Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall, and Meagan Khoury’s edited volume, Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements, brings together literary, historical, and art historical studies that shed new light on what gendered and sexualized experiences were possible in medieval Europe and neighboring communities.The essays in Medieval Mobilities consider ways gender manifests in moments of mobility, as well as how mobility constructs gender across space, in (predominantly late) medieval sources. By “centering study on moments of travel, transition, and transformation” (5), the volume asserts the importance of gender studies and queer theory for thinking about the Middle Ages, as well as the relevance of the Middle Ages for theorizing gender and queerness in the modern world.
Medieval Mobilities also claims an admirably activist method that responds to issues of inequity and the job crisis in medieval studies (and academia) by intentionally fostering exchanges between junior and senior scholars, between disciplines, and between the precarious voices most likely to be shut out from a shrinking field. Each of the volume’s three sections--on bodies, spaces, and transcendence--begins with an introduction by an established scholar that traces interfaces between essays in that section, with the result that the literal conversations that accompanied the collective project are reflected in the volume, a rare witness to scholarly mentorship and community-formation in action.
Roberta Magnani opens Part I on “Bodies” by highlighting the essays’ work of “extricating bodies from unhelpful and limiting binaries (female/male; feminine/masculine)” (23). Meagan Khoury, in “Where Do We Go from Here: Transitivity and Journey Narratives in Eleanor Rykener” (27-47), surveys the historiography of the 1395 court documents witnessing the story of Eleanor Rykener, a trans woman engaged in sex work, in relation to critical developments since the documents’ uncovering in 1995, with particular interest in how scholars have navigated names and pronouns for Rykener and the trend toward honoring her transfemininity in conversation with the broader field of trans studies. Lauren Cole and Hannah Victoria’s “Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy” (49-75) analyzes Hildegard’s transformed representation of female bodies as erotic and fertile--in addition to holy--in the carefully historicized contexts of Hildegard’s homoerotic expressions of love for her fellow nun, Richardis von Stade, and her move to Rupertsburg in the early 1150s that was accompanied by an increased interest in women’s reproductive health care. Sophie Sexon closes out the section with “Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary Identification in Late Medieval Sources” (77-108), which articulates methods for recognizing images that evoke non-binary bodies in late medieval art. Sexon’s essay revisits the topic of their entry in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, [1] in one of numerous examples of how Medieval Mobilities continues the important work of that volume.
Nahir I. Otaño Gracia introduces Part II, “Spaces,” by reflecting upon the relationship between scholarship and the space in which it occurs, as well as the movements made possible in medieval texts. Tonicha M. Upham’s excellent essay, “‘Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now’: Encountering and Observing Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala” (115-138), supplements scholarship on Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala that has often not analyzed the original language of the text and dismissed its representation of women, due to their enslavement and sacrificial roles. Through intricate analysis of the travelogue’s acts of noticing--particularly of noticing women further and further from the imperial center of Baghdad--Upham insightfully nuances Ibn Faḍlān’s assertion of authority over the spaces he enters. The well-paired second essay in this section, Jane Bonsall’s “Disorienting Masculinity: Movement, Emotion and Chivalric Identity in Partonope of Blois” (139-164), identifies patterns in the “close relationship between text, gender and embodied movement through space” (139) in the fifteenth-century Middle English romance, through which disorientation leads to the reorientation of the protagonist to chivalric norms, albeit uncomfortably.
Part III, “Transcendence,” opens with Laura Kalas announcing the section’s purpose is to “explore notions of transcendence as multiple and mobile operations of flux: of being and becoming” (168). These essays examine medieval refusals of the fixity of gender, sex, and embodiment writ broad. Eve Johnson’s essay, “Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression and Agency in the Katherine Group’s Seinte Margarete” (171-197), examines the disorientation produced by anchorites’ spatial immobility, arguing that texts like Seinte Margarete empowered anchoresses to achieve active, rather than passive, enclosure, even adopting the more masculine piety of milites Christi. Micah James Goodrich considers the “rebus” (or “alchemical hermaphrodite”) in “Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies” (199-223), expertly theorizing premodern alchemical preoccupations with movement between the alive and the inert, and offering the methodological innovation of “trans animacy,” which “extends how life can cross between, through, and beyond seemingly fixed boundaries and binaries of animate/inanimate, male/female, alive/dead, hot/cold, etc” (220). Basil Arnould Price closes out the section with “Greenland as a Horizon: Approaching Queer Utopianism in Flóamanna Saga” (225-248), a rich reading of sex and gender ambiguities made possible by an episode of miraculous masculine breastfeeding in the desolate spaces of the saga’s Greenland.
To conclude the volume, Rachel E. Moss reflects on the importance of scholarly alliances, like that among the book’s contributors, as a form of resistance to contemporary political and social movements that seek to erase queer communities. Moss poignantly summarizes what is most valuable in these essays being brought together: they witness a refusal to see gender and sex only as we have been told to see them, to find queer futures in medieval pasts, and to imagine what José Esteban Muñoz--as evoked by several essays in this volume--called “queer utopias.” [2]
The essays in this volume, both singly and together, are valuable contributions to the ways medievalists think about sex, gender, and sexuality. It should be noted, however, that the volume is not as capacious as it claims. The editors’ introduction declares that the essays consider gender “across the global Middle Ages” (6), but the claim that the essays “encompass both the centers and peripheries of the premodern world” (10-11) begins to unravel when one tallies the geographic interests of the essays: eight on Western Europe, one on Scandinavia, and one on the Middle East and Central Asia. It is truly difficult to collect a coherent volume of scholars that broadly engages with medieval globality, and readers should sympathize with that challenge. Neither should volumes merely tokenize a checklist of regions in pursuit of breadth for breadth’s sake. As scholars such as Geraldine Heng remind us, there is still a valued place for regional studies in a more global turn. [3] Because this volume more accurately examines a broad view of Europe and its peripheries, to claim that the centers and peripheries of the whole premodern world are encompassed herein is ultimately misleading, reinforcing the very Eurocentrism that I believe the editors and contributors to this volume wish to dispel. The disciplines of medieval studies are made better by attending to a more global Middle Ages; we should nonetheless be cautious not to prize globality so highly that a thoroughly worthwhile project obscures its own merits. The volume also faces challenges in the perennial battle against typographical errors. Numerous problems with formatting and stylistic consistency persist, which is particularly lamentable for a volume at this price point.
It would nonetheless be a disservice to our field to overlook the studies in Medieval Mobilities, as their attentiveness to gendered and sexualized bodies underscore urgent questions: How have medievalists overlooked or attempted to tame our sources that witness experiences of bodies, imagined and real, beyond the cisheteronormative? How do those sources expand what seems traditional, or even possible, for the human body? And how might a more mobile scholarly practice, shifting between embodied possibilities both medieval and modern, revolutionize medieval studies?
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Notes:
1. Alicia Spencer-Hall, and Blake Gutt, eds. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
2. See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
3. See Geraldine Heng, The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction, Elements in the Global Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), e.g., 12.