Gone Medieval - Medieval Perceptions of Gender

Episode Date: December 18, 2021

Nonconforming beyond the limitations of what's typically expected of men and women has been happening for many centuries. A part of history and tradition which, some might say, even crossed into religion. But focusing on the years 200–1400 C.E, how were non-binary identities defined? In this episode, Matt is joined by professor and author Leah Devin. Leah talks about their new book and the research surrounding it. Author of 'The Shape of Sex', they delve into the history of nonbinary sex, from its embrace in early Christianity to the attempted erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century.If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit.To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Matt Lewis. I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor Leah Devon of Rutgers University in New Jersey to talk about their brand new book, The Shape of Sex, Non-Binary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. And this book takes a look at the long history of those who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories focusing on the period between 200 and 1,400 CE,

so right in our sweet spot here. Thank you very much for joining us, Leah. Thank you, my pleasure. So I guess my first question is, before we tackle the nitty-gritty detail of this, how should we define non-binary identities and how should we differentiate between a gender identity and a sex? Why don't I start with a gender and sex difference

because it's so basic and also because it's so often misunderstood? we tend to talk about sex as sort of the biological, the body stuff of it, whereas we talk about gender as a social practice or as someone's sort of internal feeling about their sense of self. And, you know, that's a helpful way of dividing things up because it gives us a sense that these two sex and gender might not align in a particular individual, right? It's a good way about talking about transgender, for instance. But for the pre-modern thinkers that I look at, there's not really the same sort of like a clear dichotomy between sex as like the body and gender as like a social or cultural practice on the other hand. They kind of wrap together gender and sex and even I would say sexuality all together into one kind of category.

They call it sexes. It's Latin for sounds like sex, but it's a little different by what we mean when we say sex. And that just means that, you know, when they think of differences between men and women, they're thinking about kind of a physiological, anatomical difference that then determines all those social roles and gender practices. So they're like knit together. And then it also determines how people have sex and, you know, how their sexuality lies too. So those kinds of distinctions that we make in the modern world, you know, don't quite work for the medieval world. But I will say, you know, that even now, when we think about our modern ideas about the body and about anatomy and kind of

of like the objective kind of truth of sex. You know, a lot of feminists and queer scholars and other people have pointed to us that, you know, those kinds of objective ideas about the body are kind of colored by our gendered sort of biases anyway. So in some ways, you know, maybe we're not totally different from the Middle Ages. But I do want to point out that some of the assumptions we might make about what sex is or what gender is, you know, but they're not continuous across time, right? Things change a lot over a long period of time. So when we think about non-binary, non-binary, non-binary.

identity, non-binary gender, all the debates we're having about it. You know, that's really in flux right now. You know, I mean, people are kind of, you know, coming out as non-binary. People are arguing about what it means. So, you know, there's not like really a firm definition of what it means to be non-binary gender. And maybe that's, you know, that's kind of always true. But I think that when we think about non-binary as anything that's kind of outside of male and female, and that that can kind of overlap with, say, like a trans identity.

so someone can be non-binary and trans, for instance, right? But then other people tend to think of non-binary as being an umbrella category that includes sort of everything that challenges or transgresses sort of simple masculinity and femininity, in which case transgender would be kind of a part of non-binary, right? And that's the way that I use it in my book. Non-binary for me stands for sort of everything that, you know, doesn't fit into one of those two binary compartments very easily.

but, and I use the word non-binary because it's what people used in the Middle Ages to talk about their own system of classification and to talk about individuals, right? So it's the appropriate term for the period, but it's not exactly straightforward because they use non-binary to talk about intersex people, people we might think of as gender crossers, people who we might think of as queer, right? People who are sexual deviants in their eyes, people who are eunuchs. So again, it's sort of an umbrella category that wraps up all of that in it, but they're using it a little differently than when somebody says now, I identify as non-binary, right? But all of that, I think, is a part of a broad history of non-binary that's important to where we are today and how we're

using the terms and thinking about them. And I think today we tend to think of non-binary gender identities as kind of a new phenomenon, something that's relatively recent. But your book examines examples that suggest it's been a part of the human experience for the better part of 2,000 years at the very least. What drove you to write this book and to look for these examples of non-binary identities in the past? Yeah, well, first let me just agree. I mean, I think it's a totally a common assumption, just in the general public, as well as even in the queer and trans and non-binary community, that this is all pretty new, right? That the words we're using, the debates we're having about it, you know, these all are maybe from the late 20th century onwards. So part of what I'm trying

