(Download PDF) Medieval Mobilities Gendered Bodies Spaces and Movements Basil Arnould Price Full Chapter PDF

Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies,
Spaces, and Movements Basil Arnould

Price
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/medieval-mobilities-gendered-bodies-spaces-and-mo
vements-basil-arnould-price/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Subtle Bodies (PsyCop Book 13) Jordan Castillo Price
https://ebookmass.com/product/subtle-bodies-psycop-
book-13-jordan-castillo-price/
Universities as Transformative Social Spaces:

Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian
Perspectives Andrea Kolbel
https://ebookmass.com/product/universities-as-transformative-
social-spaces-mobilities-and-mobilizations-from-south-asian-
perspectives-andrea-kolbel/
Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist

Experts and Create Knowledge Tan
https://ebookmass.com/product/spaces-on-the-spectrum-how-autism-
movements-resist-experts-and-create-knowledge-tan/
Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland:

Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise John Soderberg
https://ebookmass.com/product/animals-and-sacred-bodies-in-early-
medieval-ireland-religion-and-urbanism-at-clonmacnoise-john-
soderberg/
Letters of Basil Bunting Alex Niven
https://ebookmass.com/product/letters-of-basil-bunting-alex-
niven/
Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence

In Democratic India Natasha Behl
https://ebookmass.com/product/gendered-citizenship-understanding-
gendered-violence-in-democratic-india-natasha-behl/
Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements – Ebook PDF

Version
https://ebookmass.com/product/revolutions-and-revolutionary-
movements-ebook-pdf-version/
New Religious Movements and Comparative Religion Hammer
https://ebookmass.com/product/new-religious-movements-and-
comparative-religion-hammer/
Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of

Rome’s Flaws Basil Dufallo
https://ebookmass.com/product/roman-error-classical-reception-
and-the-problem-of-romes-flaws-basil-dufallo/
THE NEW MIDDLE AGES
Medieval
Mobilities
Gendered Bodies, Spaces,
and Movements
Edited by
Basil Arnould Price
Jane Bonsall
Meagan Khoury
The New Middle Ages
Series Editor
Bonnie Wheeler
English and Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of
medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s
history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series
includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.
Basil Arnould Price
Jane Bonsall • Meagan Khoury
Editors
Medieval Mobilities
Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements
Editors
Basil Arnould Price Jane Bonsall
University of York University of Birmingham
York, UK Birmingham, UK
Meagan Khoury
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, USA
ISSN 2945-5936 ISSN 2945-5944 (electronic)

The New Middle Ages
ISBN 978-3-031-12646-8 ISBN 978-3-031-12647-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12647-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the Society for Medieval Feminist
Scholarship and the organisers of the 2020 Gender and Medieval Studies
conference for sparking the conversation that inspired this volume and for
providing intersectional, feminist, and queer comradery during the longue
durée of 2020. We are grateful for the collaboration and commitment of
our contributors and introduction writers, whose work inspires us to build
better scholarly communities, now and into the future. We salute not only
our contributors, but also our publishers at Palgrave for their willingness
to experiment with the format of this volume and push the boundaries as
to what an edited volume can do. We would also like to extend our grati-
tude to the inimitable Rachel Moss, who wrote our Afterword, and
reminds us of the responsibility of medieval feminist scholarship within
and beyond the academy.
We would also like to thank our scholarly forebears. Thank you for
‘staying with the trouble’.
v
Contents
Introduction 1
Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall, and Meagan Khoury
Part I Bodies 19
Introducing Bodies 21
Roberta Magnani

Where Do We Go from Here: Transitivity and Journey
Narratives in Eleanor Rykener 27
Meagan Khoury

Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction
of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy 49
Lauren Cole and Hannah Victoria

Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary
Identification in Late Medieval Sources 77
Sophie Sexon
vii
viii Contents
Part II Spaces 109

Troubling Spaces: Taking up Space and Being Taken by
Generative Scholarship111
Nahir I. Otaño Gracia

“Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now”:
Encountering and Observing Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān’s
Risala115
Tonicha M. Upham

Disorienting Masculinity: Movement, Emotion and Chivalric
Identity in Partonope of Blois139
Jane Bonsall
Part III Transcendence 165
Troubling Mobilities: Transcendence167

Laura Kalas

Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression
and Agency in the Katherine Group’s Seinte Margarete171
Eve Johnson

Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies199
Micah James Goodrich

Greenland as a Horizon: Approaching Queer Utopianism in
Flóamanna Saga225
Basil Arnould Price
Afterword; Afterwards249
Rachel E. Moss
Index253
List of Contributors
Jane Bonsall University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Lauren Cole Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Micah James Goodrich Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Eve Johnson Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Laura Kalas Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Meagan Khoury Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Roberta Magnani Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Rachel E. Moss University of Northampton, Northampton, UK
Nahir I. Otaño Gracia University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
NM, USA
Basil Arnould Price University of York, York, UK
Sophie Sexon University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Tonicha M. Upham Department of History and Classical Studies,
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Hannah Victoria Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
ix
List of Figures
Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary

Identification in Late Medieval Sources
Fig. 1 Christ and Patrons, Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne of
Luxembourg. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The
Cloisters MS. 69.86, fol. 328r. (Used with permission from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, under The Met’s Open Access
policy, through a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license) 94
Fig. 2 Wound of Christ, Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg,
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters
MS. 69.86, fol. 331r. (Used with permission from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, under The Met’s Open Access
policy, through a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license) 97
“Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now”:

Encountering and Observing Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala
Fig. 1 Appearances of Women in the Risala, categorised according to the
nature(s) of their appearance 126
Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression

and Agency in the Katherine Group’s Seinte Margarete
Fig. 1 © British Library Board. Detail of a miniature of St Margaret
emerging from the dragon, from a Book of Hours, France (Paris),
c.1440–c.1450, Egerton MS 2019, f.216r 191
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 2 © British Library Board. Detail of a miniature of St Margaret in

prison emerging from the dragon, from a Book of Hours (use of
Sarum), and Psalter, Southern Netherlands, c.1460–c.1470,
Harley MS 3000, f.42r 193
Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies

Fig. 1 Zürich, Zentralbibliothek / Ms. Rh. 172 (Front paste-down). (Used
with permission of Mohlberg Leo Cunibert, Katalog der
Handschriften der Zentralbibliothek Zürich I, Mittelalterliche
Handschriften, Zürich 1952, S. 246–248 under a Creative
Commons BY license) 201
Fig. 2 Zürich, Zentralbibliothek / Ms. Rh. 172, f.10v. (Used with
permission of Mohlberg Leo Cunibert, Katalog der Handschriften
der Zentralbibliothek Zürich I, Mittelalterliche Handschriften,
Zürich 1952, S. 246–248 under a Creative Commons BY license) 217
List of Tables
Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s

Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy
Table 1 Virgo 71
Table 2 Mulier 72
Table 3 Femina 72
Table 4 Spiritus/Caro72
xiii
Introduction
Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall, and Meagan Khoury
Manifesting in the woods, covered in hair, the woman on this book’s cover
emerges from the shadows. She stands against a flat of darkness, broken up
by the undulations of iridescent oak leaves. A chicken pecks contentedly at
her hirsute legs. The woodwose falconer is oblivious to her spotted hunt-
ing dogs and they are indifferent to her, as their noses are resolutely
pointed toward the ground. Our wild woman’s gaze is fixed instead on her
prize falcon, perched on her hand. Unlike the domesticated beasts that
surround her, the falcon is her confederate in wildness. They share a natu-
ral covenant, communicating through shared gazes. But despite their reci-
procity, they are nevertheless distinguished by their kinetic capacities.
Where she cannot venture, her falcon can. But the freedom of the forest
B. A. Price (*)
University of York, York, UK
e-mail: basil.price@york.ac.uk
J. Bonsall
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: j.bonsall@bham.ac.uk
M. Khoury
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
e-mail: meagank@stanford.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
B. A. Price et al. (eds.), Medieval Mobilities, The New Middle Ages,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12647-5_1
2 B. A. PRICE ET AL.
floor is caught in the flexing of her elegantly articulated feet; her contrap-
posto moment mid-stride underscores her intention for motion.
Her attachment to the falcon—like her nudity and her environment—
signals her ‘wildness’. Wildness, for the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, is
a way of being and loving that pushes against categorical assumptions
while imagining possible alternatives. As Halberstam puts it, “[wildness]
does not promise freedom […] rather it offers a rubric for passions, affects,
movements, and ways of thinking that exceed conventional oppositions
between animal, vegetable, and mineral.”1 This expression is borne out in
the gaze our wild woman directs to her falcon: a form of loving that char-
acterizes the queer upending of conventionality and the expected. Her
attachment to the falcon, rather than the domesticated dogs, hints at a
love that pushes against the condoned bond between hound and hunter.
Examining the falconry practiced by T.H. White, author of the Arthurian
novel The Once and Future King, Halberstam contends that falconry is
about an ‘opening to wildness’ that allows for “the expression of a series
of unclassifiable and unspeakable desires”, such as an “elaborate fantasy of
becoming feral”.2 “In the terrain of the ferox”, he writes, “bodies flee,
escape, hide, and seek”, and these movements are accompanied by queer
articulations of desire, feelings, and attachments that push against and
transcend ready classification.3 Wildness is inscribed kinetically. Or, in
other words, through a desire for mobility.
Attending to the intersections of ‘wildness’ and mobility reveals, how-
ever, that our wild woman is not exactly what she seems. Despite the cur-
rency of creatures and monsters in late medieval literature and cultural
production (such as in this fifteenth-century tapestry from Basel), this par-
ticular falconer rejects an easy reading. With her body concealed only by
her flowing hair, she evokes the eremitic Magdalen. Her blonde hair, how-
ever, is under control, coiffed in a popular contemporaneous style and
topped with a woven floral headpiece. Even as her hirsute body threatens
to break its bounds, her body hair curling into the millefleurs, she is nev-
ertheless constrained by the trappings of aristocracy. Although her falcon
promises mobility, it too is caught between freedom and captivity,
movement, and stasis. Even if this bird could fly away, it is weighed down
1
Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press,
2020), 31.
2
Halberstam, Wild Things, 93.
3
Ibid., 111.
INTRODUCTION 3
by the bells affixed to its legs with leather bewits. Both woman and bird
are somewhere between tame and disorderly. Neither can quite engage in
the ‘wild rumpus’ proscribed by Maurice Sendak in Where the Wild Things
Are, yet at the same time, both push against the boundaries of the frame.
The woodwose and her falcon embody some of the primary concerns
of this volume. Their depiction, as wild but also not, resists our attempts
to read their bodies and situate them within a known space. Rather than
approach these figures as statically positioned within the floral ground of
this tapestry, they are perhaps best understood in the fleeting instant when
the banderole held by the woodwose catches a sudden ascendant breeze.
Floating in an arch, the banner constructs, for a moment, a space for a
woman and her falcon. Our book, like this banner, exists within the florid
field of medieval studies, but also disrupts it. Medieval Mobilities: Gendered
Bodies, Spaces, and Movements in the Middle Ages examines movement into
states and spaces that, even for a moment, potentiate ways of being that
refuse static interpretations.
Questions Posed
This edited volume explores the intersection of gender and mobility in
medieval culture. The Middle Ages was a period of myriad forms of ‘mobil-
ity’, and these movements had both minute and monumental impacts on
medieval culture, with tangible economic, social, political, and personal
implications. Specific sorts of mobilities (and specific mobile bodies) have,
unsurprisingly, long been a focus of study in the field. Historically, the
prevailing discussions of mobility in the Middle Ages are examinations of
moments of geographic travel: whether the paths taken by pilgrims,4 or the
4
Some foundational work on pilgrimage includes Donald R. Howard, Writers and
Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), and J. G. Davies’s “Pilgrimage and Crusade Literature,” in Journeys
Toward God: Pilgrimage and Crusade, ed. Barbara N. Sargent-Bauer (Kalamazoo, Mich.:
Western Michigan University, 1992). Recent reexaminations of the movements and spaces of
pilgrimage include Suzanne M. Yeager’s “Medieval Pilgrimage as Heterotopia: The Pilgrim
as Maritime Adventurer and Aspiring Crusader in Saewulf’s Relatio de situ Jerusalem”
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50, no. 2 (May 2020): 233–268.
exploratory voyages of men like John Mandeville,5 William of Rubruck,6

