting research and politics (and politicized research) with one of my favourite people in the entire world? Being interviewed by a warm, enthusiastic and generous host? Srsly, put these under my tree any time. (Note: not a euphemism). You’ll find below a transcript of the episode, if text is your thing. I hope you enjoy listening in, and reading along, as much as I enjoyed myself in the recording.
[Start of recording]
00:00:15 Danièle Cybulskie Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 222 of the Medieval Podcast. I’m Danièle Cybulskie, also known as the Five-Minute Medievalist. In the past few years trans and genderqueer issues have come to the forefront, both in society and in scholarship. And this also applies to the way scholars are approaching medieval studies. But it can be easy to get lost in a lot of the opinions and hot takes out there, especially on social media. So for the people who are genuinely interested in learning more about what terms like trans, queer and cisgender mean, how they’re applied responsibly to sources from the past, and what this means to how we look at texts from here on, this is an episode just for you.
This week I invited Dr. Alicia Spencer-Hall and Dr. Blake Gutt to speak with me about trans and genderqueer scholarship in medieval studies, especially as it applies to medieval saints whose gender is often flux. Alicia is an honorary senior research fellow at Queen Mary University of London [now an honorary senior research fellow at University College London] and the author of Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience, and the forthcoming Medieval Twitter. Blake is a postdoctoral scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor of French at the University of Michigan [now an Assistant Professor in World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah]. Together, they’re the editors of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. Our conversation on what trans and queer scholarship is, some examples of saints who shifted boundaries in the Middle Ages and how both modern and medieval readers bring their own experience to bear on texts, is coming up right after this.
Well, thank you Alicia and Blake for coming on. We’ve been trying to get this episode done for a long time and I’m so happy that we’re making it work. So, welcome.
00:02:01 Blake Gutt Thank you.
00:02:02 Alicia Spencer-Hall Thank you, so glad to be here! And again, it was all my problem—it was all my fault it’s so late, so thank you so much for your patience.
00:02:10 DC [chuckles] No, I’m going to take some responsibility for that as well for my being disorganized. But it doesn’t matter. We are here now and we’re going to talk about your book. Okay. So starting at the beginning, something I’ve just told you when we were behind the microphone was, that there are a lot of people who I think are listening to this podcast and they hear words like trans and cis and all of these things outside of the academy. There’s a lot of people who are listening that are not scholars in the traditional sense, as in ivory-tower people. So I really want to take some time to walk through these terms and make sure that we’re all on the same page and we’re understanding them, and what they actually mean to people who are working with them professionally. And one of the things that you have in your book, which is Open Access so people can look at it, is an Appendix and Glossary, so this seems like a good place to start. So, let’s start there. So the book is called Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. So, when we’re talking about trans, what are we talking about?
00:03:08 ASH I feel like that’s the broadest, best possible question for, like, the next a hundred years of podcast. Blake, what do you think?
00:03:16 BG I was going to say, you’re going to have this problem a lot because there are two of us and we don’t know whether to jump in or to just kind of wait for the other one to start talking.
00:03:24 DC [laughs] Just go for it.
00:03:24 BG So, I would describe, well, transgender, certainly the way we use it in our scholarship as a very broad term, which describes people who—for whom the gender they were assigned at birth, typically people are assigned either male or female at birth, although there are intersex people in which case many of those people are also—you know, in intersex circles the term that is often used is coercively assigned male or female at birth. These are situations where infants often undergo surgery to make their bodies look more normative in a binary sense.
00:04:00 ASH Can I interject? Because I think you are using terminology that now we do all the time. But I remember the first time I heard the phrase, like, “assigned X at birth,” and I thought, “What does that mean?” And it’s just, now I have a baby myself and I can testify this at the moment. You know, that the baby comes out and they go, “Oh, it’s a boy! It’s a girl!” That’s all that really means. Is that somebody, kind of a doctor and thus an institution, has said that this tiny human is a boy or a girl, and that’s that assignment at birth language. And so if you assign male at birth, it’s presumably because you can—there’s the visible penis, basically. So it’s to do with external genitalia that you can see. And then you are raised as that gender for the rest of your life. And so being trans, like Blake said, is if you diverge from what you were assigned at birth, but actually you know that you are a different gender and you explore that when you’re older. So that’s kind of making that distinction between what has been imposed upon you and what you know yourself to be.
00:04:59 BG Thank you. Thank you for saving me there. You know, that’s really, really helpful. And the point I was trying to make about, you know, this being a very broad category is, it’s not just about—say, you and your parents were told you are a girl, later on you decide that actually, you know, you feel more comfortable as a boy. That’s how—being a boy is what feels more natural to you. It’s not just about what we call binary trans identities, i.e. again, being a trans man or a trans woman, it’s also about non-binary people who don’t feel like they fit well into either category. It’s also about agender people who don’t feel like the whole concept of gender doesn’t really work or make any sense in terms of describing them their life, their place in social settings and in society. And also anyone who feels that the gender they were told they were as a child, the gender they were assigned at birth, is not fully adequate to account for the complexities of their gender. They might feel like, “Well, I mostly feel like a man, but I have these other parts to my identity which are also really important to me. And the term man, the category of man doesn’t really fit me.” So we define this very broadly. Obviously people get to choose for themselves whether they define themselves as trans or not.
And the other thing I think is really key to mention is that, a big misconception about being trans, and one which kind of limits people’s understanding of the possibilities of being trans in the medieval period, a lot of people think that you become trans when you undertake some kind of usually medical process that changes your body in some way, either by taking hormones or by having surgery. And, you know, while these processes are described often as “medical transition” or as “gender-affirming care”, things which we do to change our bodies in some way to make us feel more comfortable and more at home in our bodies, that is not what being trans is.