to do with my book, as you say, is to put that into a much longer chronological. framework and to show that the idea of non-binary gender and the kind of conversations that we have about them, they're just really not that new after all. And ideas beyond male and female have been with us for many, many centuries. They could be a part of history and a part of tradition. So how did I get into writing this? Well, there's a couple ways I could answer that, but I guess I'll say that I already had been doing some research on alchemy, and there are all these really striking illustrations in alchemical manuscripts of this interesting character of Jesus as a sort of amalgam or meeting of male and female together into one form. So I was kind of being struck by that

and thinking about it and looking through my manuscripts. And it was right around the same time period that my partner, who's transgender, decided to have top surgery. So top surgery is a kind of gender-affirming surgery for people out there who might not know. And so, you know, all these images from my professional life and then, you know, all of these concerns from my personal life, you know, ideas about gender in the body, about classification, about kind of how we fit into our worlds, socially, medically, in our families, in so many ways, you know, they all kind of met together in that moment and kind of came to the fore. And it was then that I decided that I really wanted to put together a longer history of how we, how we imagine these categories of sex and how our bodies are imagined to express those categories.

and how it affects our gender out in the world and how, you know, authorities and different kinds of areas of culture across time have organized systems of gender and kind of police them. And so that's what led me to have, like, go off in all these directions to try to put together that history for myself and kind of for the moment of the life that I was in. That must have been an interesting mixture of the professional and the personal kind of coming together to almost compel you to write this book. It must have felt like a really time project for you? Yeah, you know, and I would say that it also fit into kind of a longer sense that I had about what I wanted to study and why, because when I was an undergraduate, I was actually

a pre-med student, and I thought I would become a doctor. And so it's kind of like along the way, you know, that I realized that I was more interested in all the kind of culture and history surrounding medical and scientific ideas than I wasn't actually, you know, being a clinician. And during the time that I was doing that, I was actually volunteering for. for these LGBTQ mutual aid groups. I was working at Northwest AIDS Foundation, and I was also working at a homeless youth shelter called Youth Care. And so most of the people that I was encountering were LGBTQ.

And it was really kind of through that, along with the work that I was doing in school, that I started to realize how ideas about gender and sexuality, but also about religion, really affected people's access to medicine and their entire survival as a community, really. And so I think it's really at that moment that I realized that I wanted to think about a deep history of health and sort of the intersection of medicine and religious faith and how it reverberated through the lives of people with regards to their gender and sexuality. So I think that this is really a culmination of a long history of thinking about how all of those things work in our lives,

both to define us and also to make certain kind of opportunities for survival possible. Doctors and nurses and medics are wonderful people, but historians are much cooler, so I think you made the right choice. How hard or easy, in fact, did you find it to research the book? So how are non-binary identities expressed in medieval literature? And are there lots of examples, or were they hard to find? Let me start by saying, it's never easy. It always feels like kind of a struggle. But, you know, I can't say it was a terrible struggle because it's a struggle that took me, you know, tragically to have to travel all over Europe to many libraries and archives and museums and of, you know, wonderful churches to see artwork. So this was research that was, you know, it was far

ranging. It, you know, it had its challenges, but it was also really a pleasure. But I will say aside from the logistics of, you know, finding the sources that it was also true that there were so many more of them than I had come to expect when I started off doing my work. I really imagine that, you know, if I was lucky, maybe I would have enough for an article, you know, or some kind of short work. And then here, I ended up with so many that, you know, I have this massive tomb and I even cut a bunch of stuff out of that. So even though there were some challenges, in a sense, you know, once you're looking, we can see that there's so many instances of non-binary sex and gender and ideas surrounding them that haven't really been told as a history. And so in that

sense, it was easy because there was so much material to work with and so much to say about it. So how is it expressed in literature? I mean, there's in a lot of different ways, depending on what kind of literature we're looking at, but I can just give one example in the literature of saints' lives, which are a pretty mainstream kind of literature in the Middle Ages, right? Everybody was familiar with these. And what might surprise people is that we have a number of saints' lives where the saint really challenges binaries of maleness and femalness through their life.