or Marco Polo.7 These international journeys attest to the variety of cross-
cultural negotiations that flourished during the medieval period, and the
ways in which individuals attempted to make sense of how their travels
transformed them. Even though these figures and their accounts provide
us with insights as to how some men and women traversed the medieval
globe, this narrow range of subjects has had such an influence on the tra-
jectory of medieval mobility studies that Sharon Kinoshita wryly termed
them the “usual suspects”.8 This focus on only a few exceptional travel
accounts generates a sense that mobility in the Middle Ages was a rare
aberration, rather than widespread. Recent studies, such as Travels and
Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea (Doherty
and Schmedier, eds. Brepols, 2015), have worked to fill in this picture,
detailing an array of travel accounts and journey narratives that endeavor
to disprove the ‘caricature’ of the Middle Ages as a time “of general stasis
punctuated by the occasional exceptional individual or movement”.9
Instead, the image that emerges is one of an array of medieval bodies in
motion, in transit from one cultural and spatial location to another.
Centering study on the manifold manifestations of mobility in the
Middle Ages invites going beyond the physical movement of bodies across
geographical distances to consider other kinds of movements and fluctua-
tions. In their 2013 special issue of postmedieval on “Medieval Mobilities”,
Martin Shichtman, Laurie Finke, and Kathleen Coyne Kelly observe that
“cultural fluidity—something that new approaches to medieval studies
5
For example, see: Karma Lochrie, “Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville’s
Cosmopolitan Utopia,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 592–99; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The
Diversity of Man in the Book of John Mandeville,” in Eastward Bound, Travel and Travellers
from 1050–1550 , ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004 ),
156–176.
6
For example, see: Peter Jackson, “William of Rubruck in the Mongol Empire: Perception
and Prejudices,” in Medieval Ethnographies, eds. James Muldoon, Felipe Fernández-Armest,
and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Routledge, 2009), 273–290; Tillmann Lohse, “Pious men
in foreign lands: Global-historical perspectives on the migrations of medieval ascetics, mis-
sionaries, and pilgrims,” Viator 44, no. 2 (2013): 123–136.
7
Shayne Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017).
8
Sharon Kinoshita, “Review: O’Doherty and Schmieder, eds., Travels and Mobilities in the
Middle Ages”, The Medieval Review 16.02.44.
9
M. O’Doherty and F. Schmedier, eds. Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the
Atlantic to the Black Sea (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), xiii.
INTRODUCTION 5
allow us to see more and more—is the result of mobility.”10 Therefore, we

find forms of movement beyond physical travel receiving particular atten-
tion, such as the transmission of ideas, the circulation of manuscripts,11
allegorical or visionary mobility,12 social fluidity, and the navigation of reli-
gious and secular spaces. The range of methodologies brought to bear on
such diverse ‘movements’ in this collection reflects the changing approaches
to medieval mobility studies more broadly and demonstrates the breadth
of possibilities within the field.
Any exploration of mobility in the Middle Ages is also, inherently, an
examination of borders, categories, and definitions. To move from one
place to another is to call for critical reflection on both origin and destina-
tion. Therefore, studies of transcultural medieval movement may run the
risk of reinscribing expected models of binary contrast: ‘here’ versus
‘there’; ‘familiar’ versus ‘foreign’; ‘west’ versus ‘east’; ‘center’ versus
‘periphery’; and ‘male’ versus ‘female’. Focusing our analysis on a study of
mobility provides a way to break down those boundaries, and to linger on
the process of change or movement itself. As Shichtman, Finke, and Kelly
note: “[a] focus on the transcultural Middle Ages is often a focus on ideas,
people, and goods once they have arrived … To focus on mobilities, how-
ever, is to pause on the road … to examine the route itself.”13 Shichtman,
Finke, and Kelly encourage rethinking medieval journeys not as a series of
‘stops’ punctuating the route, but rather, invite the discipline to consider
the in-between spaces as themselves generative, an invitation this volume
has taken as instructive. This collection of essays navigates through several
such places by centering study on moments of travel, transition, and trans-
formation through methodologies that move between disciplines and
10
Martin Shichtman, Laurie Finke, and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “Introduction: ‘The world
is my home when I’m mobile: Medieval Mobilities”, postmedieval 4, no. 2 (Summer
2013): 126.
11
Hsy, Jonathan. “Mobile Language-Networks and Medieval Travel Writing,” Postmedieval
4, no. 2 (Summer, 2013): 177–191. See also Pascale Bourgain, “The circulation of texts in
manuscript culture,” Johnston, M., & Van Dussen, M. (Eds.). The Medieval Manuscript
Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015. pp. 140–159.
12
Harris, Anne F. “Virtual Mobility: Landscape and Dreamscape in a Late Medieval
Allegory.” Postmedieval 4, no. 2 (Summer, 2013): 205–218.
13
Shichtman, Finke, Kelly, “The world is my home,” p. 126.
fields.14 A mobile methodology is unsurprisingly necessary for a study of

mobilities.
Despite critical interest in a variety of medieval mobilities, there is a
dearth of scholarship that focuses on the gendered implications of these
movements. Gendered mobilities are present in broader studies of medi-
eval movement: either as sub-sections of a larger study (as in O’Doherty
and Schmeider’s volume), or in reference to extraordinary figures such as
Margery Kempe, whose movements have, deservedly, received a great deal
of attention.15 These discussions nevertheless reinforce the discipline’s his-
toric emphasis on a narrow range of subjects. This volume intervenes in
this conversation by asking how mobility is gendered (and how gender is
mobile) across the global Middle Ages, offering new breadth and focus.
Our discussion revolves around two broad, interrelated questions. In what
ways do medieval people, texts, ideas, and images move across physiologi-
cal, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries? How do these move-
ments afford new configurations of gender and being?
Our approach to these questions is consequently in dialogue with the
emergent interest in the intersection of medieval studies and queer and
trans studies, as scholarly disciplines that directly address ideas of change,
movement, and the breakdown of binaries, including explorations of what
queerness or gender fluidity would or could look like during the Middle
Ages. In particular, this volume contributes to the growing discussion of
how to approach medieval culture (and particularly its mobile spaces and
experiences) through a trans studies lens by emphasizing the movement
inherent to the term ‘trans’. As Dorothy Kim and M.W. Bychowski
observed in their introduction to their 2019 special issue of Medieval
Feminist Forum, ‘Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism’, the term ‘trans’
necessitates a mobile analytic approach, for “as a prefix it messes with the
constitution of any category to which it is applied (transnational, transhis-
torical, translational); and as an adjective, it unsettles the ontological
14
As discussed in Shichtman, Finke, and Kelly: “Two border crossings mark work in trans-
cultural mobilities. The first entails a shift in focus within medieval studies from the unique-
ness or distinctiveness of the national cultures that have defined medieval studies toward
scholarship that elucidates the mobility of cultures and the exchanges among them. Such
analyses have the potential to decenter Europe as the locus and progenitor of medieval (and
modern) cultures. Second, transcultural mobilities require traffic between disciplines, fields
and areas of expertise in the academy.” “The world is my home,” p. 128.
15
For a recent exemplar, see: Anthony Bale, Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2021).
INTRODUCTION 7
givenness of any body to which it is applied.”16 We have followed this

presupposed ‘unsettling’ to its mobile conclusion, and use queer and trans
subjects and categories to not merely ‘mess with’ the fixity of medieval
moments, but to reimagine them both in and through motion.
Likewise, this project builds from the work undertaken by Alicia
Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt in their edited collection Trans and
Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography.17 This series of essays
exemplifies the use of a “transgender lens to undertake a cross-temporal
investigation of medieval literature, philosophy and religion”, and the
ways this work engages with contemporary trans and queer theory to
approach the instability of gender in the medieval past has been critical to
the conception of this volume. While the essays in Spencer-Hall and Gutt’s
collection largely deal with real or represented trans saints and holy fig-
ures, they also offer a reminder of the utility of this approach beyond these
embodied examples. Echoing Kim and Bychowski, Spencer-Hall and Gutt
observe in their introduction that a “trans” reading becomes “a way of
disrupting normative and essentializing frameworks” which may be applied
to subjects less obviously related to transgender identities.18 In this vol-
ume’s attention to movements which cross (and thereby destabilize)
boundaries and normative frameworks of space and category, a ‘trans’
reading is not merely illustrative but necessary. Trans and Genderqueer
Subjects is just one exemplar that demonstrates how approaching premod-
ern gender and sexuality as unfixed and changeable—as readily as a bande-
role waves on a breeze—may undermine assumptions about ways of being
and loving in the Middle Ages.19 Yet, even if the mutual construction of
gendered bodies, places, and movements informs these analyses of the
fluid possibilities of gender and being in the premodern world, the
16
Dorothy Kim and M. W. Bychowski, “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism: An
Introduction,” Medieval Feminist Forum 55, no. 1 (2019): 9.
17
Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, eds. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval
Hagiography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
18
Spencer-Hall and Gutt, Trans and Genderqueer Subjects, 13.
19
Although there is a wealth of new scholarship on queer and trans approaches to the
middle ages, this volume is also in dialogue and indebted to Leah DeVun’s book The Shape
of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (20121) which takes a wider tem-
poral, geographic, and thematic approach in its understanding of gender fluidity in the pre-
modern era. Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).
relationship between gender and movement through spaces (whether

physical or temporal) remains understated.
The inherent intersections between space and gender have been
explored, to an extent, in publications such as Gender in Medieval Places,
Spaces and Thresholds (Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter, eds.,
University of London Press, 2019) and Authority, Gender and Space in the
Anglo-Norman World, 900–1200 (Katherine Weikert, Boydell & Brewer,
2020). What both of these studies observe is that space is intimately inter-
twined with embodiment, and gendered embodiment in particular.20 But
even as these studies point toward the animated potential of space, what
Blud, Heath, and Klafter describe as an “unpredictable and unforeseeable
interaction and constant flux”, the focus of these studies largely remains
on the static spatial moments—the ‘stops’ punctuating the route—and
therefore leaves room for further explorations of the gendered potential of
these oscillations.21 This is where Medieval Mobilities picks up, intervening
in this developing conversation to propose that we must read gender,
space, and movement in the Middle Ages as co-constructed, and that
doing so may offer a new, critically necessary element of ‘wildness’ to the
study of medieval mobility.22
Why Medieval Mobilities Now?

Although Medieval Mobilities approaches the Middle Ages as a period of
movement, this volume emerges from a moment when medieval studies as
a discipline has been rendered, in many ways, immobile. In many respects,
Medieval Mobilities is a product of and a response to the COVID-19 pan-
demic, which began near the end of 2019. By early 2022, an estimated
6.25 million people have died of the virus. Uncountable numbers have
suffered in other ways, either from persistent symptoms of ‘long’ COVID,
or from the economic, emotional, and social costs of the virus. The pan-
demic (which remains an undeniable and ever-present reality at the time of
this introduction’s composition) has profoundly affected the academy,
20
Victoria Blud, Diane Heath, and Einat Klafter, eds., Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces
and Thresholds (London: University of London Press, 2019); Katherine Weikert, Authority,
Gender and Space in the Anglo-Norman World, 900–1200 (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer,
2029, 8.
21
Victoria Blud, et. al., eds., Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds.
22
Halberstam, Wild Things, 31.
INTRODUCTION 9
and with it, the universities and institutions that many medievalists
call home.
The pandemic has fundamentally constrained the movements of the
discipline, and the ways in which we, as medievalists, can do medieval
studies. The virus prevented movements across international borders,
either by necessitating national lockdowns or through the exorbitant costs
of testing and quarantine that awaited would-be-travelers on the other
side of the border. Such measures necessarily disrupted travel to archives,
museums, special collections, and archaeological sites, limiting scholars to
work with whatever materials are digitized. In the early days of the pan-
demic, many academic conferences were indefinitely postponed or can-
celed; since then, many have migrated to digital or hybrid platforms, with
limited opportunities for network-building, collaborative conversation, or
the development of personal and professional connections. The lack of
access to archives and the loss of an international scholarly community
have demanded an adaptive scholarly practice, and its effects have been felt
keenly by students and precariously employed academics. This of course
includes the contributors to this volume, all of whom have been directly
impacted by the pandemic, in their research practice, their health (physical
and/or mental), or both.
The effects of the pandemic serve only to further exacerbate the limited
opportunities facing early career medievalists, including the contributors
to this volume. In 2018, Jonathan Kramnick, writing for The Chronicle of
Higher Education, observed a precipitous drop in the number of faculty
jobs in English departments across the United States.23 At the onset of the
2008 economic crisis, the Modern Language Association (MLA) adver-
tised 1826 English positions. The number of positions declined by 55
percent over the course of the decade, with MLA only posting 828 posi-
tions in 2017/2018. Revisiting these statistics in 2020, Kramnick laments
in another editorial for The Chronicle that “now we find out what happens
when a [job] crisis becomes a catastrophe. For all practical purposes, there
may be no jobs at all this year, or next, or the year after.”24 Although these
statistics concern only English and its subfields, the pattern persists across
23
Jonathan Kramnick, “What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
what-we-hire-in-now-english-by-the-grim-numbers/.
24
Jonathan Kramnick, “The Humanities After Covid-19,” The Chronicle of Higher Education,
July 23, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-humanities-after-covid-19.
medieval studies, accelerated by the impact of the pandemic.25 The