Being trans is knowing your identity to be different than what people have told you that it is. So, the importance of that is that, even before it was possible to take hormones or to undergo gender-affirming surgery, trans people have always existed. And even if they didn’t tell anybody, even if you were a medieval person who just never quite felt like a woman or just never quite felt like a man, these are people who’ve always existed, who have left traces in history that we can find. And they’re the people whose lives we are interested in recovering, both as the individual lives of people we can identify as trans or as having significant commonalities with the modern people we now call trans. They probably wouldn’t have used—they—well, they didn’t use terminologies such as trans in the Middle Ages, but also the way that categories of betweenness or of crossing from one to the other or of non-binary-ness, or of going beyond binaries, were essential in medieval thought, particularly in theology and philosophy and the ways that people thought about nature and the world and understood or kind of came up with answers to most—the most fundamental questions about existence.
00:08:17 ASH Blake, whoa! Whoa! [enthusiastically]
00:08:20 DC I know. [laughs]
00:08:21 BG Sorry, that was very long.
00:08:23 DC No, it was great.
00:08:23 ASH That was perfect. I think podcast listeners are getting a little microcosm of what it’s like working with Blake. And I just kind of sit back and go, “Your brain is—Oh yes, more of that please, Blake.”
00:08:33 DC [laughs]
00:08:35 ASH And I just wanted to add, there’s this notion of gender-affirming care being a special category for trans people, but that’s actually not true. There are lots of kinds of gender-affirming care that cis people undertake. For example, what if you have hair transplants? If you’re a balding cis man, well, why are you doing that? That’s to affirm a sense of masculinity, a binary masculinity to make you feel more masculine in your appearance as a cis person. So, again, it’s the idea of sort of trans is a special case and thus cis being some kind of a negative word, but it just means the opposite. Trans and cis [just mean] the opposite and so I just want to help people to start thinking through their own gender. And the way—again, we all do things that affirm our gender. We all have a part in trans history, even if you are not trans, because it helps us think through how we live ourselves and our genders.
00:09:34 DC Yeah.
00:09:33 BG Thank you. Yeah, that’s really, really helpful. And again, now it’s my turn to say, you know, how articulate—Alicia always is and how it’s great to work with them because, you know, I think we make a good team. We have—we complement each other and it’s been such a joy working on this book with you, so.
00:09:49 ASH Aww, thanks, Blake.
00:09:50 BG I like to say that in public as much as I can because [chuckles] yeah, it’s like I have this chance to talk about how wonderful you are to work with.
00:09:58 ASH Oh, thank[s]. We’re just going to have a public love-in now!
00:10:00 DC [laughs] Well, I’m always telling people what a warm space medieval studies can be with mutual admiration, and here it is as a case study. [laughs] I mean, it’s not always like that. We have our issues too, but it can be such a warm space and I’m seeing this here. Okay, so we’ve explained what trans means. We’ve explained what cis means when we’re talking about specific cases. What does queer mean when we’re talking about queer theory? Because this is something that I think the more you get into reading stuff that’s coming out of university, the more you come across this word. What does it mean?
00:10:35 ASH For me, again, the answer is: we’ll have another a hundred years of talk about this. It means something different for every individual queer person. But in a very basic sense, it is a politics—an embodied politics of being in some way divergent from a norm, of sexuality, true, but also in various other ways. And that’s what—in the introduction to the book, we talk about the relationship between queerness and transness. And that it’s absolutely not the same thing, but there is an interconnection. And it’s a reclamation of an identity. I think it’s important that queer is a reclaimed slur and it’s about a defiance behind that. About saying, “Yes, we are different. And we are different and proud of that in various ways, and thus we can inhabit time differently, space differently.” It kind of, it is a possibility. It’s kind of a horizon of possibility for being “other” in ways that you said we couldn’t be.
00:11:34 BG That’s a lovely, in this really positive way of describing it. [all laughing] I would say, you know, there are some—I mean, if you see, you know, non-academic circles online talking about this term, you often hear people saying, “Well, that is a slur. That’s something that lots of people who are alive now have experienced.”
00:11:53 ASH Absolutely.
00:11:53 BG And then it’s also true that—you know, when I was at school, I don’t know about you Danièle and Alicia, but, like, when I was at school, anything that was considered uncool, the go-to term was “gay”.
00:12:07 ASH Yeah. Even at university, like it was bandied around.
00:12:12 BG And the thing about—you know, as Alicia was saying about reclaiming the term queer, is not just, we can live in different ways, et cetera, but that we’re reclaiming and accepting the fact that queer people do live in different ways. That if you are a man who loves another man you might have an instinct to kind of try to say, “Well, that’s—the only difference between me and a man who loves a woman is, like, the object of my affection. I feel—you know, this is a very small thing.” But the thing is that the way society has operated for thousands of years to consider some people normal and some people abnormal, means that there is this kind of inside-outside, acceptable-unacceptable dynamic going on. And the power of queer studies is to—kind of to reclaim that, as Alicia was saying, to say, “Yes, I am weird in some ways by the terms of normative society. And what that means is that normative society is not doing a good job of describing the breadth of people’s experiences. And if there are things about me that you think are weird, well, let me tell you, from my different standpoint, you know, being told by society that I’m different, I can tell you there are a lot of things about you that are weird too.”
