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MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Thank you so much for coming today, and thank you so much, Brenda, for introducing me. You probably all know Brenda Marston, the former-- current former Director of the Sexuality Collection in the Clark Library. But I've always been a huge fan of hers so it's really lovely to get introduced by her. She has met all the people I admire, practically, in the world, I think, at least the living ones, so this is kind of cool for me.
All right. So here's the book. I don't like PowerPoints so I'm not going to do that-- please forgive me-- and I'm just going to launch into it. So here's where I'm going to say, in 2022, no fewer than 137 bills were introduced at the state legislative level to, well, persecute trans and non-gender conforming people. Many of those bills pitted the understood-- what was understood as women's sports, or the idea of women's sports, which they had seldom paid much attention to or supported very much.
Prior to this, pitted women's sports against the interests of trans women who might want to participate in said sports. So the issues that trans historical addresses feel very urgent to me and very sharp, not least of all because being able to say that there are what we call trancestors, right, that there is a history to trans people in the world is tantamount to saying something about loving, and cherishing, and valuing the contribution of trans people in the world. And saying that they have always existed is also a way of saying that they are valid.
Now, I find that to be a really interesting problem. Why is it that it is legitimating to have a history? I don't really know, but I find that it is true. I find that knowing that there have been queer people and trans people in the distant past somehow functions as affirming to us, as such people, and I think that that's very much the impetus behind this collection.
The joke about this collection, and I didn't bring the hardcover copy, was that it's big enough and solid enough that in a pinch, you could use it to hit somebody. And that is very much sort of its purpose. Along with an-- oh, thank you-- along with a number of other books that I will also be talking about, we thought of this collection very much as an amassing of evidence.
There are works here, there are articles here, that are from researchers who look at things as long ago as the Empire of Byzantium and, actually, as recently as a Korean blockbuster from, I think, the 20 teens that had a trans character in it. It was situated in a kind of faux medieval Korean landscape. This is not to say that we're trying to be comprehensive historically.
Most of these works are situated in the Middle Ages. And the people who edited them, two of us-- Anna works on French and I work on English mostly, Middle Ages. So we're kind of bound to that as our central force of gravity.
So here's what happened. Kathleen Long, through this conference, and Anna and I were old friends, and Greta is an old friend of Anna's. And we all went out for a drink at the Chanticleer, which turned into maybe two or three drinks-- not to affirm that whole thing about how medievalists drink too much. And at the Chanticleer which, as you know is a kind of a disreputable pub, we were talking about-- we were talking about how exciting it was at this conference that there were actually several papers besides ours that dealt with trans topics, or topics about gender non-conforming people.
And what we said, and what I think has been true all along, is somebody should really do something about this, like, someone should really make a collection happen. And gradually over the course of the evening, it went from somebody should do this to, actually, we could do this. And here's the saddest part, it would give us an excuse to hang out together a lot.
And we were imagining that maybe we could use our research funds to go on vacations to tropical places in order to do the editing work. In the end, the pandemic struck while we were working on this book, and so a lot of the work of this book was done from my living room with my kids up in, like, their room playing on Zoom, while my fellow editors were also on Zoom, and the authors were being emailed in real time with questions. So it was all much less glamorous than initially planned, I have to tell you.
But it is really important about this book-- and we actually say this in the introduction-- that this book came out of friendship, that this book came out of friendship and the perception that there was a need. I had never done anything that felt like it was because of a need before. A lot of my scholarship feels very much like it is sort of for my own pleasure, as humanity scholarship often is. It is kind of about the beautiful and the loved.
But to do something that felt like a political intervention was really cool, and I highly recommend it. So what we thought was-- and this, I think, is really important-- was that this book would be an initial step. Two of us editors are cis women.
It feels like something that I would love to see trans folk putting together collection in another-- well, maybe already. I think that they're probably the sophistication and the complexity of what we were capable of doing was not-- OK. See, I shouldn't say that. It was-- I think we-- I think that you could do better, right? This is what I really believe.
I believe that this is a first step in a project that could, in fact, be better than what it is. That doesn't mean I don't think this book is good. I don't mean to sound like I do.
I think it means that I'm can't wait for it to be the old-fashioned book that people reference as, well, it started with this, or this was a step along the way, but now we're doing something so much bigger and better than that. That's very much the vision that we had for this. Actually, as we were working on our book, all these other exciting things were happening.
And so, in fact, we're not any kind of first. We are part of a kind of synchronous, serendipitous, joyful eruption of work about trans and non-gender conforming people in the Middle Ages. So even as we were working on our book, Blake Gutt and Alicia Spencer-Hall were working on their beautiful book about transgender hagiography, which is just-- I reviewed it. I have seldom read a better collection of articles. It is just a really lovely piece.
