This book looked interesting at a quick glance, and was reasonably priced. I picked it up for the chapter entitled "Textile Concerns: Holy Transvestites and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing." The substance is a lot less useful for my purposes, though not necessarily as an absolute judgment. It appears to be intended as a textbook for "general survey" type history courses. The sort taken by people who aren't history majors, but are taking it as an elective.
Krakow university student
15th century Polish woman who passed as a man in order to study at Krakow University.
LHMP entry
This article takes a focused look at all the women (and there were only 13 of them) recorded in London legal records for cross-dressing as men in the century after 1450. While this data set is too small to draw strong conclusions, the variation among the cases challenges our understanding of the purposes and motivations for female cross-dressing. The article provides a longer chronology of cross-dressing in London before 1603 from sources that include letters and courts overseen by the city, the Bishop’s commisssary, and the chancery.
Chapter 1: Sex and the Middle Ages
A 15th century account of a young woman attending Krakow university in male disguise. After successfully passing as a man for two years and nearly attaining her degree, she was unmasked due to the suspicions of a soldier who won a bet with his friends by forcibly undressing her and revealing her sex. She was taken before a judge but no one could find any complaint against her except the cross-dressing. After that she chose (from among unknown other options) to go into a convent where she became Abbess.
This review will necessarily be somewhat cursory, as the entire book is relevant to the LHMP project. In general, I will summarize data not covered in detail elsewhere, and include references to the rest.
Chapter 6: The L-Word in Women’s History
This book as a whole is a “state of the field” analysis of women’s history as an academic discipline, and especially of women’s history (indeed, history in general) covering eras before the 19th century. This summary will cover only the chapter specifically on lesbian history.
While the academic “queer studies” movement has analyzed a great many “high culture” works in literature and art, looking for evidence of same-sex impulses, this approach has been less useful for (or perhaps less interested in) an understanding of the ordinary lives of average people who might have had those same impulses. For this purpose, identifying lesbian