So it’s about denaturalizing any kind of normality in a sense to say like, “Okay. Yes, trans people have specific ways of living, perhaps specific relationships to time, specific ways of relating to their bodies or to each other, but there are lots of things that cis people do which seem very strange. Like gender-reveal parties, which now have a death toll.” There are so many things which are considered normal, like dressing up babies in little onesies that say, you know, “I’m going to get all the girls,” if you’ve got a little cis boy. There are so many assumptions about what it is to be a cis, heterosexual person. And the queerness or the academic kind of—our academic queer studies, rather, allows us to look critically at the structures that support that and say, you know, “What are these structures assuming? What are they missing?” And to kind of look at these, what society tells us are two different kinds of lives, a straight life and a queer life, or a cis life and a trans life. Look at them in juxtaposition and see where they’re similar and see where they’re different. And also to think about how society could be better, hopefully, if it wasn’t separating people into those categories all the time.
00:14:44 ASH Totally. I mean, I would just like to add in a kind of tiny real-life case study. I was out in a coffee shop with my baby and he was wearing some pink leggings because he was three months old. And I got called “brave” by another person in the coffee shop because it was a boy. And fairly often at playgroup my son got, like, misgendered because he was wearing, what I thought, were very cool things, actually. But this kind of reinforcement. Apparently also purple, “No, that’s a girl’s colour.” And you think, “Well, I mean he is basically a potato. A lovely potato, but one from whom we are projecting this normative gender.” And I kind of find the fact of academic queer studies and my enmeshment in that and being a queer person myself kind of gives me the freedom to say, “You know what? These are great leggings. You can wear them. You are three months old. You decide what your gender is.”
00:15:38 DC Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because when you look at some of the rules that Blake was talking about, that determine gender in this world that we’re living in now, it seems like it’s fixed. But if you look back at history, pink didn’t always mean girl. [chuckles]
00:15:54 ASH Exactly.
00:15:54 DC So, it’s something that’s always in motion. So let’s get into history. When we’re looking back to the past, what are some of the challenges when you’re looking at a figure, for example, and you’re trying to understand where their place is in society, where their place might be in gender or where their place might be in sexuality. What are some of the challenges that you face when you’re looking to the Middle Ages?
00:16:17 ASH To be a bit meta for a second, let’s put aside, like, the sources themselves: it’s how people have interpreted those sources or edited them, that we then kind of have to encounter almost like a brittle facade of often very normative, regressive, often Victorian publication standards, editorial standards. So Blake and I were having a great chat about this the other day, that if you could get a published edition, by which I mean just, you know, it was in a manuscript, but now it’s in a book you can get from the library, and it says, “This is what the text is.” But often in the past, former editors will have, like, “normalized” problems with the manuscript. So they might have gone, “Oh, I don’t know why they’ve used a female pronoun here. This is supposed to be a man,” and would’ve fixed it. I used a very big inverted comma there, “fixed this error”, which actually if you go back to the original manuscript or back to kind of the original edition, you see it was there and thus gives us a different understanding of gender and how it plays out in the source. So you’ve got to—you are reading through the projections and the overlays of whoever was editing and whoever was working with the source.
00:17:25 BG Yeah. That’s a really important point. And it’s something that we kind of have the privilege in a way of having access to, as people who are trained, who know what to look for, who are reading the footnotes, who know where to find manuscripts online, we go [to the last page of Google search]. There’s an awful lot of—this is like a—in the last, I don’t know, ten, fifteen years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of digitized manuscripts. Which is fantastic because if you know where to look online, you can find a lot of these medieval texts. And you can go and look and, if you can read 12th- or 13th- century handwriting, and the—you know, the forms of the language used at the time—we both work in French mainly—if you can read 12th-century French then you can see what that text is saying and you don’t have to rely on a translation. But for many people, and particularly people who are not in academia, who don’t have a lot of time to spend on this, you are reliant on these published versions which make very strange decisions sometimes.
Like, I remember I was teaching a class on poetry and there was a debate poem between two women that had been put in the section of the book—a separate section of the book—for parodies. Because everyone knows that debating is a serious thing that men do, and because these two women poets are having a debate poem together, this must be a parody of the serious things that men talk about. It can’t be that they have serious things to talk about in their own right. So there are a lot of layers of that to get through and one of the things we can do in our work is to point these things out and to make it more accessible to—you know, to the people who don’t have the time to—and the training maybe to go through all of the sources in a very critical way. And also because, you know, many of them may not—I said a lot of things are available online but some things are not, and it can be hard to track down exactly what you’re looking for.
00:19:12 ASH Yeah. And I think also then we go back to the sources themselves and we think, “Well, do we have a lot of first-person narratives?” “No!” I mean, let’s just face it. I think hagiography, that just means saints’ biographies, it’s particularly rich because gender is so important in terms of religious worship and how you situate yourself towards divinity and the Church itself as a kind of a male structure. So you see gender playing out in loads of cool and weird ways there, but at the same time, hagiography is often written by men [chuckles] and often by clerics. And that’s not to say they didn’t have exciting ways of living through gender themselves, but we always have to be aware that you are kind of getting a filter of a filter of a filter before you can access these traces of trans lives, trans experiences. And I think that’s why, like in the introduction, Blake and I talk about, it’s about traces. It’s about resonance, it’s about affect, it’s about how seeing—I like to think about it like chinks in armour. And if kind of this notion of, like, normative history is the armour, we see through these chinks, these little windows into what trans lives felt like, looked like. And then we can kind of have those little tiny moments of communion. That’s sort of the thrill of this work for me.