There was also at the same time as us, Colby Gordon's-- wait, I got to look this shit up. Colby Gordon, Simone Chess and Will Fisher were doing a special issue of early modern trans studies-- on Early Modern Trans Studies in the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, which did a lot of the same kind of work as what we were doing with a more Renaissance, rather than medieval, emphasis. Leah DeVun, who had edited a special issue called, Trans*historicities, of Transgender Studies Quarterly, also released The Shape of Sex, Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, which I will be teaching in two weeks, and which I'm really excited about.
And I can't help but mention that Carissa Harris, Sarah Baechle, and Eliza Starkov have also recently published on a, I guess, less joyful topic than I'd like to think transness is, Rape Culture and Female Resistance in the Late Medieval Literature, which is also part, as I see it, of an emphasis, or a movement, towards asking questions about medieval sexualities and medieval survivors who were not maybe the main voices that have survived to our day. So all of this work was happening at the same time. All of us were working through the pandemic, all of us were struggling as we worked through the pandemic, but these beautiful things emerged, and so now we get to crawl out of our caves and talk about them to you.
So what is it that we found exactly? So I think that one thing that's really interesting that our book talks about a great deal is we found that it isn't just that there was no term, say, for trans gender, or trans sexual, or trans asterisk, in the Middle Ages and, therefore, those kinds of people did not exist. It's not that there was an alternative term, necessarily. It's that the way that society organized its understanding of gender was profoundly enough different from how it is understood today that the categories that we think with would not have been applicable.
The most important of those categories would be the normal. Normal is very much a 19th century invention. Maybe it's an 18th century invention. Anyway, it's later than my period.
It is something that had to be produced as part of a series of economic and social developments. There is no normal in the Middle Ages, which means that while there are concepts such as sodomy that indicate a sexuality that is not right, the idea that sodomy is actually something that happens between, say, for instance, as we think of it today to men, was not necessarily how it was understood. So in one of the pieces that we published, the Spanish Inquisition persecutes a person that I think we would understand as intersex, who lives their life, initially, as a female person and then as a male person, marries a man, then marries a woman.
And this person, at some point, gets persecuted for a sodomitical sex with their wife because if we assume that they are originally female, whatever that means, then sex between two women counts as sodomy. This is not your grandmother's sodomy, obviously. And it's not your grandmother's sodomy laws.
So the Spanish-- this is assuming your grandmother had sodomy laws, I know. So the Middle Ages is kind of an expansive term. Nobody living in the Middle Ages thought of themselves as living in the Middle Ages, of course, just like nobody in the early modern period thought they were early for anything.
All of these are very artificial distinctions that we have placed upon historical periods, I would say, largely for the usefulness of organizing things like departments and, course offerings-- sorry. So the Middle Ages roughly spans-- watch this-- kind of the year maybe 200-ish to about 1450s-ish. And that's just in Europe. And the other places have different ideas of the Middle Ages.
So that's a lot of time to be responsible for, by the way. So we medievalists would already tell you-- I think any of us medievalists would already tell you that the Middle Ages are highly queer in that normativity-- like, normativity hadn't been invented yet. You weren't supposed to have same sex sex, but you also weren't supposed to have sex during Lent.
So you were kind of-- and lent is quite long. And so you're kind of-- there's a very definite sort of-- so much is being patrolled that nothing is being patrolled. There's so much-- there are so many rules that nobody can keep their rules, I'm going to say, straight.
And so the fascinating thing about working in the Middle Ages is that you're always already dealing with a culture that is somewhat askew from what your expectations might be. One of the things we say is that we tend to see the Middle Ages through the lenses of the centuries that have come between us. And so, for instance-- sorry, I was teaching this today so I'm thinking about it-- female sexuality is something that we assume because of, I think, basically, because of the Victorian ideas about sex.
There's an assumption that women are very not interested in sex. In the Middle Ages, the assumption was quite different that women were excessively interested in sex, right? So when you look back historically, the person who is the sexual aggressor in a story might be quite different.
The kinds of scenarios that are being sort of imagined around the relationships of men and women, even heterosexual men and women, have a completely different shape in the Middle Ages than they do today. So this is-- it's kind of part of the fun of what we do. What I am really interested in is finding something that we-- we use this as a touchstone a lot-- that Lillian Faderman called a usable past.
I don't think there's such a thing as a past that is not being used, though. So a usable past means a past that can help affirm and make possible the lives of the present. And I think that that's a really important vision of how history can work.
It doesn't mean doing violence to the past, it doesn't mean distorting things that are true into things that are untrue. It means looking to the past to see what it can actually do to find the voices that have been silenced before. And I will tell you truly so much of what we found was really complex.
There was very little people just speaking up and being like, this is who I am. Instead, what we get a lot of is uncertainty and ambiguity. So the part of the collection that I wrote-- which of course, I'm an expert on so let me talk about it for a minute-- is a 13th century romance, which is like an adventure story, called The Romance of Silence. And it has nothing to do with silence, except the main character's named Silence. I've always thought the main character gets named Silence as part of the dad saying shut up, don't talk about it.
