Download PDF | Roland Betancourt - Byzantine Intersectionality_ Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages-Princeton University Press (2020).
297 Pages
NOTE ON THE TEXT
When available, the author has opted to use the most accessible translations of texts, modified as necessary, rather than using their own translations. Likewise, rather than presenting the full original-language texts, relevant terms and phrases have been transliterated when deemed pertinent to the argument or for added critical nuance. These choices have been done both in keeping with the Press’s preferred practices, as well as to enhance the text’s readability without impinging on its critical use by both the expert and novice reader. References are provided for the editions of original-language texts, understanding that the majority of these are accessible via open-access resources or databases, such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG). In the rare instances where a text has been culled from an unpublished (or merely-digitized) manuscript, the full text is reproduced, transliterated.
Introduction
AT THE TURN OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY
an anonymous author from Palestine narrated the encounter of the monk Zosimas with the ascetic Mary of Egypt.' This Mary was a sexually promiscuous woman in Alexandria who escaped into the desert to find liberation from her lust and temptations. Earlier sources, however, had described her as a devout woman fleeing the advances of men.
The earliest version of her life, from the sixth century, depicts her as a cantor in the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem who removed herself from urban life to avoid leading several men, who were infatuated with her, into sin.” A similar tale is recounted around the turn of the seventh century, describing an unnamed nun from Jerusalem who fled into the desert because a young man had become desirous of her.’ In both these cases, Mary isolates herself simply to protect lustful men from sinning—and, as the authors imply, to protect herself from being raped by them.
The Palestinian Life of Mary of Egypt, which would become the standard account, alters these narratives. Here, the departure is from her own promiscuous life, sparked by her miraculous conversion at the Holy Sepulcher. After this conversion and wishing to purge herself of her crazed desires for the most debased sex, Mary isolates herself. In other words, her life story shifts from that of a pious woman sacrificing herself in order to shelter and protect erring men to that of an exuberantly lustful woman from whom men need protection.
When Zosimas encountered her, Mary had already spent seventeen years in the Egyptian desert. Her figure was significantly altered by deprivation and the elements: the author describes her as a naked figure with short white hair, like that of an elderly man, and says that her “body was black, as if tanned by the scorching of the sun.”* Then, the author has her narrate her past for the reader. Filling the text with lurid details, Mary voices her voracious lust, describes how she raped many men, and again stresses her complete bodily transformation through harsh ascetic practices.
What can the story of Mary of Egypt tell us about the ways in which gender, sexuality, and race were construed across Byzantium? My aim in this book is to look at how stories give us a glimpse into the intersectionality of identity in the medieval world, exploring how these various categories overlap with one another—not as distinct identities but as enmeshed conditions that radically alter the lives of figures, both real and imagined. In this introduction, I open my investigation by tracing how these identities are at play with each other in the story of Mary of Egypt.
Here, I focus on two main strands of intersection that permeate this book: first, nonnormative sexual practices and sexual consent; second, transmasculine gender presentation and constructions of race based on skin color. In the specific case of Mary of Egypt, we see a literary subject whose identity is not defined by any one of these factors alone but who embodies their intersectionality and the unique conditions of oppression and marginalization. Here, as I do in approaching other figures in this book, I treat Mary of Egypt both as an author’s problematic construction and as a potential historical subject in order to give voice to subjectivities neatly purged and expunged from the historical record.
SEXUALITY + CONSENT
While Mary of Egypt is often described in the secondary and primary literature as a sex worker, that title can hardly be applied to the figure portrayed in the anonymous Life. Indeed, Mary explicitly rejects the label. As she tells Zosimas, “I was a public temptation to licentiousness, not for payment, I swear, since I did not accept anything although men often wished to pay me. I simply contrived this so that I could seduce many more men, thus turning my lust into a free gift.