00:20:30 DC Yeah. I was going to ask, is there something that sets off your spidey sense when you’re looking at a translation or you’re looking at a source that makes you think, “Hang on, I need to look at this a little bit more closely because something’s not right.” [chuckles]
00:20:44 BG I think both of us actually spent quite a lot of time looking at literary texts where, you know, it’s stories, it’s describing characters who didn’t really exist. But you get some really interesting kind of contradictions in these texts, such as there are—sometimes there are times where a character will describe themselves as a man or a woman, and yet the narrator is still talking about them using, you know, the pronouns for the category they were assigned at birth. So you have a character saying, “I am a man and, you know, this is who I am.” And the text saying, “And then she said that she was a man.” And it’s like, “Hang on, what’s happening here?” The text as a whole is thinking about gender in a complex way. And one of the things that’s really important is to take the characters at their word, to read those possibilities and to say, “Well, if this character says that he’s a man, why shouldn’t we understand him as a man?” Because what the narrator is doing sometimes is trying to re-place that character into a normative framework. To put them back into their little box. But what the text is also doing is saying, “Well, here is someone who’s coming out of that box. Who is describing themselves in a different way. Who is defining themself in a way that’s authentic to them.” And a medieval reader—many medieval readers may have read that text and gone, “Oh! This is just someone claiming to be something they’re not.” But there may have been—well, there certainly must have been—medieval readers who saw that text and were able to take it at its word, and to see in that character a possibility that would be resonant in their own lives.
And if I can add one more thing on that, we were saying that, you know, there are not that many first-person accounts, there are not that many descriptions of people who are talking about their own lives who we can unequivocally say, “Well, even if they didn’t use the word trans, they’re describing experiences which are very similar to what a modern trans person would experience.” It’s not to say those things aren’t there, but there are relatively few examples of them. But what we do have are these literary texts which demonstrate really clearly to us that medieval people were interested in things such as miraculous gender transformations. Like, what would happen if you were somebody who was suddenly transformed from a man to a woman? What would that mean for you? What would that mean for your society? What would that mean for your role in that society for the rest of your life? That was something that people were very interested in. It was something they could easily conceptualize. It was not in any way strange or unusual or kind of shocking to think about the fact that people could conceptualize what effectively were trans lives meant that people were thinking about these things. There was a framework for that and that suggests to us that—well, it kind of demonstrates to us that trans lives were liveable. Maybe for some people only in an internal way, “Yes, I recognize that I have something in common with that literary character. I see myself in that character. I feel that what society tells me is not everything that I am.”
But, you know, also, maybe people did live in these ways. And there is very strong evidence in the number of texts we have in hagiography where it’s talking about—particularly about people who assigned female at birth who live as monks, who spend the rest of their lives in male monasteries and present themselves before God, when you’re supposed to be presenting yourself in the most authentic way possible, as men.
00:24:13 ASH Can I just add to that, because I think you make such a great point as ever, Blake. I’ve heard from quite a few critics saying, “Well, we’re just dismissing these narratives because they’re literary or miraculous. So clearly, it’s not real. I mean, clearly it’s just kind of a thought experiment or just entertainment.” And to me, I think like, “Well, but think about modern soap opera, right? What goes on in modern soap opera? Yes, it’s often hyperbolic. Yes, it’s often—it’s downright bananas, but it is, socially, you are working through key things. You are thinking things through.” And that’s, I think, what happens in medieval text. A miraculous transformation including gender and they’re just as valuable for us as source texts.
00:24:56 DC And I think that what you’re both getting at is that you are allowing for the possibility to read it in one way and the possibility to read it in another way. So that these possibilities are still open, none of them are closed, which is, I think, the difference between the way that Victorians were reading it and the way we’re reading it now, right?
00:25:15 BG Yeah, absolutely. You make a really great point there, which we could take in two different directions. First of all, that those multiple readings were open to medieval people. That those texts that say those interesting things about gender did mean something both to the authors who wrote them and to the audiences who read them in the Middle Ages. And then also the fact that, you know, we are not medieval people. We don’t have to pretend to be medieval people when we read these texts. That’s not the only way to relate to them, to understand them and to interact with them. I always tell my students when I teach that, you know, “We are modern people. So a modern reading of a medieval text is just as, you know, valid, just as authentic.”
And if these texts, I mean we’re talking about literary texts here, which are essentially these little kind of—these little machines that are meant to make us think. To engage with our brains and to create these experiences that we have when we live through literary texts. If we can still do that, if we can bring something of ourselves to those texts. In fact, just as medieval people did. They weren’t trying to be anybody else. They were bringing their—some of their own experiences to the texts and, you know, living in a way through them, thinking through them and with them. If we can do that, then that’s a perfectly valid way to read a medieval text, even if our understanding is different than a “typical” medieval person, who of course doesn’t exist. Because there were no—there was no—you know, there’s no one medieval brain. There’s no one modern brain, right? And my reading of the text will be different from Alicia’s, will be different from yours, Danièle, will be different from anybody else who reads the text. So, what we can get out of the text is, it’s just as valid. And when we have these really interesting readings, we want to share them with other people and to increase—absolutely to increase and multiply the numbers—the number of ways of reading those texts and the number of things we can get out of them.
00:27:10 ASH Absolutely, Blake. So that just makes me think, again, of this idea of anachronism, which you might well imagine, Danièle, gets thrown at Blake and I quite a lot.
00:27:18 DC [chuckles] Yes.