So Silence is born at a time when women cannot inherit property, and the parents fearing that they will have no more children-- for some reason, they don't, and it's not clear why-- decided they will raise this assigned female child as a boy. So here we have a problem with the word assigned sex, which is currently in vogue and which I really like. I tend to say that assigned sex is kind of like a homework assignment, like, you've got to go home and do that.
So this child is assigned female at birth. Someone looks at this child and reads their body in a certain way. And this has implications, for instance, whom this child can marry and what kinds of expectations they can have of their life.
But then their assignment gets radically changed. They get reassigned as a boy, and raised as a boy. And because this is the Middle Ages and it is kind of fantastical, the allegorical figures of nature and nurture appear to this child and start debating kind of in front of her-- them-- start debating in front of them about whether or not they can be taught to be truly a man, or if their nature is that of a woman that is unalterable.
This debate goes on for some time and is repeated several times throughout the text. I will tell you that Silence is the best warrior, the best knight, the most faithful friend that anyone sees in this romance. They are also the most beautiful person, and people swoon over Silence just as much as they-- I don't know-- get knocked over by Silence's sword, or something.
They're sort of a superlative person. And a kind of feminist response to Silence has always been to say, well, look, anything boys can do, girls can do just as well, right? In a non trans affirming kind of way, people could say, look at this, this person born female, whatever the hell that means, can go ahead and knock over all of your knights.
But that's a pretty limited way of reading the poem. I think that that was-- it had its moment, and it's not-- this is a work of fiction so it's not that there's a complete wrong or a complete right to be said. But what I would say is that the fantasy of this poem-- and here's what I really think and what I think is so interesting.
The fantasy is, what if we set up the conditions to allow somebody to be trans, right, in the Middle Ages, in the 13th century? What would it take? Well, apparently-- twist my arm, twist my arm-- I have to be trans because, ooh, I really need to inherit my father's castle, right?
It's set up as a forced masculinization, kind of like forced feminization scenario, but it isn't, right? Silence lives this life that seems full and rich. And then Heldris of Cornwall, the supposed author of this poem, at some point has to take it back.
And like so many fairy tails, at the very end the princess is no longer roaming free but has to marry the prince and have a happily ever after. So I will tell you, just in case you get excited about The Romance of Silence, which does exist in modern English translation, and also as a novel called, The Story of Silence-- I will buy Alex Myers a plug-- that it does have this ending that is problematic as hell where Silence is taken up, is stripped naked before the court, revealed in their femaleness, such as it is-- repolished is the interesting word-- into a beautiful woman and sent off to marry the king. The king who, by the way, is old enough to be hurt, like, their granddad, so that's an important detail there, too.
This is an incredibly problematic ending. But what we know about endings is that they often, as in Shakespeare's comedies, as in Shakespeare's tragedies, right, they often have to normalize, or return to some kind of moment of stasis, because too much freedom is such a dangerous thing. So there's this period, and it's quite a long romance, of adventure that then has to get shut down. We accept that because what we have to say is at least this text exists. It existed as a single copy marked, things that are not very important, in a box somewhere in somebody's attic until it got discovered, which is how we get a lot of things, right?
The more normative gender and sexuality stuff, maybe-- especially, the modern stuff-- gets published and recopied. And there's a lot of it. This exists in a single copy with illustrations and is, in itself, kind of a beautiful remnant of, we don't know how many copies there had been. We don't know if someone chose to destroy the other copies. We don't know what Heldris of Cornwall was or Heldris of Cornwall was telling a slant, a story about their own life.
What we do know is that these-- in the world of imagination, in the world of fiction, it was possible to imagine a knight like Silence. In real life, a lot of the people who lived their lives in an a crossgender manner-- all of this assumes that there is such a thing as gender that you can cross, which kind of isn't-- women who-- people who are assigned female at birth who lived as men, people who are assigned male at birth who lived as women, in-- we get the information about them historically often when they tangle with the law, or when they tangle with doctors. Those are a lot of the sources that we have. And those sources kind of suck, right?
When we get our sources that are about being-- about stripping people bare, looking at their bodies as if their genitalia tell this whole story of who they are, when we get our stories where people are being punished for who they are as part of finding out something about them, or knowledge is wielded as a violence. And that is as true of the medical professionals who are looking at case studies of trans people in order-- or intersex people in order to make conclusions about what their bodies did or could do, as it was for the prosecutorial arm of the law, police on up, which went after such people because they, in some fashion, did not conform.
I mean, I got to say, Anna Klosowska's contribution to the collection, whose name I'm going to totally mispronounce, Voynich is-- I'm going to-- I said it wrong-- was a person who I don't know if they were assigned female or assigned male at birth, they lived as both. They kept marrying people and stealing stuff from them. They were basically like a con artist that traveled Poland and got what they could out of everyone.