Placing her beyond excuse for her actions, Mary is made to say that her deeds were justified by neither calamity nor poverty. The author’s tactic here is consistently what we would describe today as slut-shaming: a rhetorical practice of criticizing a person’s appearance, behavior, or both for failing to adhere to gender-based expectations about their sexuality. Usually deployed against women and queer men, slutshaming targets a person’s real or assumed sexual promiscuity (including premarital or casual sex) and their physical appearance (including attire, makeup, and bodily development). But the practice also relies on a host of other charges, such as accusing or humiliating a person for requesting or gaining access to birth control, engaging in sex work, or for being the victim of sexual assault. In all these regards, the Life of Mary effectively produces a character who is both a product and an example of slut-shaming.
In analyzing such stories, we can appreciate slut-shaming as more than just a practice enacted on a single person, group, or class of people. In art and rhetoric, it is a social practice used to generate tropes of women, real or imagined, that are thus cast as sluts. In the Greek-speaking Mediterranean where the author wrote Mary’s story, the most vicious and graphic example of this is the mid-sixth-century Secret History, the subject of this book’s second chapter. Written by the emperor Justinian’s historian, Procopius of Caesarea, the Secret History contains extensive and repeated attacks on empress Theodora’s sexuality.
In a text verging on the Byzantine equivalent to revenge pornography, Procopius criticizes and graphically illustrates Theodora’s “shameless” behavior, sexual appetites, history of sex work, lower-class upbringing, and reliance on birth control, both contraceptive and abortive. In the Life of Mary of Egypt, written just about a half century after Procopius’s Secret History, we witness the same tropes and tactics of slut-shaming, though given a more demure and censored form in the context ofa saint’s life. Nevertheless, the scars of slut-shaming as a welldefined rhetorical practice are evident in the author’s story.
Aroused by a crowd of Libyan and Egyptian men boarding a ship to Jerusalem, the Life’s Mary says (in the first person) that she wanted to go with them so that she “could have many lovers, ready [to satisfy] my lust.” But she spares Zosimas more graphic details about her desires, lest she “defile both you and the air with my words.” Zosimas urges her to continue, and there the author gives us a prudish glimpse into Mary’s lust, as she thirsts over those men on the seashore—“vigorous in their bodies as well as in their movements, who seemed to me fit for what I sought.
Later, she states that “there is no kind of licentiousness, speakable or unspeakable, that I did not teach those miserable men.”° Mary is thus like Theodora, who Procopius accused in meticulous detail of devising new sexual positions and practicing oral, anal, and vaginal sex; the Life’s narrative follows such textual precedents to coyly intimate to a medieval audience the various sexual acts in which Mary was engaging with those throngs of Libyan and Egyptian men. The effect of the anonymous author’s slut-shaming is twofold: it places Mary of Egypt beyond redemption or compassion, while it titillates the imagination and sexual desires of a presumed cisgender, heterosexual, male audience, familiar with the bawdy performances and slanderous stories popular at the time.
Because the Life’s account, like that of Procopius, enacts our current definition of slut-shaming, that term is apt for unraveling the intersection of practices and subjectivities through which women (and also queer men and trans women) were marginalized. These stories also provide an inkling of the various practices connected with sex and reproductive health in which the Byzantines took part, even if the accounts cannot be ascribed to the lived realities of a historical Mary or Theodora. In acknowledging slutshaming—both as an act by a social group and as a compositional practice by an author—we must be careful not to redeem these historical women by denying the charges.
Instead, it falls upon us as readers and historians to call out these male authors for their rhetorical violence against these women, while also ensuring that we do not fall prey to the same politics of “respectability” that sparked the attacks in the first place. In other words, though we must call out the toxicity of the Life’s author and of Procopius, we must also provide room for these slut-shamed figures to maneuver within their descriptions. Put simply, we must move past the stigma associated with the sexual acts attached to their names and embrace a sex-positive image of the accounts, allowing a Mary or Theodora to operate without prejudice. At the same time, we can prudently assess the glimpses into medieval sexuality, birth control, and oppressive tactics that these narratives provide.