Medieval Academy of America’s overview of academic positions for medi-
evalists within the disciplines History, English, Islamic Studies, and Italian
Studies reveals that from 2015/2016 into 2020/2021, “access to full-
time faculty positions in all the subfields that normally constitute Medieval
Studies in North America can be defined for all intents and purposes as a
job lottery, not a job market.” 26 For medievalists, these statistics challenge
our deeply seated (even if absurdly optimistic) beliefs that our training
would provide some measure of social mobility.
Despite the systemic and structural constraints on the next generation
of medievalists, scholars have responded to this uncertainty by moving
against and beyond the narrowly defined limits of medieval studies. The
Gender and Medieval Studies Conference (GMS) in 2019 offered a (vir-
tual) space in this time of profound personal and professional anxiety for
such medievalists to think collaboratively about what mobility meant in
the Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities builds upon the interdisciplinary,
international, and explicitly intersectional feminist conversations begun at
that conference to ask how a discussion of medieval mobility can bend the
boundaries of an increasingly inflexible discipline.
Contributions
Medieval Mobilities stresses that questions of gender and mobility are
themselves mobile, intersectional, and interdisciplinary by challenging
assumptions of rigidity and immobility in the field itself. The eight essays
included in Medieval Mobilities work together to think through how gen-
der and mobility are reciprocal and interlocking. These essays span the
early to late medieval period and encompass both the centers and
25
As a consequence of the pandemic, enrollment in higher education has declined. In the
United States, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center revealed that, as of Fall
2021, higher education enrollment fell 2.7 percent, following a 2.5 percent drop in Fall
2020. All told, there has been a 5.1 percent decline in enrollment in the two years since Fall
2019—representing a loss of 938,000 students. Given that universities rely upon student
revenue, particularly from out of state and international students, to maintain their infra-
structure, these falling numbers suggest that the most optimistic outcome of the decline in
enrollment is the continuance of the job crisis.
26
Merle Eisenberg, “Executive Summaries of Medieval Studies Academic-Positions Job
Market Data from: Cycles 2015-2016/2020-2021,” The Medieval Academy Blog (blog)
(The Medieval Academy of America, October 6, 2021), http://www.themedievalacademy-
blog.org/medieval-job-data-summary/.
INTRODUCTION 11
peripheries of the premodern world, ranging in their focus on Western

Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. Furthermore, these essays
engage with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with contributions from
art historians, cultural historians, literary critics, and those whose work can
only be described as part of the thoroughly multidisciplinary tradition of
medieval studies. While gender studies and queer theory are ubiquitous
frameworks throughout our volume, our contributions are also informed
by phenomenology, performance studies, disability studies, posthuman-
ism, and object-oriented ontology. Through these critical approaches, our
volume insists on the relevance of the Middle Ages for how we think
about contemporary questions of gender and mobility.
Moreover, this volume introduces a novel organization strategy that
creates a space for intergenerational conversation, collaboration, and
debate between senior and junior scholars. In doing so, we respond to the
insecurity facing early career scholars by prioritizing contributions from
graduate students and precarious scholars, set in conversation with contri-
butions of more senior scholars. Furthermore, this volume provides a col-
laborative space for women, queer, and trans scholars to reclaim the
archive, and to receive mentorship and community in innovative and sub-
versive ways. Our contributors represent elements of the scholarly com-
munity most likely to be immobilized by the seemingly endless COVID-19
pandemic and an increasingly inflexible academy, and such scholars are
often prevented from succeeding in the very spaces in which their scholar-
ship and perspectives are most needed. Given the range of our contribu-
tors’ lived experiences, disciplinary backgrounds, and methodological
perspectives, the conversation generated by and between these chapters
opens up interdisciplinary, intersectional, and collaborative possibilities for
medieval studies.
To create a dialogue that is both radical and in continuity with the
foundational feminist scholarship that has come before us, each of the sec-
tions outlined below begins with an introduction composed by a senior
scholar, responding to and in conversation with our contributors. We
chose Roberta Magnani, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, and Laura Kalas not only
because of their expertise in medieval gender studies, but because they are
all active contributors to the development of feminist communities within
the discipline, particularly through the project of mentorship. The intro-
ductions composed by Magnani, Otaño Gracia, and Kalas are, like
Medieval Mobility as whole, the product of collaboration between estab-
lished voices and emergent ones. Specifically, they are the result of a series
of conversations held over Zoom (a methodological intervention we may

never have considered prior to the pandemic). These conversations (and
the resultant introductions) enact a dialogue between the selected essays,
pointing to cross-temporal and cross-cultural connections spanning the
global Middle Ages, and furthermore, offer a space for contributors and
senior scholars to jointly interrogate and dismantle narratives that have
persisted in medieval gender studies.
To further encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and intergenera-
tional conversation, these contributions are organized by neither their
methodology nor the cultural contexts that they focus on. Rather, this
volume is organized through three interconnected but distinct thematic
strands: Bodies; Spaces; and Transcendence.
Part I: Bodies
This first section addresses embodied experiences of movement and how
contemporaneous and retrospective discourses set medieval bodies in
motion. Roberta Magnani offers an introduction that gestures toward the
tensions implicit in body awareness and gender expression in the Middle
Ages. Drawing from her conversations with Meagan Khoury, Sophie
Sexon, Lauren Cole, and Hannah Victoria, her introduction reminds us
that neither medieval nor modern bodies exist at the extremes of a binary,
but rather, that these bodies move in an energetic continuum betwixt,
between, and beyond. The following essays offer an interdisciplinary
exploration into the possibilities that arise from examining gendered and
kinetic embodiment.
Meagan Khoury begins our volume with a review of scholarship on
Eleanor Rykener, a trans sex worker in fourteenth-century London.
Responding to the regressive, revisionary, and rehabilitatory ways in which
Rykener is perceived, Khoury proposes an innovative reading: that
Rykener’s journey narrative is thematically similar to modern trans texts,
which are often metaphorized as geographical transitions, pilgrimages of
and to the self. Her historiography focuses on the ways in which academics
have gendered Rykener over the past twenty-five years and offers a broader
comment on the ways in which trans bodies have been read (or not read)
by medievalists. Khoury therefore provides an introduction to how medi-
eval studies genders bodies and movement, while also pointing us to
where we must—and need—go from here.
INTRODUCTION 13
The focus on mobile readings of gendered bodies are read and repre-
sented continues in the second essay, in which Lauren Cole and Hannah
Victoria track the evolution of how the twelfth-century nun Hildegard of
Bingen wrote about women. Cole and Victoria contextualize Hildegard’s
lexical choices regarding Mary and Eve as models of holy femininity across
several major texts with an understanding of her personal experiences of
movement and emotion. Physical movement (Hildegard’s move to the
religious community at Rupertsberg in 1150, which was under her direc-
tion) and the loss of her beloved companion Richardis in 1152 are both
cited as having a profound effect on how Hildegard reads the female body.
Cole and Victoria argue that this period demonstrates a reorientation in
Hildegard’s thinking about embodied femininity and demonstrate her
move from more traditional and negative depictions of women to a posi-
tive—even desiring—attention to the female body in later texts, such as
her Symphoniae and Causae et curae.
The readability of gendered bodies, in particular the inherently mobile
trans or gender-fluid body, is further explored by Sophie Sexon in their
essay on iconographic depictions of Christ’s wounds. Focusing on Bonne
of Luxembourg’s Book of Hours (c.1349), Sexon advocates for mobility
as a way to see the nonbinary possibilities of Christ’s body and recuperates
this body as a site of trans possibility both in the late medieval and modern
period. Sexon argues that when the wound of Christ opens up on the
manuscript page, it also opens up a new configuration of gender and
being, which, in the parlance of RuPaul’s Drag Race, ‘serves cunt’ to all
nonbinary bodies that need such an icon. Through this way of seeing,
Sexon offers the wounds of Christ as static representations of a mobile
transgender body that fluidly moves not only beyond gender binaries but
also across time and space.
Part II: Spaces

Picking up on the question of bodily and spatial reciprocity, Spaces consid-
ers the gendered movements between bodies and through space. This sec-
tion begins with an introduction composed by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia that
considers the varying gendered meanings ascribed to spaces in the medi-
eval imaginary, both material and textual. Based on her conversations with
Jane Bonsall and Tonicha Upham, Otaño Gracia offers an introduction
that demonstrates the fruitfulness of the ‘spatial turn’ as a means of con-
sidering movement and gender, and moreover, emphasizes the
transformative interdependence of bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Her

introduction mediates on the temporally constructed nature of space, and
how these narrative, cultural, and historical moments influence and are
inflected by ideas of gender and movement.
Jane Bonsall moves to the emotional spaces of romance, exploring the
quality and impact of the hero’s movement in the fifteenth-century Middle
English Partonope of Blois. Beginning with a consideration of how action
and mobility are gendered in medieval romance, Bonsall then invokes
critical theories of space and movement to examine the queer potential of
Partonope’s emotional and physical journey through fairy spaces. Reading
romance conventions of masculinity and madness in dialogue with theo-
ries of queer orientation and disability, this chapter explores the subversive
potential of the knightly emotionality, stasis, and movement in this text.
This section then travels from the fairy-worlds of medieval England to
the far north imagined by tenth-century Arabic travel accounts. Drawing
on Nadia Maria El Cheikh’s work (2002) on gender as a method configur-
ing racial difference in Arabic writing, Tonicha Upham offers a close read-
ing of Ahmad Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala, detailing an Arab diplomat’s
tenth-century journey from Baghdad to the Volga River. Rather than lim-
iting herself to the Rūs, Upham moves between the cultural contexts envi-
sioned by the Risala to offer a more nuanced picture of Ibn Faḍlān’s
depictions of women. The chapter then narrows its focus to offer a new
reading of the much-discussed Rūs funeral, employing geographical and
spatial frameworks from Sara Ahmed (2006) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) to
establish how Ibn Faḍlān navigates his spatial immersion and discomfort.
Through this reading, Upham treats gender as a fraught lens for the medi-
ation of information on a racialized Other, turning its focus back on Ibn
Faḍlān as intruder and observer.
Part III: Transcendence