They were apparently so charming that people kept marrying them as a man, or as a woman, and giving them gifts. And this story is extraordinary, partly because what Anna sees in this, and Anna, my collaborator, is such a fundamentally joyful person. What she sees in this is that even if we just have this one person doing this running around Poland, different regions of Poland doing this, it's possible that there were all these people who were cleared by loving Voynich, right?
There were all these people who married someone whose genital sex is kind of unknowable by us, married someone who had been previously a woman but was now living as a man, married someone who had previously been a woman then was living as a man, was now living again as a woman. These were people who were queered by association to this fundamentally indeterminate joyfully con artisty person, who possibly, in the records that we got about them, was finally getting punished, which sucks. But at least we get to hear about them.
This, by the way, brings me to some of the most complicated things that we found in our research. What we found is that because so much of the record comes from the police and the medical establishment, as it does, frankly, to this day, what we would get had a kind of violence to it, right? That in order to find a trans person, you'd need someone to strip the trans person. You'd need the trans person to have died-- like Billy Tipton-- to have died and had to have had someone look at their body in a way that seems disrespectful and inappropriate, right?
So one of my favorite pieces in the collection, Scott Larson's essay, Laid Open, which is the only one that deals with America, talks about how-- what the ethics are of speaking about a subject who seems to have lived lives as both a man and a woman who seems to have crossed some kind of thing in their life, but without going into the kind of violating, icky looking at their body that a lot of these works are. We do not want to be voyeurs. We do not want to invade privacy.
In trying to find queer people in the past and try to find trans people in the past, we run the risk of not anachronism, not bringing categories from the modern world into the past. We do that, maybe, and that's OK because those people existed and we need some framework to understand them with. The problem becomes when we violate their own selfhood, right, by stirring-- by making them into objects to be scrutinized.
And that is a problem because we're scholars. It's our job to scrutinize things. And so the tension between the desire to know and the problems with that knowing was one of the things that I really encountered in working on this book.
Another problem that I encountered as a queer person was the tension between gay, same sex stuff, and what I was doing in this book. And here's what I mean by that. I'm like gesturing with my book.
Here's what I mean by this. One of the really important early texts in trans medieval studies is a legal record that was published in GLQ, The Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, in 1995 year of our Lord, very long ago. The font is even ancient, right?
This text that was published is a legal deposition by a woman named Eleanor Rykener, who had been assigned the name John at birth, and had been caught selling sex in Cheapside to a man named John Britby. So John Britby and Eleanor were caught and brought into court initially as a prostitution problem, like sex work criminalization. But, also then, it turns out that Eleanor had been assigned the name John at birth, and what, was in some way male, whatever the hell that means, without being voyeurishly scrutinizing.
This is kind of a problem. So when they published the story of Eleanor and John, who get accused of committing sodomy, what they said was this is evidence of same sex love. Why is this evidence of same sex love?
Because if Eleanor is John, and John Britby is John, then they're both John's and they're having sex together. And there we have, yes, evidence of same sex love, great. The gays rejoice.
But what this does is this forgets the transness of Eleanor which, in time, becomes an untenable move. So in order to get the gay, we had to sacrifice the trans. And honestly, the people who published this have already worked through this and, essentially, said this was not quite the right approach.
We-- I love this text. I love teaching it. One of the things it talks about is how Eleanor learned how to have sex as a woman, was taught how to have sex as a woman, by other women.
So how she was mentored by other women, how other women took her in and nurtured her. God knows what kind of life she had been living that this was something that happened. But she ended up in a community of other sex workers who, I think, kind of seemed to have set her up with a business of her own that could sustain her in life, right?
Survival sex work is not pretty, but it is a way of surviving. And in her contribution, Gabby Bukowski, M. Bukowski, in transhistorical, talks about how in the description of John seeing Eleanor, he does a double take. I forget if this is actually in the-- if this is something that Gabby remembers that wasn't in the text. But we think that maybe Eleanor was beautiful, right, or Gabby imagines that Eleanor was beautiful in order to be able to do the work that she is doing.
I don't think beauty is a necessary component, and I also am not sure that I believe that there is such a thing as beautiful and not beautiful people. But there's something to be said about affirming the beauty of this trans woman functioning in 1380 something in London, right, and surviving in the big city as who she was. So these are the kinds of stories that I love to tell.
But I also notice that we end up trading these things around. Some stuff gets to be same sex, some stuff gets to be trans. The problem is that queer studies, LGBT studies, organizes itself at the outset on the assumption of the gender binary.
And the many of you, or your friends who are non-binary, probably know how complicated that is, right? Because what does it make you if you are attracted to a non-binary person, if you love a non-binary person, if you partner with a non-binary person? Does it make you gay or straight?
Does it make you non-binary-oriented? Possibly the sexual orientation you bring to the table, it just stays your sexual orientation anyway. But the idea that we have organized a movement-- and I love our movement-- but that we have organized a movement around the assumption that there's such thing as men and there's such thing as women is a very modern notion and one that, while we know that we're persecuted for it, might not be sustainable.