The anonymous author culminates his multipronged slut-shaming campaign by clearly and precisely accusing Mary of rape. While traveling on the ship to Jerusalem, the Life’s Mary repentantly exclaims, “What tongue can declare... the acts into which I forced [énagkazon] those wretched men against their will [mé thelontas]?”’ The author uses the violation of sexual consent as a way to express the extent of Mary’s depravity, showing her not only to be licentious in her own voracious sexual drive but also to exceed and impinge on the sexual wishes of others.
Thus, her violation of (male) sexual consent is presented as the last straw in the litany of her depravities. Over the course of the two centuries following the Life’s composition, Byzantine legal and religious authorities developed clearer and more nuanced language to classify crimes that involved consent, in relation to both sex and marriage.’ For instance, while Roman law did not unambiguously differentiate between rape, adultery, fornication, and other sexual crimes, in 741 C.E., the law code of Leo III the Isaurian clarified how these sexual crimes and improprieties were designated.
Beyond such codification in law, this period also demonstrated a cultural consciousness that sexual consent was at the very heart of Christian ethics and theology. A telling sign of this importance can be seen in the growing role played by reproductive consent in homilies and narratives on the Annunciation. Writers before Iconoclasm (726-787 C.E., 814-842 C.E.) could be quite careless in their descriptions of when the Virgin Mary conceived Jesus, but, from the mid-ninth century onward, authors deliberately stressed that Mary gave clear verbal consent to becoming the Mother of God before she was impregnated.
This emphasis on Mary’s consent, which is the focus of my first chapter, underscores the importance given in Byzantine thought to a woman’s consent to sex and reproduction. We need to keep this historical context in mind when we consider the author’s accusation of rape against Mary of Egypt. Appearing in the final passage before her conversion at the threshold of the Holy Sepulcher, the author’s charge pathologizes Mary’s sexuality not just as lewd or shameless but also as violent, criminal, and fundamentally inhumane.
I propose further that these narratives present stereotypes of sexual lasciviousness, assault, and violence that are often associated with (and even, at times, praised in) men in Byzantine sources. In staging Mary of Egypt as behaving in a masculine way, the author is impugning not only her moral compass but also her gender identity. Infamously, Byzantine medical handbooks from the sixth and seventh centuries prescribe the trimming of the clitoris for women who seek frequent sexual intercourse, a practice that we today would call female genital mutilation.? In his sixth-century gynecological treatise, Aetius of Amida states that an enlarged clitoris is “greatly irritated by constant contact with the clothing and stimulates venery and coitus.
A century later, Paul of Aegina expands this observation in his surgical manual, stating that “some women have had erections of this part like men, and also an impulse toward frequent sexual intercourse.” These medical sources view incessant sexual desire in women as a masculine characteristic that must be corrected to ensure their femininity. Therefore, we should also read these various slut-shaming tactics as questioning Mary of Egypt’s gender by emphasizing her masculinized sexual practices. This is an approach often taken in attacks both on female masculinity and in the broader spectrum of transmasculinity, where a person assigned female at birth identifies more with masculinity, but is nonbinary or not attached to a male identity.” We therefore come to the broader intersection of sexuality and gender, and this investigation will lead us further—to the intersection of gender and race.
GENDER + RACE
As we consider the transmasculinity of Mary of Egypt in greater depth, visual culture provides a richer archive than do the textual sources alone. In depicting her great asceticism, painters often produced a transmasculine body for Mary of Egypt that is visually synonymous with that of her male counterparts. For example, compare the image of Mary of Egypt in the sanctuary of the Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou in Cyprus with that of John the Baptist just outside the sanctuary of the same church (figs. 0.1 and 0.2).'?
Both wear a scrappy, tan-colored garment over their emaciated bodies: John’s tunic is shredded at its hem, while Mary’s is haphazardly tossed over her flesh, wrapped as a himation (a loose mantel-like garment) but without a chiton (the long tunic usually worn under the himation). Her garment, which Zosimas has just tossed to her so that she can cover herself up, is much finer than John’s, neither tattered nor torn, with subtle embroidery visible at its hem.