And there's been a bunch of stuff written about this recently, And people look at these saints and they say, oh, these are transgender saints or they're gender queer or they're non-binary. But in any case, you know, they're not simply men or women, right? And, you know, and these are saints. So they're really held up as an example, you know, a model, a very central kind of literature for Christians to read. So just to think of one example, St. Eugenius, for instance, who was lived as a daughter

of Roman aristocrats and then ran away and joined a monastery, I think, at 16. And then lived an exemplary life as a male monk even became the head of the monastery. And the visual arts surrounding the saint really combined male and female attributes in a way that truly does bring our attention to the non-binary aspects of the saint's life. There's others too like Joseph of Shernow and a whole ton of them. So we think, you know, this is really a sort of interesting and surprising way to think about this, you know, from our vantage point in the present. you know, we often imagine that when we do find non-binary lives or, you know, stories surrounding them that these are going to be very marginal, you know, this is going to be a story of persecution. And for sure, there is some of that in the history that I tell.

But, you know, these are ones where the saint is, you know, even if readers aren't supposed to emulate the gender crossing of the saint, the saint is, you know, a marvel, a model for behavior in some cases. and really, you know, told as sort of an exemplary person, not merely, you know, someone who needs to be corrected or the subject of some kind of targeted violence. And do you think, particularly in Saints' lives, I guess, were they used as a way of exploring non-binary identities, or was it just something that naturally appears in the story that they were acting in ways that necessarily crossed gender boundaries or fell into a non-binary identity? So were they looking to explore that specific issue, or is it kind of a side issue to the main story of the saint's life? Well, part of what the miracle of the saint's life is is that the person passed as, you know, a different gender from that which they were, you know, assigned or appeared to be when they were being raised. So it's not so much a side issue. It's central to why they're a saint. Now, you know, are they explorations of non-binary gender? I mean, you know, I think that often two students, when we look at these kinds of sources,

they're hoping for some kind of like non-binary memoir. You know, like so, like, you know, there's been so many recently and they're wonderful. And, you know, we don't have a medieval non-binary memoir where someone's really, you know, exploring their gender identity in the kind of way that people do in the 21st century. But I think it's important to point out that when medieval people write about Adam and Eve, when they write about the afterlife, when they write about saints' lives, these are theorizations and explorations of identity and of gender. So I think we can't ignore that if that's what the story hinges on,

it was important to tell it that way. And the message from it was important for people. And this is a part of kind of the long discussion of identity that becomes a part of our history. You narrow down in the book a change to attitudes towards non-binary identities to the late kind of 12th and early things. 13th centuries, before that change took place, is there evidence of people and the church, in fact, being comfortable with a non-binary identity? So are there examples where it's treated

as something that isn't an issue at all? Well, maybe let's not talk identity here so much as talk about bodies and practices. So let me start with theology and say, and yes, in a way. I mean, you know, we're used to thinking of conservative Christians as holding up the, you know, the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis, Adam and Eve, as evidence that God made humans to be male and female, right? And that's the kind of decisive story that proves that. But, you know, I think what we see is that people haven't always read that Genesis story in that way. And so part of what I look at in my book is how theologians and late antiquity and early Christianity read that story and what they saw. instead was the story of the creation of a non-binary, androgynous, non-differentiated sort of person as the first human. You know, that's kind of like the most perfect form of humanity, right? Simple, not divided up. You know, and this is kind of the most ideal version of humanity as it was intended.

And, you know, it's like later after the fall, then humans get divided into male and female and so on. But, you know, if you think about it, the, you know, the claim there is that the fall. nature of humans is what's binary and the sort of paradisiical prelapsarian version of humans is non-binary. So this doesn't become the orthodox interpretation of Genesis, obviously, but there were a lot of, you know, a fair amount of people who repeated it over like, you know, more than a thousand years. You know, it gets repeated by people who are writing treatises and people give it in testimony when they're on trial. It comes up in visual art. So, you know, it was appealing enough that it was out there

and are people comfortable with it? I mean, you know, some people surely were not comfortable with it, and that's why they were refuting it. That's why they were pressing down the idea. But, you know, I think one of the things that historians say is that if something's being refuted over and over again, if something's being pushed down over and over again as an idea, it's because someone held it.