We might want to not fight under that banner. We might want to be fighting for queer liberation. Not on the basis of I, male, get to be with a male. But under some other kind of understanding of what it means to be queer.
And this is really complicated for me. I'm working my way through what that would mean in the future. What I'm good at is talking about the past, and the fact that that is how I think some-- a fair amount of sexual orientation was organized in the past.
So one last thing-- in the Middle Ages, priests were instructed to pretend like no one had ever committed same sex sexual acts before. Like we have a famous-- Carolyn Dinshaw writes about instructions for parish priests. Someone comes to you in confession and says, I'm having feelings, father, for a fellow boy, and you're supposed to say, oh, my God, no one has ever felt those feelings before. There is no precedent for that.
How did you invent such a sinful, terrible thing-- bad, bad, bad, right? Making people believe that there was no other-- there was no precedent for their desire is a historical mode of erasure, right? And so, in fact, one of the tensions that this volume documents is, when they did persecute sodomy, they would get-- there was a kind of conflict about the fact that if you're persecuting the sodomy, you're acknowledging that sodomy exists, which already sticks your neck out for admitting that this has happened before, which is already corrupting some other youth, right?
The minute you say no, you're also saying yes. Because we're so damned sneaky. So just to say this is something that's part of the history, this is part of gay history, the denial of gay, of the existence of gay people. But it has also been used about trans people, about denying that that was even possible.
I was reading something on Twitter yesterday about people saying that you can't transition after 25, which is like bullshit and cruel. And I was thinking, like, that kind of violent rhetoric-- I know, I know, this is just so bad, I shouldn't even quote it. It is not true.
But the kind-- that kind of violent rhetoric is also about telling people what they can't imagine. You can't possibly imagine transitioning, they say. You would not make a good whatever it is. But that's a lie, right?
Eleanor Rykener, with no hormones and no surgeries, and pretty much no anything, was passing as a woman in London in Cheapside. And I don't think that it's that she was just so genetically gifted. I think that we have these stories to hold on to that tell us that a lot of things are possible, that maybe we have not known were possible.
All right. I think that's what I got.
[APPLAUSE]
I did some misgendering of my own of Silence while I was speaking. I'm not getting a lot of sleep because of the puppy, and I'm just really embarrassed about that part-- anyway.
SPEAKER: Thank you so much. I'm going to just help with question and answer by bringing you the mic, if you raised your hand. And wait till you have the mic to ask your question.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Got one.
SPEAKER: What?
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: You've got one.
SPEAKER: Oh, great. I couldn't see your little hand it was down so low.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for the talk. I-- can I ask a question about in studying with you text about the aspect of the text being fiction versus how much is actually reflecting on the actual? I mean, society and community versus, like, fictional people imagine something that's more dramatic, if you get what I'm trying to--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: So I think your question-- I will try to say it back to you because I want to get this right-- is the relationship between the fictional and the nonfictional realities for trans people in, say, the Middle Ages, but let's say in the same period. And I have to say the romance of Silence, which I'm talking about, is a way of imagining a life that is a trans or non-binary life. I'm not actually completely sure that it's a trans life.
And my whole argument is like that it's too complicated to judge on. But making that decision in a fictional environment seems much safer because it's not talking about an actual person that could get punished for living the life that they're living. So here's what I will say, the accounts we have that are nonfictional are court records and medical records.
And that's just inherently a much less happy picture than what I was talking about. So the example of Eleanor Rykener, who does get arrested, first, for having-- for performing sex work, and then gets in trouble for sodomitical somethings, right? Eleanor Rykener would be the reality that is not fiction, and it's someone who's in court.
We don't quite know what happens after that. We don't actually have a record of what punishment, or lack thereof, she received. But it's unlikely that she received no punishment.
So, yeah, I mean, fiction is better, right? Fiction is happier. And when we deal with fiction, even in the violent moment when Silence gets all of their clothes taken off, which is like a moment that I just really like trigger one of the shit out of-- pardon my language shit, sorry.
But this moment when Silence gets stripped naked, which is so very violent, is at least a fictional person getting stripped naked, right? At least it's not actually some person alive dealing with this. So even that's my empathetic imagination reaches out to Silence in that moment of being told what their truth is, because their truth is apparently their naked body. Who says?
Nevertheless, it's not like stripping an actual person down. And I think that that makes it more endurable just by a titch. Does that answer your question kind of?
AUDIENCE: Hi. So I guess I'm kind of working through my question as I word it but--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Best kind.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I know, right? When we see that trans people into the record mostly as a means of being kind of accosted by, or confronted with, institutional attempts to enforce a form of normalcy, do we get this impression that the law in this regard, or medical knowledge in this regard, are somehow representative of or are stricter than sort of the experience that these people would have had in their daily lives? Because the book cites like multiple instances of trans people who get people to marry them--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: --as either gender. And so do we assume like--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: And these people testify on their behalf, right?