As the author details in the text, she had “hair white as wool, and even this was sparse as it did not reach below the neck.” In the sanctuary image, Mary’s white hair is sparse and shaggy, twisting and turning over her profile and her disheveled pompadour echoes that of John. And though John’s body is just as thin and petite as Mary’s, her naked chest and back reveal that she is gruesomely famished—her ribs are prominently visible and she has a pronounced hunchback, with thick blobs of paint marking every single one of her vertebrae.
Looking at these two images, we are left with the realization that, by Byzantine standards, John’s body is more feminine than Mary’s, or rather, Mary’s is more masculine than John’s. John’s hair is longer than Mary’s, reaching well past his shoulders, and it falls into locks of thick glossy curls. Mary’s tunic falls as flatly over her chest as John’s falls over his; a thin swirl of color beside her armpit might allude to withered breasts, a feature recounted in some of the trans saints’ lives that we shall see in chapter 3. On her face, the weight of Mary’s excess flesh and wrinkles pulls down her jawline. The soft and rounded face of the Virgin Mary, standing next to John, provides a marked contrast: the ascetic has no roundness to her.
The streams of paint that contour the ascetic Mary’s drooping cheek flow down from the top of her ear and the outer corner of her eye, curving at an angle that echoes her rigidly square jaw. That jaw features a strong and prominent chin, unlike the Virgin’s soft and rounded features. The ascetic’s brow is furrowed and shadowed, while the Virgin has a serenely elastic brow. John’s legs, arms, and feet are covered with body hair, indicated by thin long stripes of black paint. Mary’s body is lacerated with similar lines, though thicker and shorter; brownish-red stripes of paint even cover her back, yet notably not the palms of her hands.
Her flesh is also seemingly covered in body hair. In this ambiguity in representations of scar and hair, the lacerations of asceticism transmute into the secondary sex characteristics of the male body. In the later Western medieval world, though rarely in Byzantine art, Mary of Egypt and her often-conflated counterpart, Mary Magdalene, are both commonly depicted as covered in body hair as if they were beasts of the wilderness. Yet, despite their hairiness, in Western art the women often retain the coded characteristics of feminine beauty, youth, and pallor, making them radically different from the Byzantine Mary of Egypt. In every way, the Byzantine artist has sought to portray Mary as transmasculine.
Is this transmasculine depiction unique? If not, what do such cases tell us about the fluidity and presentation of gender? In the Life’s narrative, as Zosimas pursues her, Mary attempts to flee; eventually overtaken, she asks him to toss her his cloak for she is a woman and should not turn around and reveal her nudity.’° This moment is dramatized in the Theodore Psalter’s gloss to Psalm 54:6-8, which reads: “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. I would flee far away and stay in the desert. I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm.” In the marginal illustration, the encounter with Zosimas is captured precisely at the moment that he has tossed the garment toward her (fig. 0.3).
The cloth is suspended in midair, having just left his hands. Zosimas looks away, while Mary turns back to catch the fine cloth. As she twists, she exposes her naked chest to the viewer while her right thigh modestly protects her pubic region. When we closely inspect her chest, we again see no indication of breasts, whether full or withered. Rather, her chest is crossed from armpit to armpit by a thick reddish brushstroke, slightly wavy, resembling a wound. It looks more like the mottled dark-red of cauterized scar tissue than breasts.
What do we make of this line? Do we relegate it to a minor painterly gesture, a minute flick of an artist’s wrist in a composition? Or is there any possible meaning that we can pull from this detail? Looking at this line with a knowledge of Byzantine medical guidebooks, I perceive a scar that would be in keeping with a mastectomy. According to the medical and surgical handbooks, a mastectomy at the time involved a process of alternately cutting and cauterizing, such as is prescribed in the chapters of Aetius of Amida’s sixth-century gynecological treatise that describe the removal of breast cancer.
There is no clear evidence to corroborate that this was the artist’s intention, and these surgical manuscripts include no illuminations. However, we can compare the scar-like trace on Mary’s body to an earlier image of Saint Agatha’s torture found in the Menologion of Basil I (fig. 0.4). Here we do have an artist explicitly tasked with depicting the surgical removal of breasts from a Christian saint. The tactics, imagery, and knowledge deployed suggest how artists might have used medical texts in their works.
