Gone Medieval - Medieval Trans Saints & Sex Workers

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

In this episode of Gone Medieval for Pride Month, Matt Lewis takes a look at some transgender stories from the Middle Ages. Marinos was a 5th century monk mentioned in the trial of Joan of Arc. They shaved their head and changed into men's clothes to live in a monastery with their widowed father. Eleanor Rykener was a 14th century trans sex-worker in London, arrested for prostitution and sodomy. To discuss these and other cases that resonate with today’s discourse on gender, Matt is joined by Dr. Gabrielle Bychowski.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here >  You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form 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. I'm Matt Lewis. For Pride Month this year, I wanted to investigate the history of transgender stories and I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Gabrielle Bikovsky and Annesfield Wolf Fellow at Case Western Reserve University, who teaches courses on transgender history, disability culture, racism and medieval literature. You can also find out more from Gabby on her website at things transform.com. Welcome to

on medieval Gabby. Pleasure to be here. To start off with, one of the people that you mentioned to me as we were planning this episode was something I've not heard of at all before, St. Marinos the Monk. Can you tell us a little bit about their story, please? It's fascinating digging into our archives, including major organizations and institutions like the Catholic Church, where a lot of the conversations that we're having now are not that new. And a lot of the fights we're having now are not that new. and that these organizations have not come down the exact same way today as they have in the past. Particularly in the early church, we find about a dozen or so transgender saints, and we're not just discovering them.

For decades, they've been called transvestite saints, cross-dresser saints, and it's mostly been cisgender scholars writing about them. So the terminology is not necessarily kept up with the times. But as a new phase of transgender scholars are beginning to filter into the field, we're updating language, we're bringing new insights. And one of the big ones is correcting the major title that we're putting all this under from cross-dressing saints to transgender saints. And what's very interesting is that beyond just the historiography, of the history of conversations about these saints. It's where they show up in the archives, that there is a smattering of stories that emerge in the early Christian period as the Middle Ages were getting going, as the Roman influence the empire was breaking apart. We get a variety

of saints, individuals. Again, they wouldn't have known them to be saints at the time, who among them were mostly transgender monks. And they're stories vary. In some cases, you have people leaving home, sometimes for reasons that are explicit, other times more nebulous reasons, which of course we can read into in a lot of different ways, and they took refuge in monasteries and changed their name, started to present using male terminology, and going under male names, and living as a monk. In a couple cases, we have the situation where these monks were found out while they were alive. And what again is very fascinating, much like today, this would certainly be a kind of scandal.

In the time period, there was a major conversation with some of these people, but rather than immediately kick these monks out, we find at least a couple cases where the monastery stands on the side of the monk saying, this person is our brother. They have been a very faithful monk. In becoming a monk, they have essentially disavowed any sort of sexual life, any sort of life that was gendered in a secular way. Obviously, monks and nuns are extremely gendered. I often point out that in the same way that we have all these sort of subcultures of queer, transgender communities today, and also just forms of masculinity and forms of femininity today, a monk was a very particular gender, almost all. its own. And this even gets compared to when you talk about like the estate model, like the different estates, like to make fun of each other. You had the laborers out in the field. You

had the knight on their horse. And then you have the monk who again had their own mythology as being sometimes hypersexual, sometimes completely disavowing their sexuality and so on and so forth. So they take on these monastic roles and habitus. And effectively the monasteries and the monasteries and the church in the time largely supported their return to monastic life, saying, whatever the genitals may be, that is more of a worldly concern. Reproduction in the biological sense is a secular concern, not the concern of the church. And the monastery is a place where people to leave that kind of worry about marriage and children behind anyway. And again, it's just these people have served in this capacity. Again, there's the echo of the conflict of why did

they come there. And in some cases, we hear stories and other cases we do not. There is some implications, for instance, that there may have been conflict at home around maybe their gender presentation. Of all the places they could run off to, why choose a monastery? Why change their name to a male name? Why enter this sort of highly disciplined male community? I guess most obviously, why not go to a nunnery if that's not a concern? The interesting thing about Marinos is that both of those trends and some of the other stories don't hold true for Marinos. Marinos not only was not running away from his father, he entered the monastery with his father. So his father actually vouched for him. So again, talking about parents supporting their transgender children, this was a situation