AUDIENCE: Right.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: These people are like, well, like Elano is the best husband a woman has ever had. He's so great, right?
AUDIENCE: Right. So like-- in like almost like a Boswell sort of sense, not that I am fully--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: I feel a little Boswell, actually.
AUDIENCE: --convinced by-- he feels a bit too optimistic for me. But sort of in a Boswell sense, do we sort of assume that people cared less about it than we would assume or--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Yeah. I think that people tangle with the courts when there's an inheritance issue. People tangle with the courts when someone tells on them, right, or when they steal a lot of shit. Let's just notice that theft does get you in some kind of trouble.
Sex work gets you in trouble. It's like those are moments when there's an interface with the law, say, and then with medical practices, as well. But that's not-- these are folks who live long lives before and after-- well, we hope after, definitely before they get scrutinized by the law and medical establishment.
And they are loved, they have children whom they raise. They are part of communities. Sometimes, they're not the communities that they were born into, but they are, nevertheless, communities.
And we don't have evidence that those communities were somehow more radical and more sort of progressive than anywhere else. They're just part of normal villages, and normal towns, and normal cities, just like everybody else. So that, I think, is in fact a very hopeful thing.
You know what I didn't talk about is I didn't talk about saints and religious figures who get to be all kinds of gender complicated things because God lets them. So I called my article, Without Magic or Miracle, because what I love about Silence is that they get to be like a non-gender conforming person without any actual stuff being done to their body except, like, that they exercise a lot and become a great knight. And there's a lot of miracles where you pray and God makes you a man, or you pray and God conceals the fact that you were assigned female at birth so that you can live in a monastery of monasteries where you want to live.
But we have a lot of those saints. We have a lot of those records from the histories of Christianity. And that-- I think I didn't talk about it as much because that's Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt's wonderful transgender hagiography book, which is all about that. And I'm like, that's their job, that's what they do. And their book is just beautiful. I recommend it so highly.
SPEAKER: Thanks. We have a question from online. And, actually, we have two questions so I'll start with the first one. This is from Tekla.
Thank you so much, Professor Raskolnikov, for this brilliant and engaging talk. I'm wondering if there are any examples of courtly love taking place in a transgender context. Courtly love seems like such a binary system of gender roles, but maybe it had some trans potential, and I'd love to hear about it.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: So I love the question, but I got to say I can think of-- there's a lovely modern romance novel called, A Lady for a Duke, which is-- what is it-- 18th century, maybe 19th century nobility trans woman getting-- is being beloved by a cis man, and they go through a courtship system procedure very much like courtly love. That's the only thing I can think of.
Also, today we were reading a pastoral that featured a young squire refusing to have sex when given the opportunity and the young woman in question making fun of his manhood. And we had like a spontaneous eruption of transness in class. And we're like, what if that's a trans narrative?
But we don't know. And the pastoral does not say. And it's so short that we can't hang a whole lot on it. So I got to say, I wish, but I don't know of one. And I'm so sorry.
SPEAKER: Here's another question, and this is from Kate. Is there a translation of The Romance of Silence that you can recommend?
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Yes. So Sarah Roche-Mahdi published, I think in the '80s, Silence-- colon-- a 13th-Century Romance, or something like that, very easy to find used copies everywhere. And then Alex Myers, who's an interesting writer, wrote, basically, almost very close to a translation-- but not-- a novelization of the story of Silence called, The Story of Silence. And that came out in 2021, maybe, or 2020-- maybe 2020.
It's now available in paperback, and it's not even that expensive so I recommend both of those things. Alex Myers could not stand the ending, I think, and so Alex finds a way to make Silence free at the end, which I love. But it's not quite accurate to the text.
But why not? If you're going to write a novel, why not give it the ending you wanted?
All right. There's a bunch of questions up front.
SPEAKER: The second part of that question was, are there-- I see that there are some modern stories that are based on The Romance of Silence. Are you familiar with any of these, or would you recommend exploring any of them? And I think you--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: I just answered that, sort of.
SPEAKER: --answered that part, too. Thank you.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Masha, this was wonderful, and I really look forward to reading the book and--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Highly recommend, excellent book.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I had a question. At the beginning, you said that there's nothing normal about the Middle Ages. And then still in the stories you alluded to, there are certain rules people suffer because they are being punished for something that was set up as something. It seems to me like a rule, but that this is the normal or not.
So I wonder whether in the stories you are describing there is maybe something that-- there is something like a political message, resistance or something. I mean, it maybe goes a little bit back to the first question, is there something like a kind of activism behind this, or would this be totally off?
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: That is such an interesting question because, of course, I want to believe that there is resistance. And we do say, right, like good Foucaultians, wherever there is power, there is resistance. And gender sure wields a whole lot of power.
Now, I did not say, and I-- unless I misspoke, and I probably misspoke a million times-- I did not say that there are no rules in the Middle Ages. There is no normal in the Middle Ages. And binary sex-- that phrase that, like, men and women are opposite sexes? That's not a given, right?
