This tag is used when a more specific date isn’t available covering very roughly the 11-14th centuries.
Christian theology of late antiquity promoted the idea of “primal androgyny,” that is, that human beings were created as androgynous beings (Adam before the separation of Eve) and that this non-binary state was the ideal state for humanity.
This concept fell from popularity around the 12-13th centuries, as androgyny became conflated with dual-bodied hermaphroditism and thus with monstrosity.
The introduction opens with an anecdote about a 14th century Catalan person assigned female, but whose husband petitioned for annulment because she was anatomically incapable of having sex as a woman, due to atypical genitals, including a penis, a very small vaginal opening, and other anomalies. The account doesn’t include any follow-up or any personal testimony from the woman. The crux of the argument was that she could not be categorized as a woman because she could not perform sexually as a woman.
This is a fairly superficial paper comparing differing approaches to assigning gender to intersex people within Christian and Islamic contexts in the pre-modern period. (It’s an undergraduate paper, so the lack of depth is understandable.)
This is a dissertation exploring gender non-conformity in its various expressions, not all of which are relevant to the Project. The author’s thesis, as noted in the abstract is that “the fragmented approach historians have previously taken when examining the lives of gender non-conforming individuals has been inadequate and could be improved by envisioning the individuals not as individual anomalies or aberrations, but as participants in a long cultural tradition of gender non-conformity and transgression throughout western Europe.”
This article is a survey of recent work in trans and intersex historical studies covering the medieval period. Wingard notes that these topics have only been seriously included in book-length studies since 2020, following something of a hiatus in queer medieval history publications in general since the early 2000s. This particular survey focuses on work that studies “lived experience” via documentary sources and non-fiction texts, rather than a broader scope that includes literary and artistic materials.
We start with an overview of the events of the story. A medieval Irish abbot falls asleep on a hill at Easter, wakes up as a woman, encounters a supernatural female figure, goes to a nearby monastery where he meets, marries, and has children with the “erenagh” of the monastery. [Note: “erenagh” was a post, often hereditary, that served as a sort of business manager for the monastery.] On another Easter, he falls asleep on the same hill as previously and wakes up as a man. He returns to his original home and is told by his wife that he’s only been gone an hour.
This article discusses genres of poetry that reference homosexuality, especially “songs of scorn and malediction,” though these are sometimes more teasing in tone than slanderous. The article discusses 36 poems, of which 3 make brief passing references to the potential female same-sex encounters of prostitutes in military camps.
The introduction reviews the background and thematic connections of the papers in this volume. The focus is overwhelmingly on masculinity and sodomy, although several articles in the section “The Body and the State” focus on women (or female-coded figures). There are a total of 15 articles of which four have at least marginal relevance to the Project. However the two that have the strongest focus on female-coded individuals both concern transmasculinity.
The chapter opens by noting the severe gender imbalance in both sources and attention in the Chinese history of homosexuality. The author cites male-centered and phallocentric attitudes toward sex that led to the invisibility of female homosexual relations. The chapter covers 2000 years of history and so is necessarily uneven. The primary focus is on male homoeroticism in the late Imperial era.
As indicated in the chapter title, this section solely concerns relations between men.