In this depiction, two men are torturing Agatha by cutting off her breasts, using not pincers, as is often shown, but rather a striking halfmoon knife. The knife is a unellum (fig. 0.5), commonly associated with the scraping and cleaning of animal skin in the making of parchment (fig. 0.6); it is thus a tool connected with the working of flesh for a scribe and illuminator. In the miniature, Agatha’s recently cut-off breast has fallen onto the ground to her right.
A man approaches her with a torch that is about to be pressed against the wound where the right breast had been, apparently to cauterize the open lesion. After all, Agatha’s torture was not intended to be fatal; rather, she was meant to live on without her breasts. In the composition, this point is stressed by the recumbent Agatha to the right of her torture. Depicted within the walls of a city, she sits with her body contorted, perhaps in pain, as she recovers after the forced mastectomy.
Nuances regarding the proper surgical procedure for mastectomies must be noted here, as these details lead us deeper into the artist’s logic. First, an open torch is not hot enough to cauterize such a wound. And, second, we have no evidence that such a lunellum was ever used as a surgical tool. In other words, we are seeing here painters conceptualizing a surgical process through the types of tools and methods with which they would have been most familiar in a manuscript workshop—those used to work, manufacture, and process animal skins for parchment. Nevertheless, I contend that a familiarity with medical texts is certainly at play here.
These patterns of scars and incisions match modern reconstructions of Paul of Aegina’s instructions for the surgical treatment of moderate and severe gynecomastia (figs. 0.7 and 0.8)."° Paul of Aegina’s seventh-century instructions for breast-reductions for severe gynecomastia indicate the need for “a lunate incision” (ménoeidé . . . tomén), which would have naturally led the artist to articulate this “crescent-shaped cut” via the shape of either the cutting tool or, as in other cases, the gash (fig. 0.8). The scene of the Martyrdom of Melasippos, Karina, and their son in the Menologion of Basil II provides an example of such a crescent-shaped wound on Karina’s chest, her breasts having been freshly excised (fig. 0.9).
As we compare these images, we can find striking parallels—for example, between the lunate wounds on Karina’s chest and the similarly oval form on Mary of Egypt’s chest in the Asinou portrait, or between the depiction of Agatha’s wound with its height just at her armpit and the curious dark-red undulating line across Mary of Egypt’s chest in the Theodore Psalter. Certainly, whether out of cruelty, modesty, or a strong desire to obscure their breasts, these painted figures have had their breasts removed,even showing the scars. This suggests that the visual language of excision and cauterization associated with mastectomies could be deployed to manifest the transmasculine body of Mary of Egypt.
While Mary of Egypt is not explicitly understood as a transgender man or eunuch, as are several of the figures examined in this book (particularly in chapters 3, 4, and 5), her presentation is nevertheless masculinized.” Her story and depictions in art also feature several important details that speak to her unsettled gender identity. As we will see, there are several narratives of trans monks who were assigned female at birth but chose to live their lives as male and pass as eunuchs. In those stories, the authors repeatedly make note of how these figures altered their bodies’ secondary sex characteristics. The authors comment that these trans men went beyond wearing male garb—they had lost their feminine beauty, their menstruation had stopped, their breasts looked like two shriveled leaves, and their skin had darkened.
According to these texts, the figures were unrecognizable to their loved ones; they looked like “Ethiopians”—a reference to the ancient Greek theory of racial difference, stressing that the sun had made their skin “burnt-looking.”"’ These details are striking, offering us a host of different factors that not only show ways in which these figures were able to transition but also how Byzantines linked skin color and the attendant assignment of race with gender identity. Medical writers, like Aetius of Amida, associated dark skin with manly women who were hairier and menstruated less than other women.” In contrast, Eustathios of Thessalonike praised the emperor Manuel I Komnenos for his dark skin, saying that it spoke to his manliness and his willingness to purge from his flesh all “effeminate paleness” (thélyprepés leukotés).”