00:27:19 ASH And I think Blake made a great case against why that is incorrect. But also, I think academic queer studies in particular, at least, again, for me, made me able to question this compulsive heterosexuality that we’re, like, applying on the past. Because again, there’s this notion that it’s anachronistic to say that, “Oh, trans people existed in the past,” but you’re saying it’s not anachronistic to say that people were straight in exactly the same way as they are today, and that sort of 21st-century cisness and straightness was just what medieval people were like? And this kind of internal illogic, it does rile me, but I think it’s actually a very productive place for people to start thinking through, “Like, well, why am I assuming in a modern text, let alone a medieval text, that cisness and that straightness is the default here?” And hagiography in particular is just so rich in saying, “All of these categories are kind of up for grabs and are negotiated and they’re produced by structures for specific purposes.” And you kind of have to look at that, and then I work on a lot of holy women whose relationship with gender is very interesting because it’s about transgression. So if holy women become more like men, if you look at their contemporaries who are holy men, they “become more like women”. Because it’s not necessarily about kind of fixed gender states, it’s about transition in the kind of broadest possible sense to become closer to God. And so that’s why my final point is just fluidity.
I think it is a very modern notion that transition—or it’s like coming out, it happens once, right? But actually coming out as a queer person or coming out as a trans person is itself often repetitive. It’s not just one singular thing. And gender identity, for some people it is fixed, that’s great, but not for everyone. And so you have sometimes these texts where it’s—maybe it’s quite normative, but you have these little pockets where it’s kind of this beautiful fluidity. And for my point of view, it’s important we allow—that we allow that to breathe and say, “Well, that’s as valid a kind of example of transness.” A trace of difference as if the whole text were doing that.
00:29:28 DC Yeah. The more you work with these texts, I think the more that you have to put aside all those things that people have built up in you over time. Because I mean, one of the places that’s pretty obvious and have been talked about on the podcast quite a lot, is the fact that women were supposed to be the lusty ones, for example, in the Middle Ages, and that was just understood. And now if we look at culture, it’s men who are supposed to be the lusty ones, and that is just understood. And it’s talked about as if this has never been different, when it’s always been different. And I think that getting at fluidity is an important concept because one of—I think it was in the epilogue to the book. There was some discussion about humoral theory, right? So if you dial up or dial down the different humours, that’s going to make someone more masculine or more feminine. Which means that they’re not really fixed categories [chuckles] even medically in the Middle Ages. So you were just bringing up saints’ lives, so let’s talk about that for a second. Why is this book focused on holy lives, on saints, on hagiography? Why did you choose this to be the place where this discussion was going to take place?
00:30:33 ASH I came up with the idea for this volume because I was very angry and frustrated at the state in which gender was treated within my very niche area. So I’ve worked on hagiography for a long time, that’s kind of my specialty. I’m interested in gender. I’m an intersectional feminist as a scholar. But you kept seeing in publications, even fairly new ones, this kind of, this “problem” of transness, either erasing or neglecting or kind of disenfranchising that as a reading, basically. And I know Blake, and Blake is the best thinker on gender that I’ve ever met. And so I kind of recruited him [chuckles] to my case, because also I think the hagiography gets a bit of a bad rep. It gets a rep of being boring and you have to be, like, super Christian to be into it. Now, I’m neither of those things and I’m super into hagiography, because I think the texts are about becoming, the texts are about how to be a person in the world, yes, its true for specific reasons and to be palatable to the church, but also the authors have to deal with a lot of weird stuff. You know, I work a lot on Christina Mirabilis, who is like the 13th-century “zombie” saint. How do you make her alright for the Church? Let’s find out over this book. So there’s a lot of stuff there that gets kind of dismissed as lowbrow, not interesting. As a genre, it’s very repetitive there, but also there’s a lot of stuff there about gender that I felt was just not being treated frankly responsibly, respectfully or progressively. And there’s a lot of people who look at saints’ lives in particular because of gender, and I thought that it would be great to kind of showcase, “What could our field be if we really affirmed the scholarship of people who are working at the cutting edge but also often have skin in the game?” So our volume has a lot of queer—gender queer and trans contributors. Like, Blake and I are both in the community, you know, we aimed—at least I think we succeeded, Blake, to, like, create an environment to really foster early-career scholars. People who really are trying to do something important with this work.
00:32:53 BG Also, by the way, we’ve been saying hagiography [“hagg-ee-ograophy”], hagiography [“h-age-ee-ography”]. That’s fine. We’re allowed to say it in all different ways and I never say it the same way twice, but anyway. For me, there were two reasons why, you know, this is an important focus. First of all because it’s certainly not the only place in medieval literature and in medieval culture and in medieval artefacts where transness is apparent, but it is a place which kind of concentrates transness. Both because people are thinking about gender, but they’re also thinking about, “Who is my authentic self? How can I be the most true to myself in order to be the most true to God?” I mean, already before trans studies existed, there was a conception of medieval religious people, by which I mean, you know, clerics, priests, but also monks and nuns, as people who constituted, you know, again, in quotation marks “a third gender”, because their social role was different because they were not expected to reproduce. Which was—you know, or not allowed to reproduce, rather, which is very different from the majority of people. So already they had this slightly differently gendered position outside of the reproductive structures of society, and that put them in a place to think about gender differently.
And the other reason is because gender difference or non-normative gender or transness or whatever we want to call it, is celebrated in these texts. And that is both a bit unusual, and it’s also really a place where we can do really positive affirming work that resonates in really important ways with modern trans people. And I think Alicia, you talk a lot in the introduction, or rather we all wrote it together but I think this was your impetus, talking about, you know, the ways that these are like biographies, as you were saying, of medieval saints. Biographies of these exceptional people that become these beacons we can kind of cluster around to see a bit of light in the world. You know, these are very similar to some of the biographies of trans people. Biography has—there’s kind of a joke in—you know, among—certainly among trans academics, maybe larger trans circles as well, that the trans genre is the autobiography. That people cannot—trans people cannot stop writing autobiography and that is the accepted way to write if you are a trans person to say, “This is my unusual life, let me explain it to you.” This is very much what medieval saints lives are doing as well. They’re typically biographies rather than autobiographies.