You know, people don't bother to refute something that no one thinks, right? Or no one cares about. So, I mean, I think we can imagine that this was an idea that was out there and was appealing. And we do see this visual art over a long period where people are imagining Adam and Eve as really symmetrical, really similar to each other and, you know, not firmly differentiated. There's some other images of Adam as sort of like an Adam Eve kind of like mishmash, you know, with Adam and Eve like in one body. And there's a lot of versions of that. So, you know, these images that sort of challenged the idea of minarity and sort of imagine this androgynous creation,

We're out there circulating. Is everybody comfortable with it? For sure not. But, you know, it's a part of Christian tradition and history. So I think that's something that I want to, you know, make sure that I point out in my book is people tend to think that this is all new and hence it's threatening to tradition. But we can't get back to a period of time in Christianity before ideas about non-binary and, you know, and all these challenges to sexual binarism. They're there from the beginning of the religion. And as you say, you can't crush an idea that was never there in the first place. It has to have existed and flourished to some extent for somebody to have turned around and decided this is now a bad idea and we want to do away with it. It must have been there.

Do you think at all it played into an early medieval notion that God must be in some way, androgynous, that he's beyond sex or gender, that God can't be a man or woman? We often imagine, you know, the guy with a big long beard sitting on a cloud. but did they view God as being above all of that so that perhaps some of this religious imagery removes the idea of sex and gender because that is closer to God? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's no definitive answer on this. We can find plenty of texts that are canonical

that refer to God in male terms with no uncertainty. But then we can also find images and descriptions of Jesus as also being androgynous or feminized. And, you know, the idea that Jesus was depicted or imagined by people as being something beyond just simply male, you know, that can be a pretty surprising thing to notice about Christian history. I mean, this isn't a minor character, you know, in Christianity. And so, you know, I think that we can see that, you know, there are a number of visual art images of Jesus as extremely feminized. I mean, so feminine in some cases that art historians for a long time thought that these were depictions of women before they were identified as being ones of Jesus. We have some very mainline thinkers in medieval Christianity, people like Bernard of Clairvaux or Elred of Roveau or others.

You know, and they write about Jesus as having breasts or a womb. They write about Jesus as engaged in activities or appearing in ways that you're more associated with femininity. In some devotional text, Jesus appears as a maid or a washerwoman. And we've got even some churchmen from the period using that kind of language to talk about themselves as being both sex, as being both male and female, mother and father. So, you know, I mean, I think that we can find a fair number of musings on the sort of transcended nature of Jesus, including the transcendence of sexual categories. You know, and some people imagine that for humans after death, too. So when people are imagining these kind of like paradise states, right, the Garden of Eden before the fall, humans after death and resurrection, when they start imagining that, they start imagining a world without sex and gender. And so some people theorized, you know, after death, well, why do we need these, you know, why do we need all this?

You know, people become transcendent like Jesus and kind of slough off the male and female, you know, the gender, the sex. that's attached to us in this life. Okay, so again, you know, this doesn't all become the orthodox argument. But the fact that people are, when they're thinking about like a perfect world or like a sort of counterfactual world, that when they start imagining it and they start imagining the release from like sexual binarism, binary gender, you know, I think that's very interesting and speaks to a sort of imagination of, it just goes beyond male and female. goes to thinking about divinity and the nature of time and perfection.

That's where we see these ideas about non-binary coming in. I think it's fascinating enough to me that these ideas are appearing in saints' lives. So to think that they form a part of the stories of Adam and Eve and Jesus, who are entirely central to the Christian tradition, this isn't some peripheral saint who happens to mention something. These are core people, core personalities in the Bible being treated in a non-binary way. And I guess to some extent monks in their cloisters are wrestling with ideas of sexuality and sex because they're supposed to abstain from it all, but that doesn't mean they don't have any desires.

So I guess they have to find ways to process all of that for themselves and whether it's proper to have those desires. Would Jesus have those desires? Or is he above sex and gender? I guess it must speak to some of the things that they were talking about or thinking about in their cloisters. Yeah, and I think that we can find some of this interest in androgyny with, Some of these churchmen as precisely that issue. It's not like so much a celebration of equality, right? Or, you know, the ways that we're thinking about non-binary gender.