Our final section, Transcendence, develops and deepens the themes raised
by previous sections by considering how bodies and places might dissolve
and transcend their gendered boundaries. Laura Kalas, through a discus-
sion with Basil Arnould Price, Eve Johnson, and Micah James Goodrich,
provides an introduction that theorizes what it means to transcend in the
Middle Ages, and what subversive possibilities transcendence affords. This
conversation thinks about how ‘trans-cendence’ affords new kinds of
meaning-making, a play, and a pun, on queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s
INTRODUCTION 15
contention that ‘trans’ is another way of knowing.27 This dialogue, and

this framework, informs the shape of the following essays: medieval spaces
that disorient (Johnson); medieval science that refutes classification
(Goodrich); and medieval bodies that refuse to be read (Price).
The disorienting potential of gendered spaces and the possibility of
transcending that disorienting experience are central to Eve Johnson’s
exploration of the relationship between the English legends of Saint
Margaret and anchorites. Using Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology as a
starting point, Johnson explores the anchoritic experience of enclosure as
a form of disorientation. That experience could, however, be transformed
for the enclosed women through affective association with literary models
of holy femininity, Johnson argues. The thirteenth-century Middle English
Seinte Margarete offers an ‘orientating’ narrative of enclosure and entrap-
ment, followed by freedom through faith, and simultaneously provides
the female audiences of the legend with a model of inspiring, even mili-
tant, active feminine faith. Johnson explores the transgressive and liberat-
ing potential of Seinte Margarete and other early versions of the Margaret
legend for anchoritic women in particular, meditating on the possibilities
for spiritual and literary mobility, even transcendence, especially for women
in physical confinement.
The idea of spiritual transcendence is followed by that of chemical and
physical transcendence through Micah Goodrich’s exploration of gen-
dered alchemical animacies in late medieval alchemical treatises. Using
texts such as Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of Alchymy (c. 1477) and George
Ripley’s fifteenth-century Book of Quinte Essence Or The Fifth Being,
Goodrich explores how the theory and process of medieval alchemy—or
‘multiplicacioun’—genders non-human objects and agents (such as mer-
cury, stone, lead) and imbues these objects with mobile, generative possi-
bility, challenging the seeming immutability of nature’s laws. In addition
to generation, some alchemical processes also facilitate transformation: for
example, Norton’s Ordinall concludes that like-on-like substances such as
metal (‘metalle ons metalle’) can never multiply (‘multiplie’), but rather
can only be transmuted (‘transmutide’) into another nature. These diver-
gent possibilities between generation (the ‘multiplicacioun’ of two differ-
ent compounds yielding a new body) and transmutation (the
‘transmutacioun’ of two like compounds which transform into a new
27
Jack Halberstam, Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2018).
body) offers a premodern schematic of sex that is more invested in the

movement of transformation than the duplication of reproduction. These
movements, Goodrich shows, may therefore offer a perspective of the way
premodern literary science conceptualized of queer/trans inhumanisms
that challenge nature’s binary of alive/dead, male/female, mobile/immo-
bile. In this chapter, then, not only do the alchemical ‘bodies’—metals,
plants, stones, and liquids—transcend their original states, but in so doing,
they offer an unconventional way to (re)conceptualize modern formations
and categorizations of sex, gender, and animacy.
The transcendence of gendered categories is further explored in the
final chapter in this volume, Basil Arnould Price’s exploration of the func-
tion of Greenland as a ‘queer periphery’ in the Icelandic Flóamanna Saga
(c. 1290–1330). Though the Íslendingasögur (family sagas) traditionally
populate Greenland with strange beings and behaviors, this saga, Price
contends, uniquely situates Greenland as a site for ambiguous negotia-
tions of gender and sexuality, evidenced in the illegibility of the gender of
its protagonist, Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri. The narrative recounts the wid-
owed Þorgils cutting his nipples and nursing his son at his breast after the
death of his wife. Price suggests that the saga does not portray this act as
solely miraculous, an example of affective piety, but rather expresses an
‘unease’ toward the illegibility of Þorgils’s gender—what we might call
queerness. From here, his essay moves to consider the intersection between
Þorgils’s lactation and the queer possibilities of Greenland. If Greenland
offers an imagined ‘queer periphery’ for the sagas to locate nonnormative
gender and sexuality, might Flóamanna Saga imagine a queer way of
being, possible only in this environment? Put otherwise, perhaps
Flóamanna Saga invites approaching Greenland as not only a repository
for unacceptable gendered and sexual behaviors but also or alternately as
what the queer theorist Jóse Esteban Muñoz (2006) calls a ‘queer utopia’.
By creating a dialogue between Flóamanna Saga and Muñoz, Price
rethinks Þorgils’s breastfeeding as more than an exemplar of masculine
piety, but rather as a utopian gesture that critiques Iceland’s punitive dis-
courses against gender nonconformance.
Conclusion
Medieval Mobilities raises questions about the mobility of the medieval
archive: which ideas can cross the temporal boundary between the medi-
eval and the twenty-first century? What is at stake when we talk about
INTRODUCTION 17
medieval mobility and gender expressions, and what are its blind spots?
How can we learn to write in a way that confronts our anxieties about the
discipline, avoids anachronism, and still makes the work accessible to a
wide readership? Answering these questions requires the new and emer-
gent voices Medieval Mobilities amplifies, supported, and grounded by the
scholarship of those who got us here.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology : Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006.
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “The Diversity of Man in the Book of John Mandeville.”
In Eastward Bound, Travel and Travellers from 1050–1550, edited by Rosamund
Allen, 156–176. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
Bale, Anthony. Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2021.
Blud, Victoria, Diane Heath, and Einat Klafter, eds. Gender in Medieval Places,
Spaces and Thresholds. London: University of London Press, 2019.
Bourgain, Pascale. “The circulation of texts in manuscript culture.” In The
Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, edited by M. Johnston and
M. Van Dussen, 140–159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Davies, J.G. “Pilgrimage and Crusade Literature.” In Journeys Toward God:
Pilgrimage and Crusade, edited by Barbara N. Sargent-Bauer. Kalamazoo,
Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1992.
DeVun, Leah. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Eisenberg, Merle. “Executive Summaries of Medieval Studies Academic-Positions
Job Market Data from: Cycles 2015-2016/2020-2021.” The Medieval
Academy Blog (blog) (The Medieval Academy of America, October 6, 2021)
http://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/medieval-job-data-summary/.
Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place : Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives. New York : New York University Press, 2005.
Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2020.
Halberstam, Jack. Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.
Harris, Anne F. “Virtual Mobility: Landscape and Dreamscape in a Late Medieval
Allegory.” Postmedieval 4, vol. 2 (Summer 2013): 205–218.
Howard, Ronald R. Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and
Their Posterity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Hsy, Jonathan. “Mobile Language-Networks and Medieval Travel Writing.” post-

medieval 4, vol. 2 (Summer 2013): 177–191.
Jackson, Peter. “William of Rubruck in the Mongol Empire: Perception and
Prejudices.” In Medieval Ethnographies, edited by James Muldoon, Fernández-
Armest, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, 173–290. London: Routledge, 2009.
Kim, Dorothy, and M.W. Bychowski. “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism: An
Introduction.” Medieval Feminist Forum 55, no. 1 (2019): 6–41.
Kinoshita, Sharon. “Review: Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages, Edited by
M. O’Doherty and F. Schmedier.” Medieval Review 16.02.44.
Kramnick, Jonathan. “What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.” The
Chronicle of Higher Education (December 9, 2019) https://www.chronicle.
com/article/what-we-hire-in-now-english-by-the-grim-numbers/.
Kramnick, Jonathan. “The Humanities After Covid-19.” The Chronicle of
Higher Education (July 23, 2020) https://www.chronicle.com/article/
the-humanities-after-covid-19.
Legassie, Shayne. The Medieval Invention of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017.
Lochrie, Karma. “Provincializing Medieval Euorpe: Mandeville’s Cosmopolitan
Utopia.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 592–99.
Lohse, Tillman. “Pious men in foreign lands: Global-historical perspectives on the
migrations of medieval ascetics, missionaries, and pilgrims.” Viator 44, no. 2
(2013): 123–136.
O’Doherty, M., and F. Schmedier, eds. Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages:
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.
Shichtman, Martin, Laurie Finke, and Kathleen Coyne Kelly. “Introduction: ‘The
world is my home when I’m mobile’: Medieval Mobilities.” postmedieval 4, vol.
2 (Summer 2013): 125–135.
Spencer-Hall, Alicia, and Blake Gutt, eds. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in
Medieval Hagiography. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
Weikert, Katherine. Authority, Gender and Space in the Anglo-Norman World,
900–1200. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2020.
Yeager, Suzanne M. “Medieval Pilgrimage as Heterotopia: The Pilgrim as Maritime
Adventurer and Aspiring Crusader in Saewulf’s Relatio de situ Jerusalem.”
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50, no. 2 (May 2020): 233–268.
PART I
Bodies
Introducing Bodies
Roberta Magnani
That is why our medieval trans feminism may never be complete

but must begin with love and begin with perceiving the work and value
of one another. […] While the work, sacrifice, and leadership of trans
scholars are critical, discourse is necessarily collaborative.
—M. W. Bychowski and Dorothy Kim, ‘Visions of Medieval Trans
Feminism: An Introduction’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of
Gender and Sexuality 55:1 (2019), 6–41 (7; 19).
In the introduction to the 2019 special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum,

M. W. Bychowski and Dorothy Kim forge an impassioned and urgent
manifesto for the field of medieval studies (and beyond): a trans feminist
epistemology founded on an affective and embodied scholarship. Its call
for grounding historiography in compassion urges our community to step
up through activism and the mobility of collaboration, that is, as Sara
Ahmed would put it, through a personal and political commitment to ‘a
willfulness archive’. This is a ‘living and lively archive’ which is the marker
R. Magnani (*)
Swansea University, Swansea, UK
e-mail: r.magnani@swansea.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12647-5_2
22 R. MAGNANI
of a lesbian and radical feminism, demanding ‘our full involvement’ in a

‘willfulness as standing against; willfulness as creativity’.1 This intentional
living manifests itself in community-building through the creation of a
capacious queer archive which gives a voice to (hi)stories of oppression
and euphoria. Echoing Blake Gutt and Alicia Spencer-Hall, doing trans
history is an ‘ongoing project of reclamation’ of the lived experiences of
individuals and their communities who have been subjected to marginali-
sation and pernicious silencing.2
A cognate trans feminist methodology underpins the ethos of this
ground-breaking collection of the essays and the first section, ‘Bodies’, in
particular: all three essays push forward the scrutiny of medieval gender,
with a deliberate (willful) yet rare combination of courageous, robust,
uncompromising, and compassionate unpacking of existing approaches to
medieval conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. The essays and this
introduction stem from and foster an idea of scholarship as an intention-
ally collaborative process whereby arguments are generated through dia-
logue, exchange and the richness of shared expertise. This is a queer and
specifically trans mode of scholarship, as it is founded on ‘intra-actions’, to
borrow from Karen Barad’s queer ontology. According to Barad, phe-
nomena come into being through entanglements or intra-activity, as all
matters do not pre-exist relations, but emerge through them: ‘what we
commonly take to be individual entities are not separate determinately
bounded and propertied objects, but rather are (entangled “parts of”)
phenomena (material-discursive intra-actions) that extend across (what we
commonly take to be separate places and moments in) space and time.3 In
other words, scholarship as phenomenal matter can only truly emerge
from collaborations which eschew pre-scripted and therefore limiting
hermeneutics. The mobility of this methodology makes it epistemologi-
cally trans which, as ‘an adaptive and ever transitioning concept’, entails
generative processes of perpetual re-orientation.4 In Queer Phenomenology,
Ahmed describes queer historiography as ‘queer orientations’ which ‘do
not search for permanence […], but to listen to the sound of “the what”
1
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017,
pp. 222–223.
2
Blake Gutt and Alicia Spencer-Hall (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Trans and Genderqueer
Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 13.
3
Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 1:2 (2012),
25–53 (32).
4
Bychowski and Kim, ‘Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism: An Introduction’, 21.
INTRODUCING BODIES 23
that fleets’, that is, ‘bodies that have been made unreachable by the lines
of conventional genealogy’.5 The slant entanglements of intra-active col-
laborations in operation in this volume embrace the dis-orientation engen-
dered by extricating bodies from unhelpful and limiting binaries (female/
male; feminine/masculine).
Both methodologically and thematically, this first section fosters a queer
familia and forges communities of practice. Meagan Khoury starts with a
reflection on Eleanor Rykener’s elected family who facilitate her transi-
tioning. Lauren Cole and Hannah Victoria re-orient Hildegard of Bingen’s
post-1152 writings as a community-based enterprise which disentangles
the representation of medieval women from the misogynistic binary Eve/
Mary, predicated on women’s fundamental sinfulness, and recentres them
as agents of flourishing in both their maternal fecundity and virginal purity.
Finally, Sophie Sexon calls for an engaged scholarly community marked by
‘a personal and embodied praxis’ committed to ‘acts of affective listening
of the body’ in our now and in the medieval now. Twenty-three years after
Carolyn Dinshaw posited a ‘queer historical touch’ which binds commu-
nities across time and space, this section of the volume re-casts her intel-
lectual and ethical manifesto in powerful and creative ways.6 Through a
trans re-configuration of Dinshaw’s queer community, it is possible to
realise the full potential of such encounters, in all their troubling and gen-
erative transness. As Bychowski and Kim point out about the scholarship
marshalled in the Special Issue they edited, ‘[o]ur perspectives will not be
complete, our terminology may be out of date by the time the issue is
read, and yet we offer this perspective as an invitation for others to share
in the perceiving’.7 Acknowledging the situatedness of any critical stance
invites participation: it is the antidote to practices of gate-keeping which
privilege one academic mode (white, cis/straight, ableist, patriarchal). In
particular, Khoury’s metacritical article, which re-encounters Rykener
through the assessment of her court case, does not harness a revisionist
methodology which conceptualises and reifies the canon as a (patri)lineal
progression teleologically moving to enlightenment and truth, but as an
‘intra-action’, a re-orientation of scholarly scrutiny which eschews models
5
Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2006), 106–107.
6
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 3.
7
Bychowski and Kim, ‘Introduction,’ 8.
24 R. MAGNANI
of finality while courageously and uncompromisingly taking influential