In the Life’s text, Mary appears when the monk Zosimas catches a glance of her ghostly shape in the desert, described as “a naked figure whose body was black, as if tanned by the scorching sun.”” In early Christian and Western medieval texts on the lives of monks and ascetics, black figures often signify the manifestation of demons. At the same time, however, Byzantine sources cast the racial diversity of the empire and its peoples in a positive light, often prizing the diversity of the court and Constantinople; we will return to these matters in chapter 5.
But, curiously, the author’s Zosimas is ecstatically taken in by the black figure of Mary, writing that “he was inspired with pleasure and, filled with joy at that incredible sight.”” This narrative simultaneously undoes the aspects of racial prejudice inherent in some early Christian texts and reveals to us the multifaceted intersection of skin color, gender stereotypes, racial identity, and ethnic grouping conceived by a medieval author. The figure of Mary of Egypt as created by an elite author, writing in Greek in the city of Jerusalem in the seventh century, encompasses all these issues. Such stories require new interpretive models that enable us to appreciate the complex entanglements of identity, while understanding the systematics of oppression and marginalization that have all but purged such lives from the historical archive.
BYZANTINE INTERSECTIONALITY
Following the intersectional approach of critical race studies and feminism, this project acknowledges that identity is neither singular nor delimited by neat categories. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to stress that the lived realities of marginalized people do not exist as isolated factors alone but instead come together at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, socioeconomic status, and so on. Thus, intersectionality looks at how the overlap of social identities creates unique conditions of inequality and oppression.”?
Unlike approaches that study the role of women or foreigners in the medieval world in isolation, intersectionality suggests that a foreign woman, for example, faces a series of challenges that include the struggles of those socially identified as being both foreign and female, yet she is not merely the sum of those parts. This book is titled Byzantine Intersectionality not only because it studies the intersectionality of identity across the Byzantine world but also because the pejorative “byzantine” speaks to the inherent queerness of these stories and the empire from which that slur was taken. Intersectional identity is byzantine—it is infinitely complicated, and it is often characterized as devious, deceitful, and corrupt.
For those reasons, I have chosen to use the phrase “the Byzantine world” throughout this book: it serves as a capacious term to encompass the span of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean, as well as the contributions to this world by its closest neighbors and allies.** Ultimately, this is a book about the Byzantine Empire, which I define as the Eastern Roman Empire from the foundation of Constantinople in the early fourth century until its conquest in the late fifteenth century. In using a definition that spans the late antique, medieval, and early modern periods, I purposely acknowledge the unbroken tradition of the medieval Roman Empire, which possessed an access to and intimacy with the Greek and Latin heritage of the ancient Greek and Roman Mediterranean and its neighbors.”
Intersectionality, however, does more than flesh out the subjectivities of people who experience the overlap of several discriminated against, marginalized, or disenfranchised identities. Intersectionality also alerts us to the subjects whose privilege keeps them away from the public eye. The figure of the abortion-inducing sex worker is shaped by her intersectional identity as a destitute woman of the lowest economic status, yet it also makes us aware that women of privilege would have been spared from such libelous representations in texts, even when performing the same deeds. For example, that an elite medical text would provide detailed prescriptions for abortive suppositories, contraceptive treatments, and late-term surgical methods for terminating a pregnancy demonstrates the privilege of upperclass women’s own pursuits of contraception and abortion.
In examining the lives of figures subjected to multiple inequities, we begin to perceive the privileges afforded to some other women, men, and nonbinary figures in society. Privilege, and the privacy it often enables, create the greatest lacunae in the historical record. Privacy creates closets that allow certain figures ample room to maneuver, away from the judgment and agency of publics and oppressors. Such figures are usually also safe from the historian’s stylus.