where the father knowingly stood by his child as they entered the monastery along with them, as they present in themselves as a man. And we don't really hear much about their story beyond entering together, but in certain versions of the hagiography, which are slightly longer than the more abridged versions that exist in other collections, we hear about a back and forth where the father is saying, oh, well, you can't do that because it would be a scandal to have a woman in the monastery. And the child essentially says, well, in the monastery, I wouldn't be a woman.

and the father says something to the effect of, I'm leaving you behind my estate, you are going to be my heir, I am alone, I'm a middleware now, I'm going to enter into the monastery, I'm leaving the secular world to you, and again, the child says something that I often feel resonates again with so many conversations within the trans community around things like toxic masculinity, in the trans male community as well of the father's essentially saying,

I recognize that there are sins of the secular world as a man who has served in various capacities in worldly affairs. And I want to cleanse my soul by spending my final years in a monastery. And the child is essentially saying, great, so you're leaving all those sinful, toxic, worldly stressors to me, while you're. you go off and save your own soul and then uses very, I think, sophisticated language to turn back to the father that the one who saves the soul is like Christ. And in this sense, you could say it's the child saying to the father, hey, you're saving my immortal soul. Isn't that the duty of the father?

But also the child who would then become Marinos is also sort of implicating themselves because they're advocating for their own transition as well. And especially as some of the child, who, in these hagiographies, by the time they're being written, we already know that they're going to become a saint. So it's like someone who's going to become a celebrity or a sports star or a major politician. It's sort of like the early part of the biography where it's like setting up, oh, yes, this person is already behaving in a Christ-like manner. So they enter the monastery. They're regarded as exceptional. They're regarded as a eunuch, though they don't claim to be unic. Though again, interesting invocation because it demonstrates that, again, one, the monastery is a place that may have had Unix, that would have had Unix.

Again, we don't know if particular this one had any Unic members. But it was a recognition that this was a place where sexual reproduction was set aside. There was, of course, worldly secular concerns around Unix or other castrates around things like Hannah Castrate get married because they can't, biologically produced children. So can they serve that role? And that's in many cases why many of these people who, in plenty of cases, were enslaved. They did not choose to become castrated. That was something forced upon them. In some cases, it was punitive. But they were made eunuchs by men to invoke the gospel of Matthew there. Some are born eunuchs. Some are made eunuchs by men. And some make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. Some monasteries would have allowed eunuchs, saying that this is not a

place for marriage. This is not a place for children, which of course ends up being a interesting wrinkle in Marinos' life, the fact that it is not a place for children or for child growing. And also, it's a recognition that on top of monk, eunuch and castrate was another subtype of masculinity that didn't follow conventional rules. A eunuch lived a different life than many knights, though some became generals. It lived a different life than many. common workers, so many of them were servants. It was its own legal and social category. And so saying in effect, like, hey, this person who was, as we know, a transgender monk, a transgender man, was like a eunuch comparing one type of trans identity to another almost. And then finally,

at a certain point in the monk's life, they are accused falsely of impregnating a local innkeeper's daughter. and when the leader of the monastery comes to talk to him, he admits, I have sinned as a man in a bit of creative wordplay. Again, we don't know for certain if this conversation happened verbatim, but the hagiographer is clearly playing upon dramatic irony here that Marinos means it one way and the abbot understands it another. And so he's ejected out of the monastery, and he's eventually given the child of the innkeeper's daughter to raise. And he, with his new son, stands outside the monastery and essentially

waits out until, through prayers and other interventions, he's allowed back in. And what I like to point out about the story, and part of the reason I've done writing about this is whereas the other saint's stories, there is room to argue, though I'm not persuaded by the idea that the other stories of people fleeing their families and joining a monastery, that the transition was merely instrumental, that it is merely a disguise, if you will, emphasizing and underlining a very nefarious interpretation of trans people as inherently deceptive or inherently liars, which is false. Most transgender rhetoric, like a lot of queer rhetoric, is saying, no, we're being incredibly honest. The very fact that we're saying we're transgender women is to

