Clothes Make the Man

Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe

Valerie R. Hotchkiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135231712
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book, the author explores medieval society's fascination with the cross-dressed woman. The author examines a wide variety of religious, literary, and historical sources, which record interpretations of sartorial attempts to overcome gender hierarchy and also illustrate, mainly through the device of inversion, a remarkably sustained desire to examine and reexamine the nature of social gender identities.

Chapter One

Introduction

A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.

—Deuteronomy 22:5

Recent studies of women in the Middle Ages privilege the anomalous over the ordinary. Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, Hildegard von Bingen, Christine de Pizan, and other extraordinary figures have stirred the interest of twentieth-century scholars and students because they transcended societal biases against women to succeed and even achieve renown in a male-dominated culture. The subjects of this study, women who dressed as men, are also anomalies, although usually fictional ones. One could argue that the portrayal of disguised women contradicts a gender-based view of female inferiority more dramatically than do the intellectual accomplishments of women in the male world of letters. In both instances, however, these unusual women accede in some way to male hegemony or social constructs of gender. Whereas female authors often emphasize femininity by adopting an apologetic stance, the female transvestites, both in literature and as documented historical cases, conform to androcentric models by assimilating maleness. To the medieval mind, it seems, man was indeed the measure of all things: womens activities in male spheres were invariably judged against the standard of the male. It follows—although not without inherent paradoxes—that the transvestite heroine finds enthusiastic approbation when she performs as a man.

A study of the female transvestite in medieval literature and history is a study of aberrations, but not a recondite endeavor. In the Middle Ages, female cross dressing was a common literary device and a significant, although rarely recorded, historical phenomenon. Female transvestism occurs so frequently in medieval texts that feminine stereotypes, women’s roles in literature, and the perception of women in the Middle Ages warrant reexamination in light of it. The historical Jeanne d’Arc and the legendary Pope Joan have received their share of attention as exceptional women, but the distinction of male dress links them to such less well known figures as Hildegund von Schönau, who lived among men as a monk, and to scores of literary and hagiographic heroines who cross dress for reasons ranging from escape from sexual abuse to desire for worldly adventure. As alternative paradigms of female heroism, disguised women combine traditional feminine virtues with stereotypical male qualities of daring, strength, and perseverance. Paradoxically, the empowering force of male disguise reveals the limitations in medieval inscriptions of female identity since success—which is often attributed to the “manly spirit” of the heroine¹—is contingent upon suppression of femaleness.

The general phenomenon of transvestism is the subject of numerous psychological, historical, and literary studies. In the early twentieth century, Magnus Hirschfeld coined the word “transvestite” in his study Die Transvestiten, which focused on cross dressing as a sexual variation or “erotischer Verkleidungstrieb,” not always related to sexual orientation.² Havelock Ellis studied transvestism as a psychosexual phenomenon: reporting scores of case histories of male and female transvestites, he suggested that transvestism arises from extreme admiration of the other sex.³ The term “transvestism” has been used primarily as a clinical designation for the desire to dress like the opposite sex—but, above all, for men who dress as women. Because of its origins, orientation, and use in the field of psychology, “transvestite” generally connotes something more than gender disguise. Nonetheless, the term has gained acceptance in discussions of literary cross dressing and female disguise. The verb “transvest,” has long existed in English, meaning “to clothe in other garments,” particularly in the garments of the opposite sex in order to disguise oneself. It is in this broad sense of the word, without the connotations of sexual desire, in most instances, that I use “transvestite” and “transvestism” in this study, although I also use the related terms “gender inversion,” “cross dressing,” and “disguise.”

Given the clinical nature of early research on cross dressing, it is not surprising that the case-study approach also provides the model for more recent studies of cross dressing as a social phenomenon. It is interesting to note, however, that the female transvestite has garnered more attention in historical studies, which tend to glorify female cross dressing as a reaction against male dominance. Male transvestism remains largely in the domain of psychology and social anthropology, where it is still studied as a cultural or psychological variant. Several historians have studied female transvestism by investigating the lives of women disguised as soldiers and sailors in modern history. Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol have collected and analyzed one hundred nineteen cases of disguised women in northern Europe from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.⁴ They offer two basic explanations for historical female transvestism, arguing “that the pressures which led to the decision of cross dressing could be both material, such as poverty, or emotional, such as patriotic fervour or love for another woman, or a combination of these.”⁵ Working in the same period and with some of the same personalities, Julie Wheelwright describes the exploits of numerous “amazons” (women who served in military campaigns with or without the cover of male disguise), presenting them as models of female emancipation.⁶ Perhaps because medieval records are far rarer and less reliable as evidence, both studies ignore cases of cross dressing in the Middle Ages. Dekker and van de Pol make the unlikely claim that the phenomenon actually begins in the latter part of the sixteenth century and is generally restricted to the Netherlands and England.⁷