For them, sometimes it was about the kind of negation of sexuality. And through that, the kind of negation of the female. You know, the female kind of just gets like subsumed into this androgynous male, you know, free of any kinds of urges, any kind of earthly sexuality. And sort of like an ethereal, you know, like you said, transcendence of these kinds of, you know, material sort of concerns. So, I mean, I think that that's for sure a part of the appeal of the sort of androgyny is, you know, this nostalgia for a period of time before, you know, all of the messiness of sexuality,

all the messiness of, you know, male, female roles and all of their attendant concerns and family and, you know, patrimony and inheriting, you know, all the kind of nitty-gritty of the day. This is something that's like kind of pure and closer to God and closer to the original state of paradise. You know, but I think it's important what you note, you know, that these kinds of ideas intervene in some of the most essential characters of Christianity, right? Central figures of pre-modern history. And I think also it's the case because, you know, as I started doing my research, I found that not just the central characters, but some of the central kind of arcs of narrative history that we think about, important to the narrative of the

crusades, important to the narrative of Christian Jewish relations and expulsion of Jewish communities in England, important to the kind of definition of Europe and its relationship to Africa and Asia, other parts outside of Europe, as it kind of imagined itself through contact with Muslim polities in the Near East. So I think that one of the things I want to stress is that the histories that we've learned have tended to, at least for me, lead me to believe that if we are going to find gender, sex marginalized people, this is going to be a trivial concern. You know, it's just going to be minor characters, minor histories, not really of significant importance to kind of like the big scope of things. But what I found was that really isn't actually

the case, that ideas about non-binary gender are located in big history, right? And those ideas are instrumental for how people think about, yes, of course, male and female, and that's for sure important, but also like, who is a European, who is a Christian, who is a human? And these are big ideas, right? And I think we can't really get at how people were developing those kinds of categories and imagining themselves in relationship to their communities and their broader worlds without including that history. And I think it just kind of changes what we think is marginal or trivial, you know, and what we think is central. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, not just the Tudors, we talk about everything, from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I was partly wondering about the monks. I fairly recently read the letters of Abalad and Eloise, sort of a medieval, almost Romeo and Juliety story, but Abalad essentially has his private parts cut off on the Orleans. of Eloise's uncle, retires to a monastery, but when they strike up this correspondence later, Abelard makes reference frequently to the fact that although he's now incapable of the physical act of love, it doesn't take away wanting it, it doesn't take away the desires and things like that. So I just feel like monks must have been wrestling with this idea that they are men,

but they're not supposed to behave like you would expect men to behave. And if they can see this kind of gender fluidity and lack of gender in sort of, some of the key stories in the Bible, it perhaps help them rationalise what they're doing, that they can be humans, men, and still behave in a way that isn't what society would have expected from men to guide and procreate lots. Right. But some of the ways that they're thinking about it are just in terms of like, you know, caretaking. And if you think about the monastery, it's also a family, right? And so the abbots and the people who are writing these, you know, for sure, you know, sexuality and sort of temptations of the body are a part of what they,

they struggle with, but I think also part of what they struggle with is how to run a giant family of men, you know, essentially, right? And so many of the tropes and roles that they use are gendered ones. So thinking about sort of playing with those cross-identifications and sort of the male and female within everyone, right? And then using that as a kind of identification that allows an identification, you know, with their religious vocation, that it provides a lot of latitude for kind of imagining those different roles in one's own kind of different positions within them. Yeah, the monk communities, their fathers and brothers and things like that, but they're also doing all of the jobs that might have been considered a woman's job at the time, obviously

incorrectly. But nevertheless, they have to come to terms of the fact that they're a man doing what would be a woman's job as part of this larger family. And, you know, these must be all questions that they deal with. And obviously, it's monks and clergy that we get a lot of our written and art history from. So it's their concerns that we see being played out in these. I'm just trying to wonder whether the lifestyle that they lived played into their concerns and their sort of exploration of these ideas that gender wasn't quite as fixed as simply male and female, that there was room in between those two as well.

Yeah, and I think that that's important to note what you say, that a lot of the material that we have from the pre-modern past, you know, it's not unique to the pre-modern world, but for sure it's a challenge, is that, you know, we have the writings of elites, right? So we often, you know, we have to base some of our arguments, some of our analyses of what people thought during the time period on a very narrow swath of the people, right?