Thus, in articulating the intersectionality of disenfranchised identities, we will also be outlining the privilege afforded to those persons who might have shared in some of these identities, but whose economic status, social rank, race, origin, and so on spared them from vilification in the historical record—if not from any association with a marginalized identity. Intersectionality makes us keenly aware of all those hidden figures who were able to make choices about their sexual consent, pursue abortions and contraceptives, live as transgender monks, engage in samegender intimacies, and be black at court, without facing the same degree of invective or libel as their poorer counterparts. This book challenges us to take risks in fleshing out the intersectional lives of the downtrodden, while also providing spectrums of possibility for the identities and freedoms allowed to the more privileged ranks and neglected by the historical record.
Given the historical archive’s push toward normative narratives, queer historical tasks such as this require close reading and careful scrutiny of what has been labeled minor. As Elizabeth Freeman has eloquently put it, queer history necessitates “the decision to unfold, slowly, a small number of imaginative texts rather than amass a weighty archive of or around texts, and to treat these texts and their formal work as theories of their own, interventions upon both critical theory and historiography.”** But, more so, this book struggles with the absences of archives and the potent act of grasping at lives, purposefully and shamefully erased and denied. “To read without a trace,” as Anjali Arondekar calls it, is a way of embracing the absences of the archive, the seductions of a retrieval, and the recuperative hermeneutics of accessing minoritized lives and historiographies.” It is this intersection of slow unfolding and traceless reading that this book embraces.
The five chapters that follow unfurl a series of minuscule intersectional histories.** Each history is carefully scaled and delineated to elucidate rich, nuanced, and surprising takes by medieval thinkers and artists on familiar subjects. Sometimes it encompasses a neatly defined trajectory in the evolution of a cluster of ideas; at other times it focuses on a particular person, specific period, or textual genre to generate points of resistance that might otherwise be overlooked or have no place in a broader historical account.
‘These five chapters will reveal long-standing conversations in medieval thought around matters of reproductive consent, sexual shaming, trans and nonbinary genders, queer intimacies, and racial identity. Chapter 1 traces the evolving emphasis given to consent in treatments of the Annunciation, stressing the important role that Mary’s consent to become the Mother of God played in homilies and art after Iconoclasm. Chapter 2 focuses on the practices and tactics that Procopius uses in the Secret History to slut-shame Empress Theodora, focusing on his deployment of graphic sexual detail and accusations against her and other women of abortive and contraceptive practices. Chapter 3 surveys saints’ lives, medical texts, and the epistolary tradition not only to present evidence for the representation of transgender and gender nonconforming persons in Byzantium but also to elucidate a host of gender affirming practices found in both surgical guides and ascetic action.
Chapter 4 examines representations of the Doubting Thomas scene in text and art to reveal potent narratives of same-gender desire and monastic community, stressing the need to include trans, nonbinary, and asexual figures in the history of queer sexuality and intimacy. And chapter 5 places the visual representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch from the Acts of the Apostles in the context of discourses around racial identity, ethnic grouping, and skin color in order to delineate how artists struggled with the figure’s intersectional identity as a eunuch, a Christian, and a black African. None of these narratives is comprehensive or exhaustive, but all are sufficient and provocative orientations that require us to think further into these identities and do better as readers, historians, and modern subjects.
My promise to the reader is that I will endeavor (as much as I responsibly can) to treat the figures in my texts and images as possible medieval subjects with a past, a present, and—most important—a future. Many of the subjectivities encompassed here have been actively denied, negated, or simply assumed to have not existed in the Middle Ages.
I will take their existence for granted and treat them as real, because they were real. Whether Empress Theodora actually carried out the sexual deeds and abortions that Procopius slut-shames her for does not matter, because there were other women in the past subjected to the same—and far worse—rhetorical and physical violence as that imputed against Procopius’s literary Theodora. Whether the trans monks discussed in this book actually existed or were simply literary characters is beside the point. The fact is that there were people in the Byzantine Empire who were trans and who, even if they did not have the critical vocabulary to self-identify as such or have their voices recorded, were nevertheless still trans. To deny these realities is to be complicit with violence—both physical and rhetorical—not just in the past but also in the present.
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