acknowledge that in certain biological, social, and other ways, our lives will diverge and have some differences from cisgender women. So again, it's this language of telling the facts and telling the truth of the matter. And again, in those other stories, the fact that the monasteries let them back in, even after the truth came out, I think speaks volumes about, again, the power of trans identities to continue. Because if those people were truly just making a disguise, then the moment that they were found out, why would they go back to the monastery? And in the case of Marinos, he had an out. He had a way of saying, I can't be the one who impregnated this in Keeper's daughter because I don't have the equipment to do this. And we're many, many, many years away from IVF. So he could have,

if this was just a matter of convenience, if Marinos as an identity was just an instrumental tool, it's a tool that had no longer been useful. If the whole point was to get him in the monastery, the masculine identity was actually now the very thing keeping him from the monastery. And so the fact that he remains true to not only wanting to be a monk, that he continues to push and to pray, but also the fact that he continues to live as a man. And even, again, does the one thing that a monk is not supposed to do have a son?

So he now becomes a father, even as he's, continuing to push to get back to the monastery. And when he's let back in, he is brought in with his son. So we now have three generations of this family. He is a monk. He is a father. And he lives that way we are told until his dying day. Unlike the other stories where their trans identity, the facts of their biology,

are revealed during their lifetime, Marinos was not discovered to be trans until after he died. at which point in preparing the body for burial, they discover various parts of his anatomy. And instead of being accused as deceptive, Marinos is actually received posthumously apologies from the community. The leader of the monastery and the other brothers fall down, in one case is described as the leader falls down prostrate before the body of Marinos

and apologizes for accusing him of a sin that he, he did not commit. So I like to think that the implications of Marinos' story is like the work of a lot of transgender history. That transgender historians are not trying to rewrite the record with falsehoods. We are trying to go back into the record for the false statements, the airing statements, things that were said in prejudice, things that were said in ignorance, things that were said with or too much simplicity, or with a lack of nuanced terminology. And like the practice of the community around Marinos, we're trying to set the record straight about these various individuals.

And what's remarkable is that in the end, it is the fact that Marinos is transgender, rather than the story of Marinos, the supposedly cisgender monk, who slipped up, got a woman pregnant, eventually was left back in with his son. Now they had a transgender monk who came in, transitioned, lived piously, suffered an injustice, suffered through it well. And in the end, that story was more compelling. And that's the story that gets recorded. And that's the story that ultimately convinced the church to canonize this extraordinary individual as a saint. And again, it's what we see

around the similar century as Marinos is these other stories, these people becoming honored as saints, that there seemed to be a trend in the church of regarding transgender monks, transgender people, as exceptional, not in a deviant way, not in a sinful way, but actually as, hey, we found another transgender monk, let's make them a saint. And I often like to point out that the word saint means set apart. These were often folk stories. Unlike Jesus in the Catholic Church, regarded as the son of God, the epitome of human perfection, that saints were supposed to be more like us. They were supposed to be weird. They were supposed to be esoteric. Their journeys were often supposed to be a bit rambling. They were supposed to be unusual in ways that connected with people.

And the fact that these monks were regarded as unusual in a way that would make them saints, that would make them as holy examples for Christians really speaks to the fact that, one, they may have imagined that there were other transgender people out there who might identify with these saints. And two, that, okay, let's say you want to be cynical about that. Like, why would they imagine a transgender audience? Well, then the implication is even more radical because then the statement is there's something that cisgender people have to learn from these transgender monks, these transgender saints.