pieces of criticism to task for their problematic situatedness. Similarly, in
their recent volume Trans Historical, Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov
and Anna Kłosowska adopt a cognate trans methodology while recognis-
ing the challenges of these departures from traditional critical narra-
tives and ‘the putative “newness” of trans lives and identities: ‘[i]t can be
difficult to renounce the seduction of progressive historical narratives
which imagine that gender nonconformity, or even the concept of gender
itself, is a recent development.’8
It is one of these trans historical acts of slantwise re-orientation of the
critical debate on both contemporary and medieval conceptualisations of
gender and sex in which lies one of the field-changing contributions
brought about by this section of the volume. In a bold and astute move,
Sexon advances an uncoupling of body and morphology, or a resistance to
the morphological categorisation of the body into closely gendered and
incontrovertibly readable parts. They argue instead for a movement away
(a methodology of hermeneutic mobility) from identifying the body as
object which is monolithically legible along binary lines; this results
in advocating an affective scholarship which encounters all bodies as trans
bodies. Polysemous and in constant becoming, the (trans) body demands
fluid and capacious readings. This is exemplified by the gender fluidity of
Christ’s side wound which scrambles the facile gendering of bodily frag-
ments like the vulva. Much like COVID has forced us to re-orient our
understanding of embodiment, of acts of community building, of the hap-
tic qualities of digital communication, this section promotes a re-
orientation of medieval Christian materiality.
When discussing some of the theological and philosophical underpin-
nings of the increased centrality of the incarnate holy matter in post-1100
Christianity, Caroline Walker Bynum cites Isidore’s appropriation of
Aristotelean theories of corpus (body) as materia (matter) ‘to mean
“changeable thing”’; co-terminously, natural philosophy understands
8
Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska, eds, ‘Introduction: The Benefits
of Being Trans Historical’, in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2021), pp. 1–23 (p. 11).
INTRODUCING BODIES 25
matter ‘as the locus of generation and corruption’.9 It is this mobile and
incarnate, fundamentally human, material expression of the divine that
Christians began to desire in later Middle Ages. Similarly, Cole and
Victoria argue that the feminea forma celebrated by Hildegard and her
nuns is emancipated from the dissecting and predatory male gaze which
wants to consume its parts; it is instead reclaimed by a ‘lesbian-like’ gaze
which embraces it compassionately in all its multivalent incarnations. It is
this ‘compassionate gaze’, to borrow from Sarah McNamer’s discussion of
the practices of medieval affective piety, which encapsulates the queer
touch across time and space in operation in this section of the volume.10
This trans epistemology meets the body where it is, extricated from pre-
scripted gendered and sexed narratives, and in all its human fecundity and
abjection; it allows for fissures and disjunctures, dis-orientations and slant-
wise re-directions. In these interstices it is possible to hold space for the
trans body and bask in the euphoria of its authenticity: as Bychowski and
Kim beautifully put it, ‘[w]e know you are out there. We see you and can-
not wait for what you will show us.’11
9
Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval
Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 30; 32.
10
Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 19.
11
Bychowski and Kim, ‘Introduction’, 8.
Where Do We Go from Here: Transitivity
and Journey Narratives in Eleanor Rykener
Meagan Khoury
The prostitute about whose actual practice in the trade we have the most
detail is ironically a man, John Rykener.
—Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in
Medieval England (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1996), 70
Introduction
Nineteen ninety-five was a pivotal year for queer medieval studies, but
medieval studies did not know it yet. It was the year Ruth Mazo Karras
and David Boyd discovered a curious entry in A. H. Thomas’ Calendar of
Select Plea and Memoranda of the City of London, 1381–1412.1 This tran-
scription of court records from late medieval London was mostly
1
A. H. Thomas, Calendar of Select Plea and Memoranda of the City of London 1381–1412,
vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924–1932).
M. Khoury (*)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
e-mail: meagank@stanford.edu

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12647-5_3
28 M. KHOURY
formulaic wills and debt actions, except an entry Thomas records from
1395: “Examination of two men charged with immorality, one of which
implicated several persons, male and female, in religious orders.”2 This
deceptively simple sentence gestures broadly at questions of defamation,
homosexuality, bisexuality, and clergy depravity. Karras and Boyd, intrigued
by the brief entry, sought out the original court record, and discovered
what would become a wealth of rich resources for medieval sexuality, gen-
der, and queer scholarship for the next twenty-five years.
On December 11, 1395, two men were brought before the mayor and
aldermen of the City of London: a John Britby of the county of York, and
“John” Rykener, “calling [himself] Eleanor, having been detected in
women’s clothing, who were found last Sunday night between the hours
of 8 and 9…lying by a certain stall in Soper’s Lane committing that detest-
able unmentionable and ignominious vice.”3 Britby and Rykener corrobo-
rate each other’s stories. Britby was passing “through the high road of
Cheap” when he came upon Rykener “dressed up as a woman, thinking
he was a woman, asking him as he would a woman if he could commit a
libidinous act with her.” After a financial transaction was agreed to
(although the amount is not stated in the record), the pair proceeded to
“the aforesaid stall to complete the act and were captured there during
these detestable wrongdoings by the officials and taken to prison.” At this
point in the record, Britby recedes into the background as the officials,
dazzled by Rykener’s gender transgression, proceed to question her, ask-
ing “who had taught him to exercise this vice, and for how long and in
what places with what persons, masculine or feminine.”4 Rykener describes
her initiation into femininity, aided by two women, “a certain Anna, the
whore of a former servant of Sir Thomas Blount” who taught her how to
have sex “in the manner of a woman,” and “a certain Elizabeth Bronderer,”
2
Thomas, Calendar, 228.
3
David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras. “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite
Prostitute in Fourteenth Century London,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1,
no. 4 (1995): 482.
4
I have chosen the pronouns “she/her” to refer to Eleanor Rykener in this paper. In the
testimony, Rykener insists on being called Eleanor, and while she queers her gender repeat-
edly throughout the proceedings, and amanuenstic intervention should be considered, it is
the simplest and most receptive practice to address Rykener as she wished. In line with the
most recent advances in Rykener scholarship, I join the call to reject tepid excuses of ambigu-
ity, and pay Rykener her dues as a trans woman, author of her own text, and sex worker
with agency.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: TRANSITIVITY AND JOURNEY… 29
who first dressed her in women’s clothing. Rykener then names a member
of the clergy with whom she has had sex with “as with a woman” and
describes a five-week sojourn to Oxford where she lived as a woman,
working as an embroideress. Rykener names three “unsuspecting schol-
ars” with whom she “practiced the abominable vice often.” Then it was on
to Burford in Oxfordshire, where Rykener took up employment as a tap-
ster for six weeks. During this period, she “committed the above-said
vice” with two Franciscans who gave her a gold ring, one Carmelite friar,
and six foreign men. Rykener then traveled to Beaconsfield, where she “as
a man, had sex with a certain Joan,” and “as a woman,” had sex with two
foreign Franciscans. Finally landing in London, Rykener names three
chaplains with whom she had sex “in the lanes behind St. Katherine’s
Church by the Tower of London.” Rykener fornicated “as a man” with
“many nuns,” and with many more women, single and married, “how
many [he] did not know.” The document ends abruptly with Rykener
stating she took on priests as clients more readily than any others due to
their willingness to provide better than average compensation.5
It is easy to see why Thomas recorded the case in one sentence, eliding
the homosexual overtones, and ignoring the personal voice and compli-
cated narrative of a queer protagonist. In doing so, Thomas succeeded in
the suppression of evidence of a medieval gender non-conforming person,
reflecting the conservative anxieties of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
historical scholarship. This essay offers a historiography of the extant lit-
erature on Eleanor Rykener, ranging from the document’s discovery in
1995 up through 2021. Discussion of the case evolved from a discourse
about sex and sexuality into a gender discourse into a queer discourse and
is now in conversation with trans scholarship. I will map the choice of
pronouns employed by authors to describe Rykener. By this granular
measurement alone, the radical transformation of ontological operations
within this historiography will be made evident. Furthermore, by tracking
changes in Rykener scholarship, I will reveal the changing political and
lexical landscape in the wider field of medieval studies. Finally, I will pro-
pose directions for expanding the future of Rykener scholarship.
5
All the above from Boyd and Karras, “The Interrogation,” 483.
30 M. KHOURY
Early Rykener (1995–2006)

To demonstrate clarity around the evolving debates within Rykener schol-
arship, I have divided the most significant literature into “early Rykener,”
from 1995–2006, and “later Rykener,” from 2014–2021.6 Having
brought the case to light in 1995 with a Latin transcription and an English
translation, Karras and Boyd published their own analysis the following
year. The original article, simply titled “The Interrogation of a Male
Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth Century London,” suggests an
unselfconsciousness of labeling, telegraphing medieval studies’ delayed
adoption, if not outright rejection, of trans discourses. Masculine pro-
nouns are employed. Despite the lack of salient attention to emerging
trans scholarship, the article is an imbrication of the tensions that will be
taken up in the future, including:
the construction, or lack thereof, of specific sexualities, and whether such a

sexuality was attributed to Rykener; the deployment of accusations of sod-
omy in confronting the masculinity of a celibate clergy; the relationship
between grammatical and social passivity and objectification in sexual dis-
course; and the performative nature of the medieval understanding of gen-
der and the issues of ‘passing’ that arise from it.7
Their second article advances a critique of Rykener’s speech in describ-

ing her role in sex acts “as a woman” or “as a man.” Karras and Boyd
argue Rykener’s cross-dressing and “passive,” or receptive, position in
anal sex with men reflect the medieval understanding of gender as perfor-
mative (Judith Butler is rightly invoked here).8 Furthermore, they suggest
that because Rykener, as far as the record reflects, only took money for sex
with men, her true desires remain a mystery. As I will show, this thorny
issue will continue to confound Rykener scholars for the next twenty
years, cracking open a veritable firehose of sexual semiotics.
6
While Eleanor Rykener appears in many texts on medieval sexuality as a brief mention,
this paper will confine itself to the most influential texts which have troubled the discipline’s
reception of medieval gender.
7
Boyd and Karras, “The Interrogation,” 481.
8
David Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, “Et cum muliere: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in
Fourteenth-Century London,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla
Feccaro (New York and London: Routledge: 1996): 109.
It seems a few words about medieval conceptions of sodomy, sex work,