00:35:25 ASH I think you can’t really overstate how important it is to say that—like we say in the introduction—like transness was itself holy. That it’s not a thing that was forgiven or overlooked by God, or something that you had to change. That there are instances we can see where transness was celebrated. Where the authenticity of who you are and who you are as trans was perfect in God’s eyes. And even if you don’t believe in God, you don’t practice any religion, that kind of is beside the point. It’s about saying that modern transphobia is not “normal” or neutral. And even modern theology, which insists at times upon a transphobic point of view and says, “Oh, it’s the Bible! No, it’s always been like that.” That is not true. And I think—I’ve learned a lot from one of the contributors of our book, Kevin Elphick, and they work with the Veterans Affairs doing queer counselling basically. And they’ve said to Blake and I about how important having role-model saints, trans saints in the past, as being in counselling modern day trans people. Often those who themselves are believers or within kind of worship communities, just to offer a counterpoint and say that a normative transphobic narrative is not the end of the story. That actually there are glimpses where, one, we show that trans people existed and they thrived and were celebrated for being exactly who they were, and that is literally lifesaving for people.
00:37:00 DC I think that’s such an important point. And one of the great values of this book is showing that these people existed. These trans saints existed. And you can look to them and you can feel as if you are not by yourself, and I think that can be so important and affirming in lifesaving. So, let’s give an example for the people who are like, “Hang on, I’ve never heard this before. Transness is holy?” Can you give us an example of a saint that, for example, was celebrated in the end or at the end of the story? Because it’s usually at the end of the story that there is a reveal, I think, from what I’ve seen of these stories. Can you give us an example of someone who is celebrated and blessed and accepted, especially by God, for their transness?
00:37:43 ASH I just love the fact that the medieval saintly gender reveal happens at the end of life. [chuckles] The gender reveal, like the idea of a confetti cannon going off at the end of a life and being like, “Actually, ha, ha!” Blake, who do you think we should go for? There’s so many good saints. You are saying Eufrosine, no?
00:38:03 BG We have two chapters in the book where we talk about the saint, Saint Eufrosine, who we tend to call by a female name. So there are these kind of transphobic structures around these trans saints, even though their transness is celebrated. Eufrosine in a different version of the story gave himself a different name when he chose to live as a man, one of the names is Smaragdus, which means emerald. Is that right?
00:38:27 ASH Yeah.
00:38:28 BG So he chose that name when he went to live in a male monastery. And that—you know, it is one of those stories where the end of the story is, “Oh! It’s a revelation. Oh! Look what the truth was all along.” But I also think that, you know, we don’t have to—I call this the tyranny of endings. We don’t have to be ruled by the tyranny of endings, which tells us, “Well, the end happened like this, therefore that’s the only thing that matters.” What also matters is that this saint was, you know, a holy man who spent his life interacting with his faith community as a man, and was understood that way and was seen as not just an upstanding citizen but as a role model for a lot of people. And this reveal that comes at the end, there are several saints’ lives which follow this kind of pattern. Often you find that this reveal, you know, this kind of—oh, usually it’s that the person dies, their body is being prepared for burial and someone goes, “Oh, look! Their body is different than how I expected it to be therefore this person is really a woman,” for example. Which clearly goes in—you know, contravenes or, you know, goes against what that person thought, how that person understood themself, how they lived their life, how they interacted with their society. And often you find that as they were dying these characters who are saints are reported to have said, “Don’t uncover my body. Don’t look at it. Don’t tell people about me, because that’s not who I really am.” And there’s a really interesting example. Another example from the book is Martha Newman’s chapter where she writes about a saint—well, he’s not….
00:40:04 ASH Brother Joseph!
00:40:06 BG They tried to make him a saint. He’s not officially a saint, but, you know, a vita. A life story about him was written in the hopes that he would become a saint. So this is, you know, a monk called Joseph who was—again, and kind of his life follows this pattern that he lived as a man, after his death he was discovered to have a body which his contemporaries, you know, understood to be a female body. But there’s a really interesting kind of twist in that text in the sense that, another way of interpreting it is that, to the monks who lived with him it appeared that he had been transformed into a woman at the moment of death. That he truly was a man and the miracle was that after death his body had been transformed into something else.
It’s a really interesting text because you can feel the narrator—the author kind of grappling with, “What does it mean? What was this person’s real gender? Who were they, really? What do we trust? Do we trust the relationship that we had with this man, the way he lived his life, the things he told us about himself, or do we trust the body which supposedly tells the truth but which was only encountered after this person had died when he wasn’t there to tell us what his relationship to that body was?” And what makes this especially an exciting chapter is that Martha Newman had previously written about this text in ways which kind of affirmed the narrator’s point of view, that this was really a woman who was in disguise….
00:41:31 ASH In disguise. Yeah.
00:41:33 BG But you can also,—as Martha beautifully demonstrates in this chapter, you can read it in a different way and say, “No. You know, the narrator is referring to all these kind of social structures and trying to put people back in those little boxes,” as I was saying before, “But that’s not the only way to read the text.” And again, referring to the tyranny of endings, most of the text is not that. Most of the text is not about that. Most of the text is about a young man living in a monastery, doing his best to serve his God in, you know, the best way he knows how and to represent himself authentically before the divine figure he worships.
00:42:11 ASH I like to think of these texts sometimes like an unboxing video.