I think that's a really important point that saints are there to teach us something or show us an example or explain something to us. That's their entire purpose in existing in the church. And clearly by creating transgender saints, the church wants to broadcast a message about transgender issues. And I think it might seem odd to people today to think that a millennium ago, the Catholic Church was kind of embracing this and dealing with it openly and talking about it publicly. in a way that perhaps that conversation has gone quieter in centuries that have followed. One of my favorite parts about the conversation is it wasn't just a millennium ago that they were having this conversation very differently and far more openly. It was several hundred years ago. If we reached back into the later Middle Ages, so we're going from the early Christian period now to the later Middle Ages, and look at the figure of Jean d'Arc.

we can get into the nitty gritty of was John trans? How could we know that? And I certainly don't want to step on the toes of anyone who says that John is a woman doing a man's job and getting a certain amount of respect for it. That is a narrative. That is one narrative. But it's not a narrative I'm looking to shoot down. I'm just adding through the level of complexity as every academic should. But in the case of Jondard, the reason I'm bringing this up now, St. Marinos the monk, is mentioned in the retrial of John to Arc. And it is used as evidence for not only the heresy charges being overturned, but ultimately sets John to arc on the road to becoming a saint themselves. It's not just the early Middle Ages, but the late Middle Ages, they're going back to the early Middle Ages and actually

saying, no, there is precedence for this. We've done this before. And I like to point out in particular, especially because the term anachronism often gets thrown out about calling saints of the past or people of the past transgender. Well, first of all, first of all like to say that if you have trouble with calling medieval people transgender, well, they also wouldn't have called themselves medieval. That is another term of convenience that adds clarification to us today, so people even have issues with the word medieval. It's just to say that we do academia in modern English. And yes, we, of course, we contextualize in the modern term. No one would say that Marie de France called herself medieval, nor would I, again, say that

necessarily these people called themselves medieval or transgender. but that they are insofar as we have these words and we describe them in these terms. But actually, Jeanne de Arc is a wrinkle for any argument of anachronism because Jean de Arc's initial trial by the English, they had plenty of reasons to kill Jeanne to Arc. The fact that they were going to kill John to Arc was a foregone conclusion. People who study law, people who understand military strategy and politics, John was at very least a cultural icon or the French.

while the English were having a hundred years war with the French. And they were going to kill Jean. They were looking for the particular rationale for how to do it. And in the end, they fixated on heresy on the grounds of gender presentation, particularly summoning up Leviticus and Deuteronomy and coming with a very harsh interpretation of that, an interpretation that the French would eventually say even goes against Thomas Aquinas,

who added much more nuance and a certain level of inclusivity and his contemplation of those chapters of the Torah. So Jean is put to death for transgressing gender norms of presentations. So whether or not Jean de Arc, if brought to today, would say, yes, I am transgender. That's a question. But the medieval English considered Jean de Arc transgender enough to die for it. So whether or not we call John to Art Trans, the medieval people called John to Art trans. And what's even more fascinating, because again, then you can immediately say, oh, but the English were, of course, actively trying to warp the truth.

They were trying to get John caught up on any charge they could just to burn John at the stake, which of course also has gendered implications because it was a significant symbol if someone's going to get burned to death as a punishment for breaking some sort of. of law or a social norm, it was very often a woman to get that specific punishment. So again, the punishment was also very gendered. Also, it's not just the English who are calling genre trans. In the retrial, the French essentially buy into that concept. They don't attempt to argue, as some medievalists do today, that the clothes does not make the gender, which of course, actually they wouldn't have said because they did think clothing made the gender. They wouldn't have said, oh, no, it's not about the job that makes the person's gender. Because once again, they would absolutely say, no, yes, a knight is a very particular identity. There's all these

farces, there's all these fables, and even chivalric literature about people who are not working class trying to be a knight and hilariously failing, or a knight trying to be a commoner and hilariously failing because your job was tied into you from birth in a certain respect. They wouldn't have made those arguments. But instead of trying to disprove as some medievalist do that genre was trans in some way, they bought into the premise and instead tried to say, ah, but that's not heresy. Yeah, it's so interesting that they do say, okay, let's go with she was trans, but actually that's okay. That's not a problem because here's this whole body of evidence that says the church makes saints out of trans people all the time. Absolutely. There's

Thomas Aquinas in the background doing a nuanced reading. The fascinating thing about Thomas Aquinas, right, is that he can be used by the medieval or modern equivalent of the left or the right in both cases, because Thomas Aquinas will say things like, oh, yes, yes, technically yes, the Torah does say that it is forbidden for a man to wear women's clothing. But being a dialectical thinker, he'll do with a thesis, the question, he'll give an answer, and then he'll say things like, but we live in a world, we live in a society. there are complex situations we find ourselves in. And from time to time, there are exceptions that actually very much allow for this to go forward.