and the law would be instructive here, as anxieties around them lie at the
heart of this case. The preservation of public order was paramount for the
courts, and that required the regulation of female sexuality, believed to be
uncontrollable for women, tempting for men, and a contamination of the
city.9 Thus, sex work, if not outlawed (even then it was still tacitly permit-
ted), was regulated and practically tolerated. To preserve the integrity of
the city, as Saint Augustine (354–430) believed, sex work was a necessary
evil to preserve heteronormative gender order and the patterns and prac-
tices which prop it up.10 His less tactful but more famous dogma was
repeated throughout the late Middle Ages: tolle cloacam, et replebis foetore
palatium; et similiter de sentina.11 Sex workers were thus made visible
through their distinctive clothing (sometimes a regulation striped hood)
and were forbidden to wear other types of garments or jewelry, reserved
for respectable ladies.12 Clothing is a theme touched upon in much of the
Rykener literature, as male-to-female cross dressing was seen as an unnat-
ural act against God: “A woman should not wear men’s clothing, nor
should a man put on a woman’s clothing, for whoever does these things is
an abomination to the Lord your God” (Deut. 25:11–12).
To be a sex worker was not a profession as much as it was a moral cat-
egory, or even a sexual identity. The work itself was not the problem.
Female promiscuity was.13 James Brundage explains, “the practical tolera-
tion of prostitution, coupled with the moral condemnation of it, was also
rooted in medieval notions about the nature of sexuality itself. The medi-
eval lawyers construed sexual intercourse as part of the natural law, a
notion which stemmed from the Roman jurists.”14 If (single) women were
not the property of one man, they were available to all men, and must be
subject to regulation by male authorities.15 Rykener successfully eluded
this. Brundage also notes that the predominant concern of the medieval
9
Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,” Signs: The
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989): 421.
10
James A. Brundage, “Prostitution in Medieval Canon Law,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 830.
11
“Remove the sewer and you will fill the palace with ordure; similarly with bilge from a
ship; remove whores from the world and you will fill it with sodomy,” Carolyn Dinshaw,
“Queer Relations,” Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 16 (1999): 108.
12
Karras, “The Regulation of Brothels,” 403.
13
Brundage, “Prostitution,” 826.
14
Ibid., 831.
15
Karras, “The Regulation of Brothels,” 425.
32 M. KHOURY
sex worker was her inaccessibility to any kind of significant social status.16
This is another accomplishment for Rykener, who effectively absconded
with two gowns (filched from a priest, no less), was paid in gold, and had
legitimate feminine legibility, which for her was a desired social visibility, if
not a significant status. Finally, because sex work was an infraction that
courts only associated with women, Rykener’s femininity was validated,
but also not given full purchase because she was not officially charged with
prostitution due to her biological masculinity.
Like sex work, sodomy was not exactly what it seemed. Medieval texts
discuss sexual intercourse as something one does to another (as in Karras’
cannily subtitled book17), with the female in the passive or receptive posi-
tion, and the male in the active, or dominant role.18 That “detestable,
unmentionable, and ignominious vice” Rykener was accused of was a sin
against nature: man ceding his privilege as the primary sexual actor, in
favor of the submissive female. Vaguely defined (is it anal sex specifically,
or just the act of topping?) as disrupting the gender order, sodomy could
be committed by both men and women.19 However, when performed by
a woman, sodomy was more tolerable in that she was merely aspirational,
reaching above her lowly station to that of the superior man. The fact that
the “unspeakable/unmentionable” is mentioned at length in Rykener’s
testimony, powered by same-sex activity, disrupted the court’s presump-
tion of static sexual attraction dictated by biological sex, troubling the
handing down of a charge for sodomy.20
Carolyn Dinshaw and Ruth Evans both situate Rykener in the socio-
cultural climate of pre-Reformation London with the undergirding of
16
Brundage, “Prostitution,” 836.
17
Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (London and
New York: Routledge, 2012.)
18
Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Lechery that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sodomy and the Vices
in Medieval England,” in The Garden of Good and Evil: The Vices and Culture in Mediaeval
Studies, ed. Richard Newhauswer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
2005), 198.
19
Karma Lochrie. Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999): 191.
20
Tom Linkinen. Same Sex Sexuality in Later Medieval English Culture (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2015): 105.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.21 Dinshaw, most frequently cited after Karras

on the subject, often adopts “he/she” pronouns for Rykener, suggesting
a burgeoning awareness in medieval scholarship of the issues (like naming,
pronouns, subjectivity) critical to writing about trans identity.22 In just
four years, which in academic literature is at light speed, Dinshaw desig-
nates Rykener “John/Eleanor,” a naming device which conditionally rec-
ognizes her intentional feminized subjectivity. Names are not arbitrary
here, as Dinshaw explains:
‘Eleanor,’ the name John Rykener apparently chose to go by, plays on his
own alienness, his own otherness; and ‘Rykener’ seems particularly appro-
priate for a prostitute (who reckons—counts—money) telling (reckoning—
recounting, narrating) a story … so John/Eleanor Rykener’s existence has
something of a textual nature.23
Implicit linguistic distinctions manifest not only in the literature, but in

the original Latin of the document. While the proceedings took place in
English, the scribe recorded in Latin, choosing mostly indeterminate pro-
nouns. The court’s inability to determine Rykener’s gender seems to have
resulted in the lack of a verdict (or an unrecorded verdict) —an idea to
which I will return shortly.
Dinshaw’s focus expands beyond Rykener to briefly address other key
players, like John Britby. Although the testimonies of Rykener and Britby
agree to the events of the night of December 11, each may have been
subtly crafting their narrative to avoid punishment. Britby’s “dogged rep-
etition of ‘mulier’ in the record,” an insistence on his expectation of a
female sex worker, could point to his interest in avoiding a charge of sod-
omy.24 In fact, this aspect of his testimony serves to validate Rykener’s
femininity. Rykener, on the other hand, recounts she had sex “as a man”
with single women, married women, and nuns, which would also serve to
21
The limits of this essay cannot afford exposition on Rykener’s literary comparisons to
Chaucer’s Pardoner, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Alan of Lille, Thomas Favent’s Historia
Mirabilis Parliamenti, Roman de Silence, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For the
literary comparisons, see: Boyd and Karras “Et cum muliere,” 107; Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting
Medieval: Sexualitites and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1999); and Ruth Evans, “The Production of Space in Chaucer’s London,”
in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D.S. Brewster, 2006), 41–56.
22
Dinshaw, Getting Medieval.
23
Ibid., 103.
24
Ibid., 109.
34 M. KHOURY
disrupt the court’s understanding of Rykener’s gender and help her elude
a sodomy charge. Dinshaw finally points to “a certain Anna” and “a cer-
tain Elizabeth,” the women who initiated Rykener into the cult of femi-
ninity. As a sex worker and procuress, respectively, the women knew how
to capitalize on the cultivation of gender as performance. “Women, sub-
jected by gender so obviously in the Lollard Eleventh Conclusion,”
Dinshaw writes, “are the ones in Rykener’s narrative who exploit the
dominance of gender expectations.”25 In 1395, the same year of Rykener’s
arrest, a religious sect known as the Lollards garnered attention for their
commitment to criminalizing sex. Led by John Wycliffe, Lollards preached
that sex was only for procreation within marriage. Where their Eleventh
Conclusion targeted women’s sexuality, the Twelfth Conclusion turned its
ammunition against what they saw as rampant sodomy within the Church
(the Church, in turn, accused the Lollards of sodomy).26 This religio-
cultural climate explains why Rykener’s clerical clients offered lucrative
compensation for her discretion.27
Ruth Evans links Rykener’s embodiment to that of Chaucer’s corporeal
London, returning to the use of masculine pronouns. Evans argues
Rykener disordered the city by changing jobs repeatedly, misrepresenting
herself professionally. “He embodies the ‘absolute evil’ that Plato’s healthy
city cannot tolerate: ‘that two things can be in one, two functions in the
same place, two qualities in one and the same being’.”28 In this way, she
reads Rykener as an “imitator” whose crime is not just gender transgres-
sion, but through a lack of professional focus, a disruption of the pre-
sumed civic order, manifesting in her position as an outsider to the city. In
usurping the work of another—a woman—Rykener, Evans argues, is an
imitator of women, and thusly a false trader.29 Both Karras and Kadin
Henningsen will later contest this reading, explaining that women were
known to shift professions frequently, as well as take on jobs typically
reserved for men, while Jeremy Goldberg will concur with the identifica-
tion of Rykener as a “dishonest trader” because it will serve his reading of
the case as political satire.
25
Ibid., 111.
26
Patrick J. Hornbeck, “Theologies of Sexuality in English ‘Lollardy’,” The Journal of
Ecclesiastical History 60, no. 1 (2009): 30.
27
Isaac Bershady, “Sexual Deviancy and Deviant Sexuality in Medieval England,” Primary
Source 5, no. 1 (2014): 15.
28
Evans, “The Production of Space,” 49.
29
Ibid., 50.
Judith Bennett completes this overview of “early Rykener” scholarship.

Writing in 2003 and following Dinshaw with mostly “he/she” pronouns,
Bennett explored Rykener through the intersection of gendered class and
labor. Women’s work is a handy theme for the Rykener case, as she lived
and worked as a female embroideress and tapster, in addition to her self-
employment as a sex worker: all occupations reinforcing Rykener’s gender
expression. Bennett points to Goldberg’s suggestion that the population
dip at the end of the fourteenth century is due in part to the increase of
alternative options for women, outside of marriage and the convent.30
More jobs with higher paying wages were suddenly available, creating an
environment of economic opportunity. However, Bennett argues a
“change without transformation” theory: that while employment oppor-
tunities opened up for women (working from home; the ability to pursue
new occupations; increased guild access), “compared to men’s work,
women’s work remained characteristically low-skilled, low-status, and
poorly remunerated (as it still is today).”31 What did this mean for Rykener?
Bennett maps Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” onto her presump-
tions about Rykener’s motivations:
The world of women held its allure, so much so that Rykener kept a female
persona even when it restricted her/his legitimate employments to embroi-
dery and tippling. Like the mayor and aldermen of late fourteenth-century
London, we might be surprised that Rykener would choose social depen-
dence, poorly paid work and sexual passivity. But perhaps Rykener knew
something about women’s worlds that the historical record still obscures. In
bouncing back and forth between two genders, Rykener struck his own
patriarchal bargain … he experienced life as both a man and a woman.32
The first ten years after Rykener’s testimony came to light agitated
questions about the medieval reception of gender and sexuality through
the lenses of popular literature, the city, and women’s work. The next fif-
teen years of scholarship on the case will expand that dialogue, and gesture
toward a contemporaneous and productive reception of Rykener’s gender
traversing.
30
P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life-Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York
and Yorkshire c. 1300– 1520 (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1992).
31
Judith Bennett, “England: Women and Gender,” in A Companion to Britain in the Later
Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 89, 94.
32
Bennett, “England: Women,” 100–101.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CONSTITUTION OF BELGIUM:
The working of its' electoral provisions.
See (in this volume)

BELGIUM: A. D. 1894-1895; and 1899-1900.
CONSTITUTION OF CUBA:
The grant of autonomous government by Spain in 1897.

CUBA: A. D. 1897 (NOVEMBER);
and 1897-1898 (NOVEMBER-FEBRUARY).
CONSTITUTION OF CUBA:
Outline of the draft reported to the Convention of 1900-1901.

CUBA: A. D. 1901 (JANUARY).
CONSTITUTION OF DELAWARE, New.

DELAWARE: A. D. 1897.
CONSTITUTION OF IDAHO:
Adoption of Woman Suffrage.

IDAHO: A. D. 1896.
CONSTITUTION OF LOUISIANA:
Its discriminating educational qualification.