00:42:15 DC [laughs]
00:42:16 ASH So you put all this, like, complicated stuff about gender and authenticity and God, you shoved it in a box and then, you know, the author is trying to like, “Oh, God! We’ve got to keep it in the box guys. We’ve got to keep it in the box!” But actually the text is kind of, you take it out, you play with it, you think about it and you say, “Oh, this is good! Oh, I’m not sure about that.” And at the end of the text, you’ve got to shove it all back in the box. So I think what’s really interesting though is that, that doesn’t seem to negate the story of holiness that the text says, right? Because if it did, the text wouldn’t have been written, because it is supposedly demonstrating this person’s holiness, or we—you know, we knew this was going to happen so it could have been stated up front like, “Oh yeah, this person seemed holy, but actually we found this out. I’m going to tell you….” You know, so yes, it’s at the end, but like Blake says, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything substantive about, “Oh! Well, actually transness isn’t real in this text. It’s not authentic.” It’s more the unboxing and the re-boxing element.
00:43:12 DC I like that analogy because nothing ever goes back in the box neatly [laughs] when you try and put anything back in the box.
00:43:17 ASH Exactly.
00:43:19 DC It never fits in neatly anyway, and so it’s always open after that [laughs] so I think it’s a good analogy. But one of the things that you’re getting at that I think is important too is that, you can disguise yourself from the other monks but you can’t disguise yourself from God. So there is—when you’re looking at this stuff, there’s always stories in the Middle Ages about people who are sinning and they get struck by lightning or whatever. So there’s an endorsement—a quiet endorsement that God has allowed this the whole time. So that, as Blake is saying, it’s not just about the ending, but the fact that God has allowed this, you can’t disguise yourself from God in the monastery. He knows. This is a fundamental part of these stories too. So yeah, I’ve always found these stories very interesting and I like that there is more space in scholarship to allow them to breathe—as you were saying Alicia, to allow them to breathe and have more possibilities.
00:44:09 BG Okay— [overlapping]
00:44:10 ASH And I think that—oh, sorry, I was just going to say that, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski has a chapter in the book about, like, the trans soul and authenticity before Christ, and I think that’s what you’re saying is so important. Because in my head, brother Joseph isn’t in the dead body at the end, his body is a perfect body with God. So it doesn’t really matter the gender of this corpse because he’s already ascended.
00:44:33 DC Yeah. The corpse….
00:44:34 BG And this is also a discussion people were having, you know, in medieval kind of eschatology, talking about the end times, talking about the afterlife or if we’re going to be resurrected, or if we are all going to go to heaven, what will our bodies look like in heaven? Will gender exist in heaven? Will we still, you know, have distinguishing features that we had in life or everybody will still be short and tall? Or will everybody be the same size? You know, will we all be men maybe? There were all kinds of different arguments about what the body might be like in the afterlife, which all, you know, leads to the conclusion that the body on earth was something which was very temporary and which was not necessarily the full authentic truth about that person’s eternal soul.
00:45:17 DC I think that’s an important point. Because I think that if you’re a modern person looking back to the Middle Ages, you might not assume that they’re having these discussions about what you look like in heaven, but they are having these discussions very actively. All of this stuff is in play whether we are seeing all the traces of it or not. So, we can talk about this forever. [all laughing] I was going to say in the beginning, like just talk about it forever. But let’s wrap up. We should wrap up. So what would you say—as people who have worked with this, you’re saying you are people in the queer community, you’re people who are working with these texts, what would you say to other people who are looking at these texts and trying to see as much as there is to see there? What advice would you give to people who are looking at these texts maybe for the first time?
00:46:00 ASH Oh! That brings me to, like, the beautiful prospect of me encountering these texts for the first time. Oh, wouldn’t that be great? I would say don’t discount your feelings of what the text is doing or saying, and your personal standpoint and your reading of them. So, Blake and I are big fans of meeting the text where it is. You know, letting it breathe. “What do the words say?” But it’s also about how they make you feel and what you see in them from your specific standpoint and your identity. And then I’d say, get some reading friends. By which I mean, sometimes they’re real people, other times they’re just journal articles, but read about what other people have found there, what other traces other people have found. And then you can—sometimes it’s fun because you get into this kind of intellectual conversations of like, “Why? I don’t see that in that way.” Or, “I feel that.” It can really help you bring a sense of community and working together to kind of have a little salon, basically, with these medieval texts and the people in them. And I think that’s just a really—frankly, it’s fun but also a really affirming process.
00:47:06 BG That’s a fantastic answer. There are fandoms around certain modern texts, modern films, modern media franchises where people—you know, there’s canon and there’s fanon and there’s head canon and there’s people making up different things and saying, “Well, what if this person when they said this they really meant this?” Or, “What if this person really loved this other person?” All that kind of really creative interaction with the text, which we, I guess, often see presented as something which is reserved for kind of popular culture and things that are not, again, huge quotes “serious”. That’s something we can absolutely do with medieval texts as well, and which medieval people absolutely were doing. So that is very welcome and, you know, should be encouraged.
And my first point was going to be exactly what Alicia said: trust yourself. If something feels a bit similar to something you’ve experienced, why not? Why shouldn’t—if you feel a resonance then that resonance is there. So it’s a combination of allowing ourselves to have authentic relationships with those texts. In fact, that’s kind of my origin story as somebody studying trans—medieval trans studies. That I realized I was seeing things in texts which other people weren’t, and I was—I wanted to tell them about it. So yeah, I often kind of—if I’m trying to describe my job I would say, “You know, my job is to read books and to have interesting thoughts about them, and then to try to communicate those interesting thoughts to other people.” And I think that’s how communities around texts have always operated.