And the French pointed to that and they're like, John to Arc was just one of those exceptions. And again, this is, again, part of what transgender studies overall and trans people are saying in general is that some people are saying, oh, trans people are ending gender. Other people say we're bringing gender back to an earlier time. Again, we're being accused of both holding up the patriarchy and also, like, completely ending gender altogether, depending on again, how you read the text. But what we're actually doing is just trying to add truth and complexity and nuance. And that was what was happening with Thomas Aquinas, too, of saying that, yes, there are rules for men and women. Yes, men and women are categories that exist, but they're not the only categories. And then he just talks about the exceptions.

And so trans people largely fall into that category, too. Some people do want to see the overthrow of gender as a category. Some people, I would like to point to Caitlin Jenner as an example, do seem fairly patriarchal, even in their womanhood. But most of us are just trying to add complexity and nuance, and that seems to be what Thomas Aquinas was doing. And then finally, in the retrial of Jondah Arc, they invoke Marinos the monk, among others, to say, not only has what Joan of Arc, lived, not been unique, but actually has been allowed in other cases, and not only allowed, but these people have been given sainted by the church. And if you're a person who's trying to secure Janda Arc's legacy and you want Jond Arc to be, eventually be considered a saint,

that is a great strategy, because you're flipping the script from saying, oh, we're not only just trying to prove Jonda Arc's innocence, we're actually trying to say, no, Jean-Darck's innocence. We're actually trying to say, no, Jean de Arc was a saint. And so, buying into the transgender argument that the English set up gives us a situation where the French, in exonerating John, if anything, affirm the fact that John, by their own standards, was also transgender. So again, it's an interesting conversation, whether or not Jean themselves would call themselves trans if Bratz today. It's an impossible question to answer. But at very least, exploring the case of genre art from a transgender lens and looking at the conversation that the people around John were having informs us that our notions

of transgender are not new. And also our perception that the church has always rejected trans people, has always come to the same conclusion that the English did, is also false, that the church has at various points in early history and even in some of its later history actually been inclusive. It's so interesting to think of it that way that however Jean might have identified the French in the retrial choose to defend them as a transgender person, not as a military hero, not as a religious heretic in terms of the visions that she was having or anything else like that. They specifically latch on to this and decide to defend her as a transgender person. On American history hit, we ride the Wild Oregon Trail, delved deep beneath Central Park,

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One of the interesting cases that I've heard before in England is the case of Eleanor Reikner. Can you talk us through a few of the facts of that case, please? I think it's quite an interesting one that I have come across before. Absolutely. Eleanor Reichner is for people who study medieval England, especially people who have a penchant for teaching Chaucer, will have heard of Eleanor Reichner. And Eleanor Reichner has been written about since the 90s and has been a lens for looking through feminism, a lens for some people to look through queer and other forms of sexuality, but has been re-examined yet again as a transgender figure. And I'll start with how the story gets told and why the story of Eleanor Reckner gets told, because as it has been pointed out, this is a rare case where we actually get the life story of a medieval sex worker, regardless of the fact that Eleanor Reichner was transgender. We very rarely get an instance where the life of a working class laborer woman gets recorded, especially someone who probably was.

not literate, was not able to write their own story. And so the circumstances that her life story even gets reported is exceptional. And like the case of the transgender saints and monks, the very fact that she's transgender is part of why her story gets written. And in this case, it wasn't the best of circumstances, very different than the hagiographies, which are all about lauding the individuals. This was a court case where Eleanor Reichner was accused of committing Sodomay. The facts of the case was not to determine whether or not sex acts were committed or that prostitution was committed. Those seem to be foregone conclusions as the agents of the state had caught Eleanor Reichner involved with a client in the act. And so much like sodomy charges in the modern day,

this is an ideal circumstance for anyone who's trying to convict someone of sodomy. Because one of the reasons why so many here in the United States, so many so many sodomy charges were struck down was not necessarily because suddenly people woke up one day and were less homophobic. It's the reality that police officers and lawyers and judges found it very difficult to prove that people had committed a certain sex act at a certain day, at a certain time, at a certain location, without being personal parties to the sex acts being committed. And so everything would be circumstantial.