In a popular cultural study of transvestism, Marjorie Garber modifies the case-study model, offering an anecdotal survey of the transvestite in western society from Shakespeare to the rock star Madonna.⁸ Broadening the scope to include not only literature and history but also film, television, and cultural iconography, she focuses on the power—both political and sexual—inherent in clothing and champions the transvestite as one who disrupts societal norms. This disruption, although it can have different meanings for the groups and individuals practicing cross dressing, confronts, questions, and ultimately enhances culture. Although Garber summarizes the lives of some transvestite saints and mentions the cases of Pope Joan and Jeanne d’Arc in passing, her book is a study of transvestism in modern western culture from the Renaissance to high modernism.

As Garber observed, there is no lack of literary and cultural studies of the post-1500 transvestite.⁹ I would add only that the female cross dresser has received the larger share of attention in these studies as well. One might attribute the preference in literary studies for female cross dressing to the overwhelming interest in women’s studies over the past fifteen years but it is actually more a function of the predominance of this type of gender inversion than the result of a scholarly bias. In growing numbers, critics have turned their attention to disguised women in Renaissance, baroque, and modern literature, developing feminist, historical, and sociological approaches to a variety of post-medieval texts. Elizabethan and Spanish Golden Age drama has long offered a wealth of material for such studies.¹⁰ Although these studies rarely look to medieval antecedents as anything more than sources or analogues, their interpretative approaches have broken ground for this treatment of earlier disguise literature. Work on cross dressing in later literature covers a variety of topics: Phyllis Rackin’s article on the female page in Elizabethan drama examines the androgynous nature of the character;¹¹ David Price argues that the “manly” woman in sixteenth-century German drama, although a symbol of the inverted world, actually reinforces a strict gender hierarchy;¹² Kristina Straub studies cross-dressed actresses of the eighteenth century as “castrated” figures who challenge male sexuality;¹³ Susan Gubar writes about “modern” women, such as Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Frida Kahlo, who dressed in a masculine style or created transvestite characters;¹⁴ and Estelle Jelinek’s study of the autobiographies of female sailors and soldiers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England offers some insight into the difficulties of concealing sex from the disguised woman’s point of view.¹⁵

Medieval gender inversion remains a less cultivated field of investigation. There has been some work on individual aspects of cross dressing in the Middle Ages, such as the motives of the men who wrote the lives of transvestite saints,¹⁶ ambiguous language in medieval romances of gender inversion,¹⁷ and the influence of medieval literary cross dressing on modern society’s attitudes toward male and female transvestism.¹⁸ Although gender issues have become a primary theme of medieval scholarship,¹⁹ the general phenomenon of medieval women in male disguise has not been studied in detail. This arises not from a lack of examples but rather from the slight attention the texts in which they appear have received. Most of these sources are not represented among the “canonical” texts of medieval studies. Few of the Latin hagiographic texts have been translated, and many are edited only in the massive Acta Sanctorum. Likewise, most of the Old French and Middle High German texts have not appeared in modern translations—a fate that unfortunately often consigns a text to the status of literary arcanum. Some of the works, it might be argued, seem to be of secondary importance when compared with the better-known texts of the Middle Ages, but it also appears that the inability to categorize many of these works within traditional frameworks, such as Arthurian romance, heroic epic, or religious literature, has left them without a context, making it more difficult to incorporate them into conventional studies.

This book covers a wide variety of female cross dressing from historical, pseudo-historical, hagiographic, and literary sources.²⁰ The broad scope documents the medieval fascination with the transvestite, whose ambiguous position provided a basis for constructing, challenging, and reconstructing gender identities. The hagiographic texts, including the accounts of Hildegund von Schönau (which almost certainly have some historical basis) illustrate the problem of differentiating between historical and literary as discrete forms of discourse. Although demonstrably fictionalized, they clearly commanded the same authority as historical texts or, even more prestigiously, the status of authentic texts of salvation. Conversely, Jeanne d’Arc’s life, one of the best documented in the Middle Ages, attracted to it a massive body of literary works that cannot be overlooked when assessing how her contemporaries constructed female identity.