LOUISIANA: A. D. 1898.
CONSTITUTION OF MEXICO: Amendments.
The text of the constitution of Mexico, as published in 1891,

will be found in volume 1 [page 558] of this work, under the
same heading as above. In 1896, the Constitution received two
amendments promulgated by decrees published in the "Diario
Official" on the 24th of April and the 1st of May in that
year. Translations of these decrees were transmitted to the
State Department at Washington by the United States Minister
to Mexico and published in U. S. Consular Reports, July, 1896,
from which source they are copied below. That of April 24 was
as follows:
The Congress of the United Mexican States, in the exercise of

the power which article 127 of the federal constitution
concedes to it, and with the previous approbation of the
majority of the legislatures of the States, declares articles
79, 80, 82, and 83 of the constitution to be amended and an
addition to article 72 of the same, in the following tenor:
ARTICLE. 72. Congress has power:
XXXI. To appoint, both houses of Congress being assembled for

such purpose, a President of the Republic, either with the
character of substitute or with that of ad interim, to act in
the absolute or temporary defaults of the constitutional
President. Likewise, to replace in the respective cases and in
equal form the substitute as well as the ad interim, if these
in their turn should default.
XXXII. To qualify and to decide upon the petition for leave of

absence that the President of the Republic may make. It is the
exclusive faculty of the House of Deputies—II. To qualify and
decide upon the resignations of the President of the Republic
and of the magistrates of the supreme court of justice.
{165}
ARTICLE 79.
I. In the absolute defaults of the President, excepting that

arising from resignation, and in the temporary defaults,
excepting that proceeding from permission, the Secretary of
Foreign Relations, and in case there be none or if there
exists an impediment, the Secretary of Government shall take
immediate charge of the Executive power.
II. The Congress of the union shall assemble in an

extraordinary session the following day, in the Chamber of
Deputies, more than half of the total number of members of
both houses being present, the officers of the House of
Deputies acting. If no session can be had on account of no
quorum or for other cause, those present shall compel, from
day unto day, the presence of the absentees, in accordance
with the law, so as to hold the session as soon as possible.
III. In this session, the substitute President shall be

elected by the absolute majority of those present, and in a
nominal and public vote, without any proposition being
discussed therein nor anything else done but to take in the
votes, publish them, and make a close examination and publish
the name of the one elected.
IV. If no one of the candidates should have received the

absolute majority of the votes, the election shall be repeated
as to the two who had the greater number of votes, and the one
receiving the majority will be elected. If the competitors
should have received an equal number of votes, and on a
repetition of the election an equal result shall be obtained,
then the drawing of lots shall decide the one who must be
elected.
V. If there be an equality of votes for more than two

candidates, the election as to which of these shall be made,
but if at tho same time there is another candidate who may
have obtained a majority of votes, he shall be considered as
first competitor, and the second shall be chosen by votes out
of the first mentioned.
VI. If Congress be not in session, it shall meet, without the

necessity of a convocation, on the fourteenth day following
that of the default, under the direction of the board of
permanent commission which may be in duty, and shall proceed
as already stated.
VII. In case of absolute default caused by the renouncement of

the President, Congress shall convene in the form set forth
for the appointment of the substitute, and the resignation
shall not take effect until the appointment of the substitute
and of the legal protest by him.
VIII. In relation to temporary defaults, from whatever cause,

Congress shall appoint an ad interim President, observing for
this purpose the same procedure as prescribed for the cases of
absolute default. Should the President ask for leave of absence,
he will, at the time of so doing, propose the citizen who must
take his place; the permission being granted, it will not take
effect until the ad interim (president) shall have protested,
it being within the President's faculty to make use or not of
said leave, or to lessen its duration. The ad interim shall
only exercise the functions during the time of temporary
default. The petition for permission shall be addressed to the
House of Deputies, who shall at once deliver it to the proper
commission for its perusal, at the same time summoning the
Senate for an extraordinary session of Congress, before which
the commission shall render its decision. The proposition with
which the decision may end, if favorable, shall comprise in a
decree of a sole article the granting of the permission and
the approval of the proposition, which shall be decided upon
only by one ballot.
IX. If, on the day appointed by the constitution, the people's
President-elect shall not enter into the discharge of his
office, Congress shall at once appoint an ad interim
President. If the cause of the impediment be transitory, the
ad interim shall cease in the Presidential functions when said
cause ceases and the President-elect enters into the discharge
of his functions. But, should the cause be of that kind that
produces absolute impossibility, so that the President-elect
cannot enter into the exercise of power during the four years,
Congress, after appointing the ad interim President, shall,
without delay, convoke the extraordinary elections. The ad
interim President shall cease in his functions as soon as the
new President-elect protests, and this shall complete the
constitutional period. Should the impediment arise from the
fact that the election be not made or published on the 1st of
December, a President ad interim shall also be appointed, who
will discharge the Presidential duties until those requisites
are complied with and the President-elect takes due protest.
X. The defaults of the substitute President and those of the

ad interim shall also be remedied in the manner prescribed,
except in regard to the second, in the case when the
constitutional President, who, having temporarily separated
himself, may again assume the exercise of his duties.
ARTICLE 80.
Should the default of the President be absolute, the
substitute appointed by Congress shall terminate the
constitutional period.
ARTICLE 82.
The President, upon taking possession of his office, shall
swear before Congress under the following formula:
"I protest to perform loyally and patriotically the functions

of President of the United Mexican States; to keep and cause
to be kept, without any reserve, the constitution of 1857,
with all its additions and reforms, the laws of reform, and
all those laws emanating therefrom, watching everything for
the good and prosperity of the union." The Secretary of
Department, who may take provisional charge of the Executive
power, in its case, is exempted from this requisite.
The decree of May 1, 1896, was as follows:
The Congress of the Union has decreed the following: The

General Congress of the United Mexican States, in conformity
with the provisions of article 127 of the federal
constitution, and with the previous approbation of the State
legislatures, declares articles 111 and 124 of said
constitution amended and an addition made to same in the
following terms:
First.
Section III. of article 111 of the federal constitution is
amended, and an addition made to the said article in the
following terms: The States shall not—
III. Coin money, issue paper money, stamps, or stamped paper.
IV. Obstruct the transit of persons or goods crossing its

territory.
V. Prohibit or molest, either directly or indirectly, the

entrance or exit, to or from its territory, of national or
foreign merchandise.
{166}
VI. Obstruct the circulation or consumption of national or

foreign goods by means of imposts or taxes that may be exacted
through local custom-houses, by requiring the inspection or
registration of packages, or by requiring the documentation to
accompany the merchandise.
VII. Decree or maintain in force laws or fiscal decrees which
may cause differences of taxes or requisites, by reason of the
source of national or foreign merchandise, whether these
differences be established in regard to a like production in
that locality or on account of like production from different
sources.
Second.
Article 124 of the federal constitution is amended in the
following terms:
ARTICLE 124.
It is the exclusive faculty of the federation to obstruct
merchandise, imported or exported, or which passes in transit
through the national territory, likewise to regulate at all
times, and even to prohibit for reasons of policy and
security, the circulation within the Republic of all
merchandise from whatever source; but the said federation
cannot establish or decree in the district or federal
territories the taxes and laws expressed in Sections VI. and
V. of Article 111.
Transitory article.
These amendments and additions shall take effect on the 1st of
July, 1896.
CONSTITUTION OF MINNESOTA: Amendments.

MINNESOTA: A. D. 1896.
CONSTITUTION OF MISSISSIPPI: Amendment.

MISSISSIPPI: A. D. 1890-1892.
CONSTITUTION OF NEW JERSEY: Proposed Amendments.

NEW JERSEY: A. D. 1897.
CONSTITUTION OF NEW YORK.
The constitution of the State of New York, as revised by the

Convention of 1894 (see, in volume 4, NEW YORK: A. D. 1894)
[transcriber's note: volume 3, page 2350], was submitted to
the people at the election in November that year and adopted.
The important features of the revision were set forth in an
address by the Convention to the people, as follows:
"We seek to separate, in the larger cities, municipal

elections from State and national elections to the end that
the business affairs of our great municipal corporations may
be managed upon their own merits, uncontrolled by national and
State politics. … We have provided further safeguards against
abuses in legislative procedure, by requiring that all bills
shall be printed in their final form at least three days
before their passage, prohibiting riders on appropriation
bills, providing for notice to municipal authorities before
special acts relating to the larger cities can take effect,
prohibiting the issue of passes by railroad, telegraph and
telephone companies to public officers, enlarging the express
constitutional powers of the President of the Senate. … We
have extended the prohibition against lotteries so as to
include all pool-selling, book-making and other forms of
gambling. … We have sought to throw greater safeguards around
the elective franchise by prescribing a period of ninety
instead of ten days of citizenship before that right can be
exercised, so that naturalization may be taken out of the
hands of campaign committees and removed from the period
immediately before election. … We have modified the language
relating to election so that if any mechanical device for
recording and counting votes is so perfected as to be superior
to the present system, the Legislature may make trial of it. We
have established in the Constitution the well-tried and
satisfactory system of registration of votes, forbidding,
however, any requirement of personal attendance on the first
day of registration in the thinly-settled regions outside of
the cities and large villages, where voters would have long
distances to travel to the place of registration, and we have
provided for securing an honest and fair election by requiring
that on all election boards election officers shall equally
represent the two principal political parties of the State. We
have provided for a new appointment of Senate and Assembly
districts. … Attack has been made upon two rules laid down in
the proposed measure for the guidance of the Legislature in
future apportionments. One of these is the rule that no county
shall have more than three Senators unless it shall have a full
ratio for each Senator, although smaller counties may receive
a Senator or an additional Senator on a major fraction of a
ratio. … The other rule attacked is that no one county shall
have more than one-third of all the Senators, and that New
York and Kings county together shall not have more than
one-half of all the Senators. … We have declared in the
Constitution the principle of civil service reform, that
appointments and promotions are to be based upon merit and
ascertained so far as practicable by competitive examination.
We have sought by this to secure not merely the advantage
derived from declaring the principle, but the practical
benefit of its extension to the State prisons, canals and
other public works of the State, to which, under the existing
Constitution, the court of last resort has decided that civil
service rules cannot be applied. … We have prohibited the
contract system of convict labor. … We have authorized the
Legislature to provide for the improvement of the canals,
without, however, borrowing money for that purpose unless the
people expressly authorize it. … We have required the
Legislature to provide for free public schools, in which all
the children of the State may be educated, and we have
prohibited absolutely the use of public money in aid of
sectarian schools. … We have so amended the present
Constitution as to provide for a naval as well as a land force
of militia. … In order to allow every voter to exercise a
choice in voting on some of the important proposed amendments,
we have provided that the Revised Constitution shall be
submitted to the people in three parts, viz.:
1. That making an apportionment of Senators and members of the

Assembly.
2. That pertaining to the improvements of the canals.
3. All the remainder of the proposed amendments as a whole."
Journal of the Constitutional Convention,

State of New York, 1894, pages 839-846.
CONSTITUTION OF NORTH CAROLINA:

Amendment qualifying the suffrage.