It would be hearsay. In the early history of sodomy charges being brought about in at least the middle of the 20th century, you see police officers trying to use entrapment, actually inviting people to have sex with them and then throwing the cuffs on them. But when that was ruled unconstitutional, the police, the judges, and the legal system essentially threw up their hands saying, well, it's nearly impossible to actually prove someone, quote unquote, committed sodomy, there's no way to prove it. And so the law is unenforceable. And so it was truly a circumstance where the only way that Eleanor Reichner could in some ways

be accused of sodomy by at least our current day standards, obviously medieval standards allowed for a lot more evidence to be brought up, as if she was caught in the act. And again, historians and the medieval court all were confident. They're like, nope, we saw it. It was happening. The sex acts were happening. And so those were not being debated. What was being debated was did it count as sodomy?

And I love this question because it centers around what counts as what kind of sex. And what does Eleanor's Reichner's gender? Are we treating Eleanor as a woman or as a man? Because depending on how we gender Eleanor will produce a different outcome. We don't know what happened. And I'm not saying it necessarily ended well for Eleanor. But it seems as though they were willing to hear Eleanor out. And again, that doesn't speak to a society without transphobia, certainly without homophobia or misogyny.

But it does speak to the fact that these conversations were happening. and there weren't foregone conclusions. Again, many people today like to treat that, oh, our tradition of transphobia is ironclad and has been upheld without question for generations. This is an instance where it was being questioned. They didn't know at the start of the court which way it was going to go, or at least they didn't record it as such. And because Eleanor ultimately was being questioned on whether or not she is a woman and

whether or not they were going to treat her as a woman, all of the questioning really centers around, who are you, what is your life, how did you get here, tell us about the circumstances that brought you here today, and then she tells her story. And one of my favorite things that she mentions is that from the very onset, it says, the text says, this person who named themselves, who recorded their name into the record as Eleanor. The text then repeatedly dead names Eleanor. And many scholars have repeatedly dead-named Eleanor. The reason I fixate on calling her Eleanor using she her pronouns is that unlike Jaunda Arc, who we can't ask the question, would you have considered yourself trans? This is a case where Eleanor is like very upfront and saying,

hi, I'm Eleanor. We don't have an email from Jean-Dark with an email signature with her pronouns in it, but we very clearly do hear from Eleanor. Yeah. And so again, it's a situation where as historians, as scribes as readers, we have to choose, are we going to side with the ambiguity of the scribe, or are we going to side with Eleanor herself? And again, one of the big components of transgender scholarship very much following in the tradition of feminist scholarship, which says, listen to the women, take their side of the story into account. It doesn't mean that every woman is going to necessarily tell the truth, but at very least take their side of the story seriously. I often say when I'm teaching feminism classes, the saying is listen to the women. It's

not that, oh, take everything they say as gospel. It's listen to them, take them seriously. And so if we're taking Eleanor seriously, certainly she herself considered herself to be Eleanor enough to be aware of the fact that she was in a court of law being asked her name, and that is what she presents. She talks about transitioning. She talks about beginning to live as a woman, and she recounts her day job that people who want to paint Eleanor as just going about as some sort of sexual kick, ignore the fact that Eleanor lived as a woman during the day as well as a seamstress, which is not a job that necessarily has any inherent sexual components to it, though, of course, anything can. It doesn't seem to be a sexual kick. It seems to be the life she was

living. And for a working-class laboring woman, a woman who also may have had trouble getting hired in certain spaces, given the fact that she may not have been totally passable, that the place where she was able to get clients was to do sex work, much like many trans people today. And so she recounts that. And she also recounts traveling around London. She travels up to Oxford, sleeps with certain scholars. I actually applaud her defense here, because one of the many ways you can, at least in our current legal system, I don't know if she was trying to do this then, but is to implicate other people as a way of saying, I will cooperate if you want to go after Big Fish. And of course, in the medieval world, legal deals were struck. And so she was naming names.

