Queer Premodern Romance

Mabel Mundy, ‘Imitation, Connection, Repetition: Queer Tropes in Early Modern Romance’

A popular and controversial genre in early modern England, romance offers its readers an imaginative fantasy of an exciting world in which knights and ladies must embark on quests, develop noble identities and resist erotic temptations. In some cases these identities and temptations take on queer resonance, as characters’ gendered disguises render them the objects of unintentionally same-sex desire. This paper maps the repeated presence of potentially queer plot devices across early modern romance texts from Orlando Furioso to Don Quixote, conducting a brief study of the genre that highlights these recurring connections and their potential for queer reading by early modern people. That so many early modern writers make use of queerly suggestive disguise indicates a recurring interest in gender transformation and ‘misplaced’ homoerotic desire—and I propose that not only were these elements recognizable and enjoyable to early modern readers, but that they may have been more immediately legible to those readers than they are to contemporary scholars. 

Moss Pepe, ‘“Jesus has granted you a most beautiful son”: Gender (mis)assignment in Old French Romance’

In her influential popular history, Transgender History, Susan Stryker puts forward a working definition of transgender subjects as “people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender.” This definition has been taken up by medievalists in order to locate and describe transgender-like individuals who were previously subsumed under other gender categories in scholarship.  This paper will take one of the key terms from Stryker’s definition, ‘assigned at birth,’ and ask what such a practice might look like in medieval romance, examining the ways in which childbirth and baptism scenes in Old French secular texts trouble a straightforward assimilation of contemporary terminology, broadening the possibilities of what a transgender subject might look like in medieval literature. The paper will centre on the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, a narrative of deliberate gender mis-assignment at birth, in order to analyse the dispersed, diffuse and complex ways in which the gender of infants was iterated in courtly milieux.

Speaker bios:

Mabel Mundy is a final year PhD student at Newcastle University, working on queer readings of early modern romance and their historical readership by women and girls. Her work has appeared in the Sidney Journal and she recently collaborated with a fellow Newcastle scholar on a chapter for the forthcoming Cultural History of Gender series published by Bloomsbury.

Moss Pepe is a part-time PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on trans critical approaches to Old French romance. He teaches Queer Studies and English Literature. 

- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.