Because those are the people who left us the records that were able to read and think about. So, you know, it's true because much of the material that we have about how people were imagining these kind of questions of gender transgression, these questions of categories beyond male and female, come from them and not from gender marginalized people themselves who, for instance, identified in such a way that their practices cross or transgress gender binaries, because it's hard to find those people in historical records. When we find them, often it's because they've run a foul of some system, right? We have them because there's a court record.

We have them because there's a medical record. And so, you know, those records are what we've got, you know, so we've got to work with them. But even they are mediated through the lens of the elite person who wrote it up, right? I mean, I can think of a couple of cases, but, you know, we have a legal case, for instance, of an intersex person who's trying to petition to be labeled male so that he can inherit his father's estate, right? He believes himself to be male, but his body's atypical, and he has to go through this court procedure. And then what we get is of judges' opinion about all these kinds of things, which indeed gives us a bunch of musing on sort of the nature of the body, the nature of, I mean, I guess we could say identity, because it's really about the sense of who one is based on how they feel they are. But we don't really get the voice of the person in question. And so often, you know, because it's a court case, because it's a medical evaluation.

what that person is saying, we also can't take a face value because they're saying what needs to be said, right, to make things go their way in the context of this conflict. So, you know, I think it's always a challenge and an ethical dilemma in trying to do right to these stories of these people, knowing that everything's kind of through the mouthpiece of a particular type and class of person who was most likely to be able to leave us the record that comes down to us, you know, seven or eight hundred years later. And what do you think precipitated that change that took place towards the end of the 12th century, early 13th century? Why did attitudes begin to change and how did that change manifest itself? I think two things, and they both have to do with greater Christian contact with the Muslim world during that time period.

It's during the time period of the Crusades. So there's a much greater exchange of people and ideas across the Mediterranean and Christians were much more likely to have military, political, cultural contact with Muslim polities. And because of that, first, they get access to all of these ideas about natural science and medicine that they didn't have before. They come from the Muslim world. They were Arabic. They get translated into Latin. And then they become extremely trendy, you know, in Latin Europe. This is kind of a newfangled stuff. Never mind that a lot of it is ancient Greek, or it's very old, but it's new to them. And so they're excited to read it. And for a number of these texts that become important, they really bring an Aristotelian view.

Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, had a very binary view of sexual difference. And that gets communicated to Latin Europe in the 13th century as those texts come in. And it really starts to shift ideas about what's possible for humans in terms of their sex, right? Before this period, we can find a number of sources from the medical world that really theorized that humans come not just in male and female, but they come in kind of like across a spectrum, right? Very masculine men, very feminine women, and then kind of everything in between, right? Little gradations. That really passes out of fashion in the 13th century as these new ideas come in and Aristotle thinks like you're a man or a woman and if it appears otherwise, it's just got to

kind of figure it out. There isn't any real intersex person, no real non-binary. It's really a case of just, you know, doing enough of an evaluation to figure out where this person really fits into one of these two, you know, dichotomous categories without the gradient in between. So that, on the one hand, really eliminates the possibility of kind of non-binary in the spectrum of human sex. And the idea is, you know, those who are non-binary are kind of like, you know, lower kinds of creatures, non-humans, you know, that's what he theorizes. At the same time, because Christians are coming into contact with the Muslim world and they begin to really heighten their attention to how to describe differences between Christians and non-Christians. So they really try to differentiate themselves

from especially Muslims and Jews, although also Africans and Asians just generally, but Muslim and Jews come into special consideration during this time period because Christians are trying to distinguish themselves from those groups and they're also trying to rationalize violence against them and displacement of those communities. And one of the ways that they do that is they argue that Jews and Muslims are not like Christians. They have gender practices that cross back and forth between male and female, or maybe their bodies aren't simply male or female in the same way. This makes them seem more like monsters or animals in the kind of polemics that these Christians are writing about Jews and Muslims. So here, ideas about non-binary gender are really