NORTH CAROLINA: A. D. 1900.
{167}
--CONSTITUTION (GRONDWET) OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN

REPUBLIC.: Start--
The following are the Articles of main importance in the

Grondwet or Constitution of the South African Republic:
ARTICLE 1.
This State shall bear the name of the South African Republic.
ARTICLE 2.
The form of government of this State shall be that of a
republic.
ARTICLE 3.
It desires to be recognized and respected by the civilized
world as an independent and free people.
ARTICLE 4.
The people seek for no extension of territory, and desire it
only in accordance with just principles, when the interest of
the Republic makes such extension desirable.
ARTICLE 5.
The people desire to retain and maintain their territory in
South Africa unimpaired. The boundaries thereof are fixed by
proclamation.
ARTICLE 6.
Its territory is open for every foreigner who obeys the laws
of this Republic. All who are within the territory of this
Republic have equal claims to protection of person and
property.
ARTICLE 7.
The land or farms situate in this territory which have not yet
been given out, are declared to be the property of the State.
ARTICLE 8.
The people claim the utmost social freedom, and expect the
result from the maintenance of their religious belief, from
the observance of their obligations, from submission to law,
order and right, and the maintenance of the same. The people
permit the spread of the Gospel among the heathen under fixed
precautions against deceit or misleading.
ARTICLE 9.
The people will not allow any equalization of the coloured
inhabitants with the white.
ARTICLE 10.
The people will not suffer any slave trade or slavery in this
Republic.
ARTICLE 11.
The people reserve to themselves the protection and defence of
the independence and inviolability of the State, subject to
the laws.
ARTICLE 12.
The people entrust the legislation to a Volksraad—the highest
authority in the land—consisting of representatives or
deputies of the people, chosen by the enfranchised burghers;
but with the reservation that a period of three months shall
be left to the people to enable them if they so wish to
communicate to the Volksraad their verdict on a proposed law;
except those laws which can suffer no delay.
ARTICLE 13.
The people charge the President with the task of proposing and
executing the laws; he also brings before the Volksraad the
appointments of all civil servants for ratification.
ARTICLE 14.
The people entrust the maintenance of order to the military
force, the police, and other persons appointed by the law for
that purpose.
ARTICLE 15.
The people place the judicial power in the hands of a Supreme
Court, Circuit Court, Landrosts, Juries, and such other
persons as shall be entrusted with judicial powers, and leave
all these free to discharge their function according to their
judgment and consciences, according to the laws of the land.
ARTICLE 16.
The people shall receive from the Volksraad an estimate of the
general income and expenses of the State, and learn therefrom
how much every man's taxes shall amount to.
ARTICLE 17.
Potchefstrom, situated on the Mooi River, shall be the capital
of the Republic, and Pretoria the seat of Government.
ARTICLE 18.
All services rendered on behalf of the public are remunerated
by the public.
ARTICLE 19.
Freedom of the press is granted provided the printer and
publisher remain responsible for all the documents which
contain defamation, insult, or attacks against anyone's
character.
ARTICLE 20.
The people shall only appoint as representatives in the
Volksraad those who are members of a Protestant Church.
ARTICLE 21.
The people desire the growth, prosperity, and welfare of the
State, and with this view provision for suitable school
teachers.
ARTICLE 22.
Providing also that in time of peace precautionary measures
are taken to enable the State to wage or withstand a war.
ARTICLE 23.
In case of a hostile attack from outside, everyone, without
distinction, shall be held bound to lend his assistance on the
promulgation of martial law. …
ARTICLE 26.
The Volksraad shall be the highest authority of the country,
and the legislative power.
ARTICLE 27.
No civil servants are to be representatives of the people.
ARTICLE 28.
The Volksraad shall consist of at least twelve members, who
must possess the following qualifications:-They must have
attained the age of thirty years, and be born in the Republic,
or have for fifteen consecutive years been burghers entitled
to vote, be members of a Protestant Church, reside, and
possess immovable property, in the Republic. No persons of
notoriously bad character, or who have had a dishonouring
sentence pronounced against them, and no uncertified or
unrehabilitated insolvents shall be eligible. They may not be
related to each other in the relationship of father and son or
stepson. No coloured persons or bastards shall be admitted
into our Assemblies. In like manner no military officer or
official of the State, who draws a fixed annual or monthly
salary, shall be eligible as member of the Volksraad.
ARTICLE 29.
The members of the Volksraad are elected by a majority of
votes from among the electors of each district. No one shall
be considered as elected who has not obtained at least sixty
votes. Everyone who is born in the country and has attained
the age of twenty-one years, or has become naturalized, shall
be a burgher qualified to vote. The members of the Volksraad
are elected for the period of four years. … [The above
provisions of the Constitution, relating to the Volksraad and
the representation of the people, were modified by the
following among other provisions of an Act of the Volksraad
passed in 1891:
ARTICLE 1.
The legislative power shall rest with a representation of the
people, which shall consist of a First Volksraad and a Second
Volksraad.
{168}
ARTICLE 2.
The First Volksraad shall be the highest authority in the
State, just as the Volksraad was before this law came into
operation. The First Volksraad shall be the body named the
Volksraad until this law came into operation. From the period
of this law coming into operation, the name of that body shall
be altered from the Volksraad to the First Volksraad. The
persons forming that body as members shall, however, remain
the same, only they shall, from the said period, be named
members of the First Volksraad instead of members of the
Volksraad. All laws and resolutions having reference to the
Volksraad and the members thereof shall remain in force and
apply to the First Volksraad and the members thereof, except
in so far as a change is or shall be made by this and later
laws. …
ARTICLE 4.
The number of the members of the Second Volksraad shall be the
same as of the First Volksraad. This number shall be fixed
later by the First Volksraad for both Volksraads. …
ARTICLE 9.
The members of the First Volksraad are chosen by those
enfranchised burghers who have obtained the burgher right,
either before this law came into operation, or thereafter by
birth, and have reached the age of sixteen years. The
franchise for the First Volksraad can besides also be obtained
by those who have during ten years been eligible for the
Second Volksraad, by resolution of the First Volksraad, and
according to rules to be fixed later by law.
ARTICLE 10.
The members of the Second Volksraad are chosen by all
enfranchised burghers who have reached the age of sixteen
years. …
ARTICLE 27.
The Second Volksraad shall have the power to pass further
regulations on the following subjects as is necessary, either
by law or resolution:
(1) The department of mines.
(2) The making and support of wagon and post roads.
(3) The postal department.
(4) The department of telegraphs and telephones.
(5) The protection of inventions, samples and trademarks.
(6) The protection of the right of the author.
(7) The exploitation and support of the woods and salt-pans.
(8) The prevention and coping with contagious diseases.
(9) The condition, the rights, and obligations of companies.
(10) Insolvency.
(11) Civil procedure.
(12) Criminal procedure.
(13) Such other subjects as the First Volksraad shall decide
later by law or resolution, or the First Volksraad shall
specially refer to the Second Volksraad.
ARTICLE 28.
All laws or resolutions accepted by the Second Volksraad are
as soon as possible, that is to say at the outside within
forty-eight hours, communicated both to the First Volksraad
and to the President.
ARTICLE 29.
The President has the right, when he has received notice from
the Second Volksraad of the adoption of a law or a resolution,
to bring that law or resolution before the First Volksraad for
consideration within fourteen days after the receipt of such
notice. The President is in any case bound, after the receipt
of such a notice, to communicate it to the First Volksraad
within the said time.
ARTICLE 30.
If the President has not brought the law or resolution as
communicated before the First Volksraad for consideration, and
the First Volksraad has not on its own part thought it
necessary to take said law or resolution into consideration,
the President shall, unless with the advice and consent of the
Executive Council he thinks it undesirable in the interests of
the State, be bound to have that law or resolution published
in the first succeeding Volksraad, unless within the said
fourteen days the First Volksraad may be adjourned, in which
case the publication in the "Stasts Courant" shall take place
after the lapse of eight days from the commencement of the
first succeeding session of the First Volksraad.
ARTICLE 31.
The law or resolution adopted by the Second Volksraad shall
have no force, unless published by the President in the
"Staats Courant."
ARTICLE 43.
The President shall bring forward for discussion the proposals
for laws which have come in before the Volksraad, whether the
latter have been made known to the public three months before
the commencement of the session, or whether the same have come
in during the session of the Volksraad.
ARTICLE 44.
When the notices of laws and Government notices to the public
have not been given in time, the President shall examine with
whom the blame of that delay lies. A Landrost found guilty
hereof shall have a fine of Rds. 50 inflicted and a
Field-Cornet or lesser official of Rds. 25. …
ARTICLE 56.
The executive power resides in the State President, who is
responsible to the Volksraad. He is chosen by a majority of
the burghers entitled to vote, and for the term of five years.
He is eligible for reelection. He must have attained the age of
thirty years, and need not be a burgher of the State at the
time of his nomination, and must be a member of a Protestant
Church, and have no dishonouring sentence pronounced against
him. [By a subsequent law the President must be chosen from
among the burghers.]
ARTICLE 57.
The President is the first or highest official of the State.
All civil servants are subordinate to him; such, however, as
are charged with exercise of the judicial power are left
altogether free and independent in its exercise.
ARTICLE 58.
As long as the President holds his position as such he shall
fill no other, nor shall he discharge any ecclesiastical
office, nor carry on any business. The President cannot go
outside the boundaries of the State without consent of the
Volksraad. However, the Executive Council shall have the power
to grant him leave to go outside the boundaries of the State
upon private affairs in cases of necessity. …
ARTICLE 60.
The President shall be discharged from his post by the
Volksraad after conviction of misconduct, embezzlement of
public property, treachery, or other serious crimes, and be
treated further according to the laws.
ARTICLE 61.
If in consequence of transgression of the Constitution or
other public misdemeanors the Volksraad resolve that the
President shall be brought to trial, he shall be tried before
a special court composed of the members of the High Court, the
President and another member of the Volksraad, while the State
Attorney acts as Public Prosecutor. The accused shall be
allowed to secure assistance of a lawyer at his choice.
ARTICLE 62.
The President is charged with the proposing of laws to the
Volksraad, whether his own proposals or others which have come
in to him from the people; he must make these proposals known
to the public by means of the "Staats Courant" three months
before presenting them to the Volksraad, together with all
such other documents as are judged useful and necessary by
him.
{169}
ARTICLE 63.
All proposals for a law sent in to the President shall, before
they are published, be judged by the President and Executive
Council as to whether publication is necessary or not.
ARTICLE 64.
The President submits the proposals for laws to the Volksraad,
and charges the official to whose department they belong first
and foremost, with their explanation and defence.
ARTICLE 65.
As soon as the President has received the notice of the
Volksraad that the proposed law is adopted, he shall have that
law published within two months, and after the lapse of a
month, to be reckoned from the publication, he shall take
measures for the execution of the same.
ARTICLE 66.
Proclamation of martial law, as intended in Article 23, shall
only be made by the President with the assent of the members
of the Executive Council. …
ARTICLE 67.
The President, with advice of the Executive Council, declares
war and peace, with reference to Article 66 of the
Constitution; the Government having first, if possible,
summoned the Volksraad before the declaration of war. Treaties
of peace require the ratification of the Volksraad, which is
summoned as soon as possible for that purpose. …
ARTICLE 70.
The President shall submit, yearly, at the opening of the
Volksraad, estimates of general outgoings and income, and
therein indicate how to cover the deficit or apply the
surplus.
ARTICLE 71.
He shall also give a report during that session of that
Volksraad, of his actions during the past year, of the
condition of the Republic and everything that concerns its
general interest. …
ARTICLE 75.
The President and one member of the Executive Council shall,
if possible, visit the towns and villages of the Republic
where Landrost's officers are, once in the year; he shall
examine the state of those offices, inquire into the conduct
of the officials, and on these circuits give the inhabitants
during their stay an opportunity to bring before him anything
they are interested in. …
ARTICLE 82.
The President exercises his power along with the Executive
Council. An Executive Council shall be joined to the
President, consisting of the Commandant-General, two
enfranchised burghers, a Secretary, and a Notekeeper
(notulenhouder), who shall have an equal vote, and bear the
title of members of the Executive Council. The Superintendent
of Native Affairs and the Notekeeper shall be ex-officio
members of the Executive Council. The President and members of
the Executive Council shall have the right to sit, but not to
vote, in the Volksraad. The President is allowed, when

(Download PDF) Medieval Mobilities Gendered Bodies Spaces and Movements Basil Arnould Price Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

(Download PDF) Medieval Mobilities Gendered Bodies Spaces and Movements Basil Arnould Price Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Download PDF) Medieval Mobilities Gendered Bodies Spaces and Movements Basil Arnould Price Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies,

Spaces, and Movements Basil Arnould

Subtle Bodies (PsyCop Book 13) Jordan Castillo Price

Universities as Transformative Social Spaces:

Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist

Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland:

Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence

Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements – Ebook PDF

New Religious Movements and Comparative Religion Hammer

Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of

ISSN 2945-5936 ISSN 2945-5944 (electronic)

Cover illustration: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo

Troubling Mobilities: Transcendence167

Jane Bonsall University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary

“Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now”:

Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression

Fig. 2 © British Library Board. Detail of a miniature of St Margaret in

Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies

Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s

Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall, and Meagan Khoury

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

exploratory voyages of men like John Mandeville,5 William of Rubruck,6

allow us to see more and more—is the result of mobility.”10 Therefore, we

fields.14 A mobile methodology is unsurprisingly necessary for a study of

givenness of any body to which it is applied.”16 We have followed this

relationship between gender and movement through spaces (whether

Why Medieval Mobilities Now?

medieval studies, accelerated by the impact of the pandemic.25 The

peripheries of the premodern world, ranging in their focus on Western

of conversations held over Zoom (a methodological intervention we may

Part II: Spaces

transformative interdependence of bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Her

Part III: Transcendence

contention that ‘trans’ is another way of knowing.27 This dialogue, and

body) offers a premodern schematic of sex that is more invested in the

Hsy, Jonathan. “Mobile Language-Networks and Medieval Travel Writing.” post-

That is why our medieval trans feminism may never be complete

In the introduction to the 2019 special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

of a lesbian and radical feminism, demanding ‘our full involvement’ in a

of finality while courageously and uncompromisingly taking influential

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Early Rykener (1995–2006)

the construction, or lack thereof, of specific sexualities, and whether such a

Their second article advances a critique of Rykener’s speech in describ-

It seems a few words about medieval conceptions of sodomy, sex work,

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.21 Dinshaw, most frequently cited after Karras

Implicit linguistic distinctions manifest not only in the literature, but in

Judith Bennett completes this overview of “early Rykener” scholarship.

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

CONSTITUTION OF DELAWARE, New.

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

The text of the constitution of Mexico, as published in 1891,

Troubling Mobilities: Transcendence167