The oppositeness of men and women is kind of Victorian, I think, invention. Like, what is opposite, anyway? Like, innie and outie? Shit, that's not quite how it looks.
So it's confusing, right? Like the-- we have inherited a gender system that seems so natural in such a given. Yes, they were patriarchal, women could not always inherit. Women were treated badly.
There was something called women that were organized to be subservient. There's no question that that was the case. It's not like they had no-- it's not that it was gender anarchy, right?
To say that there is no normal is not to say that it was gender anarchy. It is to say that the kind of normal that gets imposed now, it gets imposed, say, on babies born intersex forcing them to be one or the other because you cannot ever be both. That was not yet a medical option, but it was also not yet a social option.
There was a different system for controlling genders, and that system was maybe less concerned with genitalia all the time, and maybe not at all concerned with chromosomes because who knows what they are yet, and functions as a different kind of thing. What we're talking about is very narrow European development. And one thing I haven't talked about is the ways in which this is also, like, linked up to white supremacy and to the idea that gets imposed on all the countries that get colonized by the West that gender-- the way that the West does gender is the only way, and that it has to be two and only two and all that stuff.
Like that two or only two gets inflicted on the Philippines. And it kind of gets inflicted on the Middle Ages, too. And neither of those, time and place, necessarily not that I'm equating the two, but neither of them necessarily had that kind of organization to begin with, right? So the colonizing hand reaches hard. There's a bunch of questions. I'm so excited.
AUDIENCE: Hey. Thanks for sharing about your work. This question maybe follows on the pastoral example you just gave of rereading this pastoral. I'm curious how in this book you seem to be doing a lot of this reclamation of-- especially of Silence as this kind of unique copy, unique text.
So I'm curious how you might reread or apply what you sort of learned from working on the whole [INAUDIBLE] Silence with more canonical texts. So if there's a--
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Working on?
AUDIENCE: Canonical text. So if this isn't like too normie an example like Chaucer, or reading something along those lines.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: So I'm working on Chaucer right now, and I'm doing exactly what you're saying and it's very complicated. So let me give you my example. And this is admitting to like the thing that I'm fighting, like, I'm in the trenches with this right now.
So there's a character in Chaucer called Sir Thopas, who is ridiculous. He gallops-- he gets described the way girls get described. He gallops around on his horse in a way that seems kind of gay.
He's described gayly, which is complicated because gay doesn't mean gay yet, but it kind of means gay, if you know what I mean. And in the like '50s, medievalists pretty easily said, oh, he's light in his shoes, or some other euphemism for gay, gay, gay, gay. And then people got like a little bit more like, what is this thing called gay, and did they really think about it in the Middle Ages? And it's kind of more rigorous about it.
And so people stopped writing about Thopas as gay. And, in fact, I can't find anyone to quote who says that Sir Thopas is gay, except these kind of-- I mean, maybe they were gay men, but these very judgy people writing in the 1950s. And what I don't want to say is that because a person evinces feminine characteristics that makes them gay.
Like I don't want to be that kind of gender policing. And so I'm thinking a lot about what it means to say, we don't know this person's object choice at all, like, they say they're in love with a fairy queen, but the fairy queen never materializes. So they're in love with a fairy queen, like, whatever in a fairy kind of way. It's so gay.
But it's not, right? And so the thing you have to do is not assume that gender transgression equals gayness, but also not assume that gender transgression necessarily means transness, but it means something. And I'm wrestling with how to write about this text, which we've done the work, Chaucer, and nothing's been left unwritten about Chaucer.
But like what it means that this text sort of upsets gender, rather than conforms to gender norms. And so, yeah, I'm fighting that fight with Chaucer every day, or every day that I get to work on my book, which is not every day. I hope that answers your question.
SPEAKER: Yes. There's a question from Maggie online. Hi, Masha. I was wondering if you can add anything to our understanding of how trans folks figure into the transmission and discovery of medical knowledge in the period and how this process is reflected in your archive. It seems as though a lot of our current insistence on pathologizing gender and transness is still kind of medieval, in a sense.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Gosh, I think that's kind of a misuse of the word medieval where we sometimes use medieval to say bad, or old-fashioned, or archaic. Sometimes we use it to say violent. I don't like those uses of medieval. Sorry, Maggie, I'm sure you're fine.
In fact, you're probably medievalist and you were just talking. But, yes, our ideas about medicine-- oh, God, you know what? I can't fully answer this question. It's too long an answer.
I'm going to say that we now seem to be coming back around to ideas about humors, and ideas about how human beings develop in the embryo as-- OK. All right, all right, all right. Sorry, backing up.
Embryology says that all of us were, at some point, not sexed, and that the bits of us that become whatever our genitalia are start out the same bits, and then they just do different things as they grow. This is a lot like medieval medicine. So in that sense, we've returned to the medieval.