She's naming scholars. She was naming monks. She was naming knights. She talked about the fact that that she was paid X amount, she would haggle for the amount that she would receive, sewing that she was a person who knew what she was worth. And she also talks about gifts she was given, including some dresses that she was later asked for back, and she said, no, I'm keeping these. Again, affirming one's own sense of self-worth, her own dignity, if a boyfriend gives you dresses, and then after you break up, they ask for them back. You're like, no, those were gifts.

Screw you. You get to see a little picture of the fact that, again, her life was like a number of women. I don't know about many, but at least a number of women probably had similar situations with their paramours. And she gets to tell her story. And that's remarkable for a trans person in the time period. That's remarkable for a sex worker. That's remarkable for a woman in her situation. I do think it's remarkable that she gets to tell the story.

And this is the story that she tells. She doesn't hide anything. This is full-blown. This is who I am. this is what I do, this is my life. And she must have known that that's being recorded in court paperwork as well. This isn't something she's having a casual conversation with someone about. This is going to be recorded, as far as she's concerned, for all eternity, in court records.

Yeah, it's so often that we regard women, trans people, sex workers, people who are in a marginalized position into a situation where they're finding themselves engaging in sex work. there is the narrative, of course, of them being exploited and abused. Certainly that is the case, and I do not doubt there was a part of that in Eleanor's story as well. But especially when people talk about sexual abuse and the system, at very least, was abusing her, whether or not you want to say that individuals abused her. In the language of feminism, we like to turn it about and say, no, these people were survivors, rather than simply saying they were victims. only turning to them as victims is just to reinforce their own passivity. Eleanor haggled.

Eleanor fought to preserve her dignity. However, she was able to do that. She fought to preserve the gifts that she was given. And she fought to tell her own story. And when the scribe repeatedly dead names her, she makes very sure that her name Eleanor is spoken into the record. And so she asserted agency. And for context, I love the fact that Eleanor existed in the same London as many other writers and important figures in the medieval period of Chaucer.

Do we know at all that Chaucer met Eleanor Reckner? No, of course not. Do we know that Eleanor crosses paths with John Gower? Certainly not, though I love that Bruce Holsinger wrote a fictional story with that actually. actually comes to pass. But what's fascinating, especially as we look into the writing of these other historical figures like Chaucer, is that they lived in a world where Eleanor Reckner existed. They lived in a world where Eleanor Reckner was telling her story. And these were literate men. These were men of the court. And this may have been gossip that this case got brought up. But even

if it wasn't, it adds complexity to how we imagine the London of Chaucer, that there would have been trans people then as there are people now living alongside them, that this isn't just a modern phenomenon. Do we see representations of trans figures in kind of medieval literature? I'm thinking the big Arthurian legends of chivalric romances. Do we see trans people appearing there? Absolutely. Probably the most well-known case for people who are fans of English or French literature from the Middle Ages is Rommande Salons. It is written in French, but very very much. much has connections with England, as a lot of French language chivalric literature has connections with England and tells the story of a child who was assigned male at birth, despite the fact

that we are told that the child has reproductive organs such as a labia or vagina. We're not given the exact details, but we later hear that nature said, I made this child in the mold of a woman, and you raised them to be a man. But again, the interesting scenario, is that their effective birth certificate, not that they had them, but that the announcement is we have a son, for convoluted legal reasons. They are raising this child as a son. And that for mysterious reasons, sometime around adolescence, the child realizes that they are a boy unlike other boys. One can imagine what happens in adolescence, likely the beginning of menstruation, the development of secondary sex characteristics. And the child has an argument with nature, nurture, reasons.

