Sossang and Danji: 15th century Korean maidservants in love—a guest-blog by L.J. Lee
Copyright (c) 2024 by L.J. Lee, all rights reserved. Contact the author for permissions.
Content warning: Sexual violence and stalking, enslavement, corporeal punishment, sexism, violent lesbophobia, classism
Introduction
It is generally agreed on by historians that evidence for prosecutions of women for “sodomy” (however defined) are both rare (in absolute terms and compared to those for men) and often more lightly punished. Roelens explores a context that runs counter to this pattern: the Southern Netherlands in the 15th and early 16th century.
This is the most extensive article I’ve found concerning an early 15th century French legal case that is often cited in lists of medieval European evidence for lesbianism. It includes a full translation of the original records (although it doesn’t include the full original text). The article emphasizes interpreting this case in the context of other legal cases with which it shares features, specifically other applications for royal pardon and other records involving sexual offenses, especially those involving same-sex activity.
This article moves away from the traditional focus on professional urban theater companies (in which women had no role prior to the Restoration) to look at regional performance traditions that were more varied. The differences between and among these regional traditions are as important for a closer picture as the quest for continuity and similarity. Local practices were shaped by differences in proximity to London and the court, to prevailing religious attitudes, and to the degree of participation of the local noble families.
The classical corpus of “pastoral lament” is small (two Greek, two Latin) and the genre doesn’t really come into being until the later 15th century, at which point the genre has shifted from its classical origins. This “lament for a lost companion” in its 15th century form primarily mourns female figures, and early works lack a clear relationship of the poetic voice and its subject. The poems are not clearly personal reactions.
This article looks at how beauty and attractiveness and desirability are framed within the early manuscripts of the 1001 Nights as involving similarity rather than gender difference. While later editions, and especially translations and adaptations into western languages, tended to insert a more binary-gendered aesthetic into the descriptions of characters in the thousand and one nights, this is a conceptual shift from the early versions.
As a comparison from an extremely different time and place, the author looks at marriage patterns in 15-16th century Bruges and Antwerp in the Low Countries. This culture followed what is known as the “West European marriage pattern” involving a relatively late age for first marriage, a small age gap, and a significant adult population who had not yet married or might never marry. In these urban centers, newlyweds expected to establish an independent household, so marriage was delayed until a sufficient nest egg could be accumulated, often through wage labor by both parties.
The importance of relations (of all types) between women to society and to women’s lives has tended to be overlooked in favor of the more visible relations between men or between women and men. Due to the nature of society, men could assume that their relationships were stable and long-lasting, but women’s relationships could easily be disrupted by the lesser control women had over their own lives. Or women’s relationships might be temporary alliances across social barriers, established for a specific purpose.
I’m including this summary really just for the sake of completeness and because a colleague happened to be reading the book and was willing to scan me the brief relevant section. The book as a whole (as might be determined from the title) looks at the ways that marriage relationships are represented and symbolized in medieval tomb sculpture. In the chapter on “The Double Tomb” there is a section entitled “Queer Tombs” that specifically looks at commemorations of same-sex pairs.
McLaughlin traces the history and internal politics of a planned women’s community in Ferrara in the first half of the 15th century. Although the community eventually shifted (through several branchings) into a traditional religious order, it had started as a secular (though devotional) community and maintained that status for almost 50 years, largely due to the determined and forceful personalities of its successive leaders.