So first of all, trust yourself and then tell other people what you’re thinking about. Tell other people what you’re feeling and see what they feel and what they’re thinking. And, you know, all of that is a valid way of interacting with texts because that’s what they’re for. They’re for making us think and making us imagine and making us feel things. And also for having arguments about and for disagreeing about. And because there are always lots of different ways to interpret texts and that’s, we are about making those possibilities larger. We’re not saying—you know, we’ve been accused, I think, at one time at a conference of kind of claiming people in the past and saying, “They’re just this thing now. We say they’re trans and they can’t be anything else.” But no, it’s….
00:49:15 ASH Wait! What are you saying? I thought we were in fact trans-ing the whole Middle Ages. Is that off the agenda now? Like, do I have to update my diary?
00:49:23 BG No. That’s—no, they’re for everybody. That’s the whole point.
00:49:28 ASH [laughs]
00:49:29 DC [laughs] That’s beautiful and I think is a perfect place to wrap this up for today. But I hope that people will go and read your book and learn. I mean, start with the appendix or start with the glossary. If you’ve never worked with anything that has gender on a spectrum before, start with the glossary and then dive into it and see what happens. Thank you so much to the two of you for coming on and walking us through this. It’s been just a lovely conversation. I’m so happy to have met you.
00:49:55 ASH Thank you so much.
00:49:58 DC To find out more about Alicia’s work, you can find her at aspencerhall on Twitter and BlueSky. You can find Blake’s old Twitter account at chantermestuet, or find him on Instagram at the same handle, which is spelled C-H-A-N-T-E-R-M-E-S-T-U-E-T. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography is available in hardcover and paperback as well as in Open Access, meaning you can access Alicia and Blake’s handy glossary as well as the entire essay collection for free. You can find the link in the show notes to this episode on medievalists.net. Before we go, here’s Peter [Konieczny] from medievalists.net to tell us what’s on the website. What’s up Peter?
00:50:40 Peter Konieczny Hey! Well, we have a piece called “A Guide to Medieval Wedding Dresses”. I’ve been working on this for quite a while, actually. It’s an idea I’ve had because the idea, like, you know, wedding dresses, only date back to Queen Victoria and her wedding, but in the Middle Ages it’s a lot more colourful and diverse. And we can make a lot out from manuscript illuminations and some descriptions and chronicles, so I’m hoping that this will be a real fun piece.
00:51:07 DC I think that people are going to love this because I think this is one of the most Googled terms that we get in medieval studies. [chuckles] It’s certainly a question that I get all the time, so it’s going to be great if you’re going to do an article then I can just point to it and say, “Peter knows everything about medieval wedding dresses” [chuckles]
00:51:22 PK [laughs] Yeah. That’s another reason I’m writing this article. For Google, so.
00:51:26 DC Right. Yes.
00:51:28 PK So we have that plus we have a piece by John France, the amazing medieval military historian looking at the Battle of Hattin. It’s a famous battle between Saladin and the Crusaders. And we also have some news— another news about a long-lost medieval painting that’s been rediscovered. So, and this one’s by Giovanni Bellini from the 1460s. [inaudible] it was found in a nunnery off the Croatian coast. And they had put in their museum a few years back, misidentified and then a Venetian historian says, “Hey, that’s a Bellini piece.”
00:52:03 DC [chuckles] I love those stories where you just have someone accidentally coming across something and being like, “Wait a second. That’s priceless.” [chuckles]
00:52:10 PK Yeah, exactly. [chuckles] Exactly. So now it has to be treated even better. So, we have all that plus lots more, like, new medieval books. So the other ones we talked about last week, we’re trying to put out as many as possible before the end of the year.
00:52:23 DC Perfect. So everyone can keep posted on your social media, medieval lists, where they can find all sorts of ideas for gifts.
00:52:32 PK Now we also have our book of the month, and that is a very special one, right?
00:52:36 DC Yes. The book of the month for December is Chivalry and Courtesy: Medieval Manners for a Modern World. So if you’re on Patreon in the book club tier, then you will get Chivalry and Courtesy sometime around, what? The end of December it’ll arrive maybe?
00:52:50 PK I hope so. Like, we’ll try and get all the information out to your publisher and they’ll ship it off to our loyal fans.
00:52:57 DC Perfect. And then in January, you get more me. In case you are not tired of me, there is more me to be out in January [chuckles] with How to Live Like a Monk to help you get your New Year off to a good start. So that’s the Patreon book club.
00:53:11 PK Woo-hoo!
00:53:11 DC Awesome. Well, thank you for stopping by Peter and telling us what’s on the website.
00:53:16 PK Thanks.
00:53:18 DC Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast and other indie historians’ work through the medievalists.net Patreon page. As you know, patrons have access to all sorts of awesome stuff like subscriptions to the Medieval magazine and Medieval World magazine, as well as ad-free versions of medievalists.net and this podcast. If you’ve ever been interested in joining the Book of the Month Club through Patreon, this is your moment because Abbeville Press is making two of my books available for December and January. People who are or become Patreon book club members in December will be getting a copy of Chivalry and Courtesy in the mail, followed by How to Live Like a Monk in January to give you a good start on the new year. To get in on the amazing book club action, please visit patreon.com/medievalists. For everything from gender to benders, follow medievalist.net on Facebook or Twitter @medievalist. You can find me, Danièle Cybulskie, across social media @5MinMedievalist or Five-Minute Medievalist. And you can find my books at all your favourite bookstores, where you can get hold of Chivalry and Courtesy: Medieval Manners for a Modern World now out in hardcover and ebook and soon to be audiobook. Our music is Beyond The Warriors by Guifrog. [upbeat instrumental] Thanks for listening and have yourself a wonderful day. [instrumentals continue]
[End of recording]
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