It's a lot like medieval medicine where, however, it is believed that men-- people who become men-- are hot and, therefore, their male genitals push out, while women are cold and, therefore, their genitals stay in. This is ridiculous sounding, and yet embryology kind of confirms it. So what do you do with that?
So, yes, in that sense our medicine is kind of medieval. The idea that our medicine has continuity with that history, I mean, I don't think that any medical research knows about Galen-- any medical researchers know about Galen, so it almost seems coincidental, rather than continuous. I think that the history of medicine really starts in the Renaissance, not in the Middle Ages.
And very little of what brilliant doctors in the Middle Ages figured out really counts for much in modern medical establishment. So I'm going to say, I don't think that that's a continuity situation. I don't know if that quite answers the question-- maybe.
SPEAKER: One more question, at least.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Only one? OK.
SPEAKER: OK.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: This is so fun.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, this is so fun, thank you so much for your talk and for also for all the questions you ask. And I really like the way you describe all the issues talking about trans people in the archive and queer people and gender nonconformists, because when you describe the archival work, it seems like the people you-- not you, in particular, but historians are looking for are people who are successfully passing, meaning that many of them are of us successfully passing we won't ever find out.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Meaning that in a way we are also gender conforming. And again, we, trans people, might sometimes be gender conforming and sometimes we might be gender non-conforming and queer. And so is there a way to articulate this distinction between trans as gendered, happily gendered, gender conforming, affirming, and trans as queer, which in this way would touch upon queerness as gayness, or lesbianism?
Because this creates over a more original, let's say, I can't say non-normative, but over definitions of what types of transness. And I think that there's a node of conflict between-- in the definition of transness.
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: I mean, what a beautiful question, and thank you so much. And I think mostly I can say this back to you in different language and say, yes, right? Like we don't know how many people were just passing.
We don't know, and maybe we shouldn't know, because they chose to live their lives as passing people and, therefore, like, let's leave them alone. We should not go after their naked bodies, right? So, yes, absolutely, there's a type of being gender non-conforming that is very gender conforming, right?
This is not unlike the debates within, and this is something that is debated insofar as I can say this in trans communities, queers debate this in queer communities, right? Some of us blend into suburbia and are no different, like, homo normative gays, right? I sometimes feel like I am at this point.
Like, I'm a mom, like, I blend in to heterosexuality in a certain kind of way that I don't intend, right? Like, we become less queer sometimes as we get older, but also, as we live our lives integrated into a society, rather than actively persecuted, right? The moment we. Get-- we stick our necks out as queers, as trans people, we are subject to different kinds of stuff.
That's where the stories come from. The stories come from those who stick their necks out, who fight for their rights, who let themselves be visible. Those are the people who both take the punishment, right, who throw the bricks at Stonewall. And those are the people who become the stories that we do put into the historical record.
And what that means is that the historical record is skewed towards the very queer and the very defiant. And I like that, but it's not the whole story, and we have to accept that that's not the whole story. I am really sure in my article on Silence, at some point, I started talking about why a person would want to pass as male.
And I was, like, shit, like, I probably couldn't have passed as male, and I'm not trans, by the way. I kind of always hope people think I am. But I couldn't pass as male if I tried.
But if I could, wouldn't it be lovely to run off and be able to have a job and not have to wear like uncomfortable skirts? Like, yeah. And yet, most people think that most people did not do this. Most people did not take the job opportunities and more salary offered to men. They lived their lives as cis people, as cis women, despite what patriarchy does to women.
So there's a balance here. Some people must have. Some people must have said, you know what? I can go on a ship and be like a sailor and I could run away from my situation and not have to marry that dude, right? And if I have to do that, if I have to pass as male to do that, that's fine.
And some people said, I'm going to-- I don't know-- fight that fight and steal dresses from a guy named Phillip, who then-- and then claim that my husband is going to go after him, right? And those are the stories that we've got, and we don't get that chip kid. That chip kid kind of escapes us. They just go off and become a pirate, God bless.
I just totally made up a story. I really--
SPEAKER: Well, I think that was so wonderful to hear. And I know you want to take a few more questions, right?
MASHA RASKOLNIKOV: I mean, I could if you guys still have the energy. I know it's like five after 5:00.
SPEAKER: Well, why don't we-- OK. Why don't we give a round of applause first, and then if you want to leave, you can and stay. Yes, you can.
[APPLAUSE]
In a Chats in the Stacks talk about the book she co-edited, Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, Masha Raskolnikov presents proof against those who claim that transgender people, experiences, and identities could not have existed prior to the twentieth century. The collection of essays explores the abundance and diversity of gender experiences that flourished in the medieval and early modern worlds—from colonial North America to Renaissance Poland; from Byzantine and Ottoman Greece and Turkey to Korea. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, this multi-disciplinary volume offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early-modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal.This book talk was sponsored by Olin Library. Raskolnikov is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell, and she is also its director of undergraduate studies. She is the author of Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory.
