François·e Charmaille

At the interface of grammar and nature, bees served as a figure of transgender identification for monks in England, France, and Germany circa 800–1070. Monks recognised bees as essential nonhuman participants in monastic life. Bees were associated with chastity, and communal life, but also with the arts of grammar and poetry. They were also known for their divergence from human sexual difference. Monastic writers used bees to conceptualise their own status in the sexual economy of their society, by experimenting with the grammatical genders used to refer to bees, identifying bees with monks, and rewriting the genders of monks in the process. This process of nonbeenary identification unfolds in Old English and Latin bee charms, and in the works of monastic writers including Rainerus of Blandin, Bern of Reichenau, and Wulfstan of Winchester.

This article argues that intersex is present in medieval medical texts outside of the medieval concept of hermaphroditism. The phlegmatic man, the phlegmatic woman, and the sanguine man, in the twelfth-century medical text _Cause et cure_, all exhibit intersex characteristics. The close examination of the terms in which these figures are described also shows that the elaboration of intersex in this text directly challenges the modern distinction between sex and gender. Contrary to Joan Cadden’s influential analysis of _Cause et cure_, I argue that the text has a robust nonbinary system of sexual difference. In particular, phlegm is consistently characterised as an intersex category. The examination of phlegm’s intersex properties leads to a re-examination of _viriditas_ [greenness]. This study reveals that _viriditas_ acts as a masculine and masculinising substance, in an almost hormonal sense. Its imbalanced presence in phlegmatic bodies causes them to diverge from prelapsarian ideals of sexual dimorphism. _Cause et cure_ identifies the Fall as the cause of humoral imbalance, and illness. The text precisely describes atypical sex as one of the effects of this fallen state. I identify this through an intersex reading which contests the sex/gender distinction and the reification of sex.

The Pardoner’s description in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has often been read in terms that reproduce the narrator's binary assumptions about the division between male and female. The narrator reifies these assumptions by metaphorically representing the Pardoner as a horse. This equine metaphor draws on a minor trope in anti-sodomy writing of the later Middle Ages. By analyzing the animal trope's appearance in the writings of Ovid, Peter Damian, Walter of Châtillon, and Alan of Lille, this article shows that a concern for the stability of the male/female binary is at the heart of these anti-sodomy writings. The rhetorical recourse to horses and other nonhuman animals as points of comparison attempts to restore a stable, natural status to the male/female binary. This attempt fails with the Pardoner, who is exactly what he appears to be: male and female yet neither at once.

Lacan’s theory of metaphor and medieval theories of metaphor have much to say to each other, and this dialogue in turn sheds light on medieval understandings of gender. Over the course of Lacan’s theorisation of the metaphor/metonymy dichotomy, he formulates a critique of identity that describes identification as a specific linguistic process, that of metaphor. Metaphor, for Lacan, is a symptomatic méconnaissance of the signifier’s relation to the signified, and the subject’s relation to its unconscious. Lacan’s theory of metaphor benefits from comparison with a (slightly unusual) medieval theory of metaphor found in some thirteenth-century glosses to the Doctrina puerorum, an influential grammatical textbook by French cleric Alexander of Villa Dei. While this medieval theory of metaphor is more flexible and optimistic than Lacan’s, it demonstrates an awareness of the fraught relation between the tenor and vehicle, which Lacan models as metaphor’s entanglement with metonymy. This resonance between medieval theories and Lacan’s critique of metaphor as a mechanism for identification in turn sheds light on a particular medieval trope, what I call the gender metaphor. The metonymic critique of metaphor, when applied to gender, draws a path towards the unfolding of a transgender discourse. By bringing Lacan’s theory of metaphor into contact with the medieval gender metaphor, the possibility of a Lacanian critique of gender emerges, beyond Lacan’s own transphobia.

This article gathers evidence of a distinct strand of writing in Western Europe from the sixth century onwards which concerns itself with the relation between the seasons and sexual difference in humans, particularly in discussions of Tiresias. From this tradition emerges what I call trans climatology, a conceptualization of seasons as gendered, of the climatically ordered procession of the seasons as transgender change, and of this change having a direct effect on the bodies of people (or indeed, of people’s bodies having a direct effect on the climate). This article’s aims are therefore threefold. Firstly, it uncovers a tradition of mythographical exegesis, i.e., the climatological interpretation of the myth of Tiresias, and shows that mythographies across the 500–1300 period engaged in a debate around the significance of Tiresias’s transitions. Secondly, this article shows how two major literary works of the late Middle Ages, Alan of Lille’s _De planctu naturae_ (c. 1160) and Jean de Meun’s continuation of the _Roman de la Rose_ (c. 1268–74), responded to this intellectual tradition. It is with these two texts that a fully-fledged trans climatology becomes actual discourse rather than the potential implication it was in previous mythographical works. Thirdly, this article hopes to convince scholars, both inside and outside the medieval field, of trans climatology’s import as an analytical concept. It therefore intervenes not only in medieval ecological studies, but also in the even younger field of medieval trans studies and their modern counterparts.

This speculative essay suggests that instead of arguing for the Middle Ages as essential, instead of arguing for the Middle Ages’ modernity, medievalists ought to embrace the contingency of the Middle Ages. This means thinking the Middle Ages as neither a disposable patch of darkness nor an essential stage on the way to modernity. Particularly in relation to disability studies, critical race studies, queer studies, trans studies, and other social justice fields, it is precisely because the Middle Ages open a space of contingency that they can enable us to think modernity otherwise.

This essay revisits the genealogy of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité and calls for a reassessment of its later volumes as politically engaged expériences in historiography. Recontextualizing their work within the Essentialist–Social Constructionist debate that took place among historians and theorists of sexuality in the 1980s, I show that the relations between John Boswell, the most prominent "essentialist," and Michel Foucault, the most prominent "constructionist," were much more amicable and complex than commentators have previously claimed. Boswell served as a "guide" for the last three volumes of Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité. By uncovering the considerable influence Boswell's supposedly "essentializing" concept of "gay" had on Foucault's later writings and politics, I demonstrate that Foucault was not committed to the historicization of sexual concepts, but rather to the transformation, through historiography, of present-day relations. This process, at once historiographical, intellectual, subjective, and political, is what Foucault calls "expérience."