but ultimately, Seelon's gets to choose. And Seelon says, happy being a man, and then lives until the very end of the story as a man, mostly as a knight in the service of the king. And this story was in circulation, would have been in circulation around the lifetime of Jonda Arc. It would have been in circulation around the lifetime of Chaucer, around the lifetime of Eleanor Reichner,

and is not the first or only of its kind. There are a variety of stories, one of which appears, for instance, in the prose Merlin and other chivalric tales where you find figures who are, for one reason or another, transitioned typically from a assigned female identity to a chosen male identity. And then at various points, that choice is affirmed. In most cases, by the end, they are forcibly brought back into living as a woman. And the repetitive nature of these stories is very fascinating, as it plays not only with a certain type of transgender masculinity, but also with trends in the genre of chabal literature, where you have characters pretending to be something they're not, when you're having magical transformations, when you're having dramatic revelations, you're having aventure,

veering away from the natural force of things. It's one of the many reasons why chivalric literature has so many magical components because it veers away from reality. It's a genre that embraces trans people to such an extent that one can imagine if transgender people didn't exist, which they did. But if they didn't, chivalric literature would invent them anyway because it so plays upon all the things that chivalric literature loves to tell in their stories. It's a limit test for so many things.

We see some knights testing the boundaries of what is human, others, what is goodness, what is a true knight, what is upper class, what is lower class, all these, what is the limits of sexuality or of chastity? Of course they're going to get to gender at some point. And so in the time of genre, when they were living as a knight, there would have been French literature that to some degree, Jeune de Arc, or at least people in the courts would have been familiar with to think, oh, John DeArc, they're a real-life Romanda Seiland's character. And again, it just reminds us that these conversations are not new.

Trans people were in literature, trans people were in history, trans people were in the church, and trans people were actually living lives and telling stories that people were hungry to hear. Two things I thought occurred to me then, that six, seven hundred years ago, people were able to say, you can have a conversation about nature, nurture and reason, but ultimately isn't it up to the individual to choose? When did we lose sight of that? But also the Chevalric Romances in these days, they're written for a really high elite audience. They cost a lot of money to produce this stuff. It wouldn't be produced if there wasn't an audience hungry to read it. And the fact that trans issues are included in that means that there must have been an elite audience willing to pay

considerable amounts of money to explore, read, understand, enjoy these stories? There was an investment of funds. And again, it's something I often have to remind people because the vast majority of transgender scholarship, like unfortunately a lot of scholarship in the United States, is being done by people who do not have adequate funding, who are underemployed, in some cases people who are unemployed. We are beginning to create a transgender turn in scholarship overall, and certainly there is a transgender turn in medieval scholarship. But the vast majority of us are finding it very difficult to find sustainable jobs. Some people who have written foundational essays that I am certain will be cited for decades to come,

that people will be talking about many years from now as one of the founding texts in medieval trans studies are written by people who are no longer in medieval studies, or in academia at all because they are not being adequately paid for it. So I think about Eleanor saying, pay me what I'm worth. I'm thinking about the story of Ramonda Seelons, which is thousands of lines long. And as you say, that would have been a very expensive document to produce. That is a story that costs someone money to get. And so at the end of the day, this is something that is a conversation that we've been

having for a long time, but is one that if we are to do better than our predecessors or even as well as some of our predecessors in how we treat one another. It's something that we also need to back up with funds. Definitely. So there you go. Anyone who wants to fund Gabby's work, I can definitely put you in touch. Well, thank you so much for exploring some of that with us, Gabby. I found it absolutely fascinating.

Not least that these are complex issues that people have been discussing and wrestling with and thinking about for hundreds running into thousands of years. It's nothing new today, which is probably to get better at it. Definitely. Thank you for inviting me. This is an important topic for now, but also I think an important topic for helping us understand our past and hopefully where we're going. Definitely. Thank you so much for joining us. As I mentioned, you can check out more of Gabby's fascinating work at things transform.com. There are a brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time

for more on the greatest period in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help us to reach new listeners. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following 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.