François·e Charmaille

Nonbeenary gender: Bees and grammar in monastic culture circa 800–1070 - postmedieval At the interface of grammar and nature, bees served as a figure of transgender identification for monks in England, France, and Germany circa 800–1070. Monks recognised bees as essential nonhuman part...

This article has just been published in Open Access by postmedieval 👇

doi.org/10.1057/s412...

An illustration from Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Codex gall. 16 (the Psalter of Isabelle of France), folio 57r. It shows a man collecting bees as they fly out of their skep.

Monks in the ninth–eleventh centuries identified with bees to make sense of their place in medieval society. In bees, they found an ideal of communal life, selfless virtue, and chastity. By living with bees and writing about them, these monks forged a distinct, nonbeenary gender.

The Contingent Middle Ages | Speculum: Vol 101, No 1

Read it here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

And make sure to look through the whole issue. This centennial publication offers a remarkable, open-ended, prismatic panorama of new directions from across medieval studies. It is a heartening picture of a field that continues to flourish.

The cover image for the centennial issue of the journal Speculum. It is illustrated by a detail from a fifteenth-century manuscript illumination, depicting Wisdom as a richly clothed woman, who holds open a book in her left hand. On the right of the illustration is an elaborate timekeeping device.

The Middle Ages are not essential -- and that is what makes them so helpful to us. Prior to the hegemony of racial capitalism, medieval cultures offer us a glimpse into other ways of thinking and being, revealing our own capacity to be otherwise.

This is the topic of my essay in Speculum.

Read it here 👇
doi.org/10.1353/sac....

& please let me know if you have any trouble accessing this paper.

This culminates in a trans/medieval critique of Lacan's transcendental sexual difference.

This colloquium is generously edited by Ruth Evans and Jessica Rosenfeld, with brilliant contributions from A. E. Whitacre, Masha Raskolnikov, Zachary Engledow, and Grace Lavery.

Screenshot of my essay, "Lacan and the Medieval Gender Metaphor", showing the title and opening sentences. Said opening is as follows: "I come to Psychoanalysis from trans medieval studies because my primary concern has become the question of language's relation to the establishment of sexual difference. An essential question for transgender studies is the question of gender as a concept. Can we rely on the assumption that there is a "gender" to be found in medieval society and culture?

It's an honour to contribute to the colloquium on "Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Studies" in Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

I argue that Lacan's critique of metaphor allows us to join up a distinctly medieval concept of "gender" with present-day anxieties about toilets.

This has everything to do with horses' bones, and with the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Read about it in The Chaucer Review.

muse.jhu.edu/article/961888

A screenshot of the title and abstract of an article in The Chaucer Review. Sodomy Against the Binary with Chaucer’s Pardoner. Abstract: The Pardoner’s description in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has often been read in terms that reproduce the narrator’s binary assumptions about the division between male and female. The narrator reifies these assumptions by metaphorically representing the Pardoner as a horse. This equine metaphor draws on a minor trope in anti-sodomy writing of the later Middle Ages. By analyzing the animal trope’s appearance in the writings of Ovid, Peter Damian, Walter of Châtillon, and Alan of Lille, this article shows that a concern for the stability of the male/female binary is at the heart of these anti-sodomy writings. The rhetorical recourse to horses and other nonhuman animals as points of comparison attempts to restore a stable, natural status to the male/female binary. This attempt fails with the Pardoner, who is exactly what he appears to be: male and female yet neither at once.

Out today! Sodomy is "the sin against nature." But what is "nature"? "Heterosexuality" seems like the obvious answer, but such a term is anachronistic... Sodomy might be better understood as the disruption of the division between male and female.

The table of contents for the July 2025 issue of The Chaucer Review, A Journal of medieval studies & literary criticism. Articles include: The House of Fame and Its Gossip Mill by Marisa Libbon, The Poetics of Experience and Illusion: Ovidian Alter-Egos in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale by Jennifer Bryan, Translation and the Squire’s Fabulous “Traveling Icon” Narrative Venture by Liam O. Purdon, Sodomy Against the Binary with Chaucer’s Pardoner by me, Chaucer’s Troy in Early Modern Wales: Time and History in the Welsh Troelus a Chresyd by Jacqueline M. Burek.

Very pleased that my article on sodomy and the Pardoner will appear in what promises to be a rich and lively issue of The Chaucer Review.

Yes! This is a great way of putting it.

Also enjoyed how some of what you were saying, especially in the context of historic ideas of gender, overlapped with this Tumblr post, but like, with an actual academic basis. an-ruraiocht.tumblr.com/post/7790442...

No worries, I'm so glad you could make it, and will welcome your thoughts whenever you are able to formulate them

Friday 2 May, 5pm, in Cambridge: I will be speaking at the ASNC Research Seminar, about The Contingent Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are generative, are worth engaging with, because they are inessential. I'm very excited to share this work.

GR04 in the Faculty of English.

🥳 It’s publication day! 🥳

IMPOSSIBLE RECOVERY is now available to buy and online via institutional access.

Read more about the book and buy a copy at 20% off with code CUP20: cup.columbia.edu/book/impossi...

Or access online: www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

Trans Climates of the European Middle Ages, 500–1300 | Speculum: Vol 98, No 3 Abstract This article gathers evidence of a distinct strand of writing in Western Europe from the sixth century onwards which concerns itself with the relation between the seasons and sexual differenc...

Writers over the course of the Middle Ages interpreted the classical myth of Tiresias's sex change as an allegory for the cycle of the seasons. This led to the emergence of a strange notion: that the seasons have genders, that the climate is trans.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Intersex Between Sex And Gender In Cause Et Cure This article argues that intersex is present in medieval medical texts outside of the medieval concept of hermaphroditism. The phlegmatic man, the phlegmatic woman, and the sanguine man, in the twe...

Were there medieval medical theories of intersex? Was there a distinction between sex and gender? How were humors related to sex/gender? What does it do to a woman if she has too much greenness in her body?

I wrote about it in Exemplaria, and it's Open Access.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Since I've recently joined I may as well share some of my previous work.

What kind of political work do we perform by claiming people in the premodern past were "gay"? How can an encounter with the past transform us? I wrote about it in Diacritics. muse.jhu.edu/article/845151

Queer Philologies – NOTCHES

Very happy to see The Languages of Queer History, now online!

notchesblog.com/category/phi...