This post introduces Aylin Malcolm’s recently published Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment article, “Out of the Woods: The Nature of Gender in Le Roman de Silence.”
My work on medieval environments often requires me to think across long timescales—to consider how the long history of ecological transformation in the West has led to the current moment of crisis. Studies of medieval gender often have a similar activist bent. The emerging field of medieval trans studies has uncovered a range of gender variant figures across literary and legal records from this period.1 Notably, medieval texts do not necessarily condemn these figures; in fact, some associate gender variance with heroism or sainthood. As the editors of an important collection on gender-variant saints have argued, medieval records challenge the idea that such identities are a “modern” phenomenon and “offer historically grounded refutation of theological transphobia.”2
To be sure, trans approaches do not require us to identify historical people as trans in a modern sense; they can simply provide frameworks for analysis. In fact, premodern texts often invite us to recognize both similarity and difference in the past. Thus on one hand, medieval records can give queer and trans people today an expanded sense of historical community. And on the other, the fact that medieval ideas of gender and sexuality—from “hermaphrodite” to “virgin”—don’t perfectly map onto modern ones can broaden our sense of human gender and sexual diversity.3
One major text for this movement is the Roman de Silence, a thirteenth-century French poem about a knight who is initially assigned female at birth but raised as a boy. As an adolescent, the eponymous Silence negotiates their identity in relation to a restrictive gender binary. Though it is convoluted, problematic, and frequently antisemitic, Silence is somewhat inevitable in medieval trans studies. Less frequently discussed, however, are the impacts of environmental factors on Silence’s body and identity. For example, the tale consistently links their sun-darkened skin with masculinity. Thus, the steward tasked with Silence’s education:
took them through woods and streams,
which were plentiful in the countryside.
He took them out often in the scorching heat
because he wanted to make Silence more of a man.4
This lifestyle produces changes in Silence’s body – darker skin, rougher arms – that the text explicitly genders as masculine.5
Why does enduring the heat make Silence “more of a man”? For an answer, I turned to medieval medicine, which attributed aspects of a person’s character to the movements of materials through their body. The humoral frameworks derived from Galen and Hippocrates held that each person’s body was shaped by a unique mixture of hot, cold, wet, and dry fluids. Shifts in the balance of these fluids, known as “humours,” produced diseases and behavioural changes. Moreover, while men were thought to have hotter and drier bodies than women, gender was often imagined as a spectrum along which someone could move by ingesting or otherwise interacting with substances that altered their constitution. So, when Silence rides around in the scorching hot woods, they are not only acting like a man, but also actively masculinizing their body and habits.
As a process both organic and technological, grafting reflects modern theories of gender transition as a creative, technical process of self-shaping.
The resulting article is an initial foray into the relationships between gender and environment in Silence. By tracking changes in Silence’s skin tone, I show how the poem reconfigures typical medieval associations among epidermal whiteness, femininity, and nobility. I also examine the text’s account of a meeting between Silence and Merlin, a figure who destabilizes the human/animal boundary. Merlin compares Silence’s situation to a grafted plant, which I read as signifying both interspecies collaboration and trans thriving. As a process both organic and technological, grafting reflects modern theories of gender transition as a creative, technical process of self-shaping.
Silence’s system of whiteness, gender, class, and other-than-human nature highlights the importance of intersectional approaches in the environmental humanities. Perhaps surprisingly, it also resonates with recent ecological theory. Material ecocriticism (e.g., Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality”) presents a similar view of humans as enmeshed with the more-than-human through the flows of physical materials.6 In queer and trans ecologies, scholars like Nicole Seymour and Hannah Boast have grappled with how to discuss this porosity of the human without reinforcing exclusionary ideas of the natural.7 These fields ask questions like: What are the specific challenges that queer and trans people face in our changing climate? Do trans methods help us move beyond binaries of natural versus cultural?
I believe that medieval studies can significantly broaden the scope of this conversation. While I do not recommend a return to medieval medicine, premodern writers did understand certain things about the human body: that it is permeable, materially linked to its surrounding environment, and susceptible to changes in that environment. Moreover, while medieval social hierarchies were interlinked, with writers often presenting racialized and non-Christian figures as gender-variant, this potential for transformation could also be empowering. Explorations of these complex intersections are an exciting trend in scholarship today, particularly among junior researchers.8
As medieval records reveal, this practice of mobilizing scientific discourse for political ends is nothing new. But history also provides a more expansive view of sex and gender, including categories that no longer exist as well as variable definitions of masculinity and femininity.
I am especially grateful for these communities now, as the basic rights of trans and nonbinary people come under threat. Earlier this year, I traveled to Boston to speak about Silence at a conference on medieval and early modern trans studies. Since its first incarnation in 2019, this conference has featured electrifying new scholarship by emerging stars, and this installment was no exception. But there were also differences this year: more speakers discussing trans pessimism and grief; a mention of the conference on a conservative watch list; a pervasive sense of anxiety about travel, particularly among the few speakers from outside the US. Much of this climate of dread stemmed from new legislation in the US and UK, which draws on thoroughly contested notions of binary sex/gender as “natural” and backed by “biology.”
As medieval records reveal, this practice of mobilizing scientific discourse for political ends is nothing new. But history also provides a more expansive view of sex and gender, including categories that no longer exist as well as variable definitions of masculinity and femininity. Texts like Silence help us to see gender norms as contextual and mutable, rather than “natural” and fixed. These narratives from the past offer unexpected but valuable tools in current struggles for trans rights and ecological justice.
Feature Image: Queen Eupheme (right) seducing Silence (left), WLC.LM.6, Roman de Silence, f. 209r. University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections.
Notes
1 For an overview of the field, see Tess Wingard, “The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality,”The English Historical Review 138.593 (2023): 933–951, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead214. For an accessible introduction, see Gabrielle Bychowski, “Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?,” The Public Medievalist, Nov. 1, 2018, https://publicmedievalist.com/transgender-middle-ages.
2 Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, introduction to Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 11–40 at 17, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83299.
3 Sarah Salih describes medieval virginity as a “third gender” that is “removed from the heterosexual economy, the system by which gender is produced as necessarily binary through the practices of marriage and exchange”; Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 9. Leah DeVun discusses “hermaphrodites” throughout her magisterial The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021).
4 Translation adapted from Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (Michigan State University Press, 1999), lines 2471–74.
5 Silence, lines2645–50 and 2826–28.
6 Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
7 Nicole Seymour, “‘Good Animals’: The Past, Present, and Futures of Trans Ecology,” Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch (Routledge, 2020), 190–204; Hannah Boast, “Theorizing the Gay Frog,” Environmental Humanities 14.3 (2022): 661–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962959.
8 DeVun, Shape of Sex, 40–101; Aylin Malcolm and Nat Rivkin (eds.), “Medieval Trans Natures,” special issue, Medieval Ecocriticisms 4 (2024), https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/med_ecocriticisms/vol4/iss1.
Aylin Malcolm
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