weaponized to try to cast dispersions on the humanity of these other groups that Christians are, you know, targeting for military intervention, targeting for massacre, targeting for expulsion from a territory. And here, the association of non-binary with something that's like a lower creature, a mistake, you know, not really human, that kind of comes together with the scientific, natural philosophical medical writings with the polemics against Jews and Muslims and starts to really distinguish what it means to be a European Christian and who is outside of that community and who then doesn't kind of have the protections of that community. So is it an effort in the Christian church at this time to kind of create a purity that hadn't

been a worry before so we can be pure European Christians, purely men, purely women, And anyone who doesn't fit into that is someone that we are allowed to attack and assault because they're not pure. Is it that simple or have I got that wrong? Well, I don't know about pure. I mean, you know, I think ideas about, you know, purity of blood come a little bit later and in a different context. And it's also not 100% new, but rather sort of like an amplification of traditions that have already been there. but it's true that we see a sort of proliferation of these kinds of polemics against Jews and Muslims. So it's not like these ideas haven't been out there, but they sort of newly become available for targeting.

I think of the bestiaries, for instance. So, you know, this is a genre of literature that's kind of illustrated animal guides. So, you know, and some of them are quite cute. You know, they've got cats and dragons and elephants and stuff like that. but they have some extremely anti-Jewish content in them. And it's where we see this sort of imagery of a Jewish person as having like male and female genitals as being kind of an bestial sort of figure, as being described as being neither male nor female or crossing back and forth between male and female.

And we see a real proliferation of those kinds of texts in the 12th and 13th century, which is, of course, the same time period, you know, that we're seeing the targeted violence against Jewish communities in England and then coming up to, you know, what finally ends up being the removal of Jewish communities from the kingdom. So, you know, was there, I mean, it's certainly not new to have anti-Judaism, but this kind of intersection of ideas and the particular kind of argument that's made is new. And I think that it does represent a sort of intersection of these concerns that are happening, you know, along with a lot of other complicated forces that tend to rise up in the 12th and 13th centuries. I think it's striking that, as you say, the way that

people used to quite happily think about and consider Adam and Eve and Jesus and figures like that suddenly becomes a weaponized way of insulting and degrading your enemy, that's kind of quite a harsh change from it being the way we think about Jesus to being the way we think about the people we hate and want an excuse to kill. Well, and I think that that's why it's important that we tell these long narratives of history because it shows us that things don't just stay one way throughout time, right? I think that when we look at this big time frame,

we can see, okay, well, a preference for sexual binarism is something that comes and goes over time. It is sometimes something that is used, as you say, weaponized, you know, as an insult. And at other times, it might be more emphasized as an ideal and celebrated. You know, and this is why we can see that it truly is a historical phenomenon and not rather just this kind of like inevitable like common sense

way that humans have always been divided and it's always been preferred that people are men and people are women and there's no there's quite a bit of variety when we look at a big picture across time and I think that that should give us I think you know some humility about the way that we categorize things here in the 21st century because as much as things have changed in the past they're very likely to continue to change, right? And so I think that we can see that, you know, the way that we imagine how things are or how they should be, that that's very situated in the moment that we're in and is not likely to be one that's shared by people who look back at us, you know, 50 or 100 years in the future. Yeah, history is so often a story of different sizes of circles, isn't it? Everything

moves on a wheel and things come round and round and round at different times and different scales, but there's very rarely anything new under the sun. Yeah, and I think that that's another. part of it too that you know the changeability I think is really helpful for sort of putting our you know current moment in context but also where we can see similarities in the past is really important because we can sometimes we can see things that give us insight into why we do things or think things now we can sort of put it together you know we can see that people who are non-binary ideas about non-binary that they existed in the past and for people

people who are living non-binary lives now, who are trans or intersex, who are non-binary of all genders, you know, they can see that there are resonances with the experiences that people had, the practices that people had, the challenges that people faced in past centuries. So, and I think for queer and trans and non-binary communities, that can give a kind of a sense of belonging, you know, it can give a sense of like a kinship, you know, with people who have come before. And I think It's an important part of that work that I also want to emphasize. And I think the flip side of that is that people who hold onto a conservative notion that this is a new thing that is defying a tradition,

it's actually we can go back and look at when the tradition was actually the other way around. This was the tradition that then became problematical and is now hopefully moving away from being anything like problematical. So it isn't new. You don't need to defend a position that you think has been there. forever because here is the history of how this is developed. Right, yeah. And I think that that is, you know, look, I wouldn't want to say that people who are, you know,