In my approach, I follow some of the concerns of new historicism: focusing on issues of authority; recognizing shifting boundaries within hierarchies; and incorporating different types of discourse into the discussion, with the understanding that all cultural expressions—literature, history, art, theology—influence the construction of social conventions. In some cases, however, I tend to invert (fittingly perhaps) the common model of reading the historical in literary texts, often interpreting the constructed qualities of historical texts instead. Authentic documents, such as historical or juridical texts, and overtly fictional texts certainly differ in that audiences were presumed to accept the veracity of the one and the fictionality of the other, yet both groups engage in the same general debate on what to make of the woman who enters the male world. It is not my intention—indeed, it would be impossible—to record a history of cross dressing in the societies of the Middle Ages. Rather, I will show how medieval documents, both literary and historical, record interpretations of sartorial attempts to overcome gender hierarchy and also illustrate, mainly through the device of inversion, a remarkably sustained desire to examine and reexamine the nature of social gender identities.

To some extent, recent critical approaches to gender and gender inversion in post-1500 western society have established the methods and context for discussing sexual identity. Essentialist and constructivist views of gender have not only become a matter of debate per se but have also colored feminist criticism for some time.²¹ Literary portrayals of the woman as “Other” reflect essentialist concepts when they present women as outsiders or archetypes defined by gender. The view that society constructs and determines gender behavior and even sexual distinctions, however, has gained the upper hand in more recent criticism, particularly historical and sociological studies but also in literary studies that recognize such mythic figures as the muse or temptress as significant only in relation to male experience. Thomas Laqueur, in his book on sex and gender, correctly observed that this tension between nature and culture or “‘biological sex and the endless social and political markers of difference” permeates feminist scholarship.²² Women become the focus of gender studies, because “woman alone seems to have ‘gender’ since the category itself is defined as that aspect of social relations based on difference between the sexes in which the standard has always been man.”²³

Because defining “gender” has become a topos of recent critical writing and political discourse, I should note that in this study the term is used to describe the societal perceptions and expectations for behavior, familial roles, physical and mental abilities, and even sexual orientation that distinguish, and divide, men and women. To what extent these differences are considered a natural consequence of biological sex or a response to cultural influences is a recurring question within the texts of gender disguise and in my analysis of them.

In the diversity of medieval thought, one finds traditional assumptions about inherent differences between men and women as well as assertions that gender behavior arises from cultural training. Questions of gender identity, cultural inscription, and essentialism— topics that ring quite modern—inform most medieval texts about cross dressing. In Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence, for example, Nature and Nurture debate the origin and formation of sexual identity and cultural roles. Medieval accounts of women in men’s clothing rarely fail to address the problem of true and perceived sex/gender, often coming to the conclusion that a woman’s sex does not necessarily determine her societal function. This is a radical departure from the common conception of medieval views on male and female as separate and unequal. Notions of male and female difference do inform most of these texts, but portrayals of protagonists who do not conform to the idea of sex as a determining factor in behavior, preferences, and abilities force authors to reconsider the nature of gender difference. This book aims to show that the boundaries between genders blurred long before the “modern” era, if, in fact, they were ever clear.

Whether as a consequence of nature or domination by one sex over the other, there is no doubt that biological distinctions, cultural training, and socially determined roles have separated and categorized men and women in a system that generally values men more highly. Medieval sources that vitiate women are not hard to find. What then can account for the apparent belief in the superiority of most of these women who passed as men? The necessity for them to cross dress points to superficial societal biases, but the popularity of the type betrays a desire to acknowledge or create female heroism. Even in texts that communicate a view of behavior as biologically determined, authors and narrators tend to marvel at women who successfully cross over into male roles since it should be against their very nature to participate in “male” activities. In many cases, as I hope to show, it is precisely the inbred notion of a hierarchy of the sexes that gives rise to a positive view of female transvestism.

Because of the social implications of gender inversion, interpretation of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors Foreword
• Author ’s Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. “Female Men of God”: Cross Dressing in Medieval Hagiography
• Chapter 3. The Lives and Death of Hildegund Von Schönau (†1188)
• Chapter 4. Transvestism on Trial: The Case of Jeanne D’arc
• Chapter 5. The Female Pope and the Sin of Male Disguise
• Chapter 6. The Disguised Wife: Gender Inversion and Gender Conformity
• Chapter 7. Cross Dressing and Sexuality
• Chapter 8. Conclusions
• Hagiographie Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index