gender marginalized now need to be legitimated. But it's important to note that history is legitimating. So if people look back at the past and they can see, yes, traditional Christianity included, you know, a very different view of genders beyond male and female. Yes, you know, these ideas about non-minarity, you know, have very different valences in the past. These are arguments where if a community has a place in the past, you know, activist arguments tend to lean on. If you have a past, you should be welcome in the present. You should have a future, right? And so I think that, you know, emphasizing the sort of

political implications of putting this history together and looking back at, you know, what might be some of the surprising things about pre-modern Christianity, that's something I hope will come out of this work. And do you feel from writing the book that we are just about beginning to come to terms with prejudices that date back 700 years that were kind of imposed six, seven, eight hundred years ago and that we have lived with ever since, but which we're just beginning to come to terms with so that wheel is turning again? Have we ignored a fundamental aspect of the human experience because of some opinions that were laid down by some people centuries ago, that we're only just now beginning to question the validity of those opinions?

Yeah, I mean, I think for sure this history is getting a lot more attention, perhaps in this moment than it has in the past. And there is sort of an explosion of scholarship on these questions, a lot of more visibility of non-binary trans, you know, queer folks in the present. But I wouldn't want to say that we're just now doing it. because I would hate to not give credit to all of the queer and trans and beyond activists and historians and cultural workers who have been drawing attention to this kind of challenge and these kinds of ideas for many decades. So yes, I think we're in like a new moment, but that moment is made possible by so many people who have been doing this work,

maybe not always getting all the attention for it, maybe not always getting the results that they hope for in the moment. But, I mean, I think it's really important to note that we're building on those, activist ancestors. I mean, I just think of Leslie Feinberg's important work on transgender warriors 30 years ago. You know, I mean, the work that I do couldn't exist without that work. So I definitely want to give credit to those people who have been and, you know, we're fighting the hard fight for a long time. Yeah, I hope I didn't sound like I wasn't giving credit. I think I was talking in grand sweeps over centuries rather than just ignoring what had happened over the last few decades. The perils of being a medieval historian, I blame it on, and deal in centuries rather than anything

else. And I guess finally, I'd like to ask, what do you think your history, your book, means for conversations about gender moving forward? What has it revealed to us that we can inform today's conversations with? Yeah. I hope all of what I've said about the kind of resonances of the past and the way that that can be useful to gender and sex marginalized communities now can be a part of what my book does. I hope that also it can be clear that these histories aren't only important to LGBTQ people, you know, that they're important to everyone's histories and that they have to be a part of the big historical narratives that we tell. But I also want to point out not just what's the same about the past, not just where we can see ourselves in the past,

but where the past is just really, just like a totally different foreign place, you know, and I think those of us who are medievalists are used to that, you know, we look at something and we're like, we're not just always seeing like the reflection of ourselves sometimes. We're just like, oh, you know, this is really baffling. It's really weird. It's really different. And that's why I think it's important to study these time periods that are so remote from us, because we really can get a sense of that difference. And it really helps us to see historical change. You know, we can really see how much has changed. We can see radically different ways of thinking about communities, thinking about ourselves, thinking about, you know, the cosmos in our place in it.

And I think that when we can perceive people who have a very different sense of the world from us, we can both sort of like challenge ourselves to imagine like what kind of different worlds we would like. And it can kind of give us a sense of how different the future can be for us, kind of in all of those meanings. And I think that that's kind of at the heart of our sort of creativity, our activism and sort of our imagination of the future, I think history is just such a critical informant of that, especially when we can see histories that really challenge us

to think about why we are the way we are, what we think we know, how little we might know, and how much things might change in the future. So I hope that my book can be in service of maybe some of those imaginations of the future. I certainly hope it can too. and this has been such a fascinating conversation on a deep topic. It feels like we've barely scratched the surface of it. But thank you so much for joining us, Leah, and for sharing all of that information.

Leah's book is entitled The Shape of Sex, Non-Binary Gender, from Genesis to the Renaissance, and is out now if you would like to find out more. Join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and to tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. While I've got you, I'd like to recommend an episode of the ancients entitled Origins of Life on Earth, in which Tristan is joined by Henry G to travel even further back than the Romans and Greeks to work out how and when life life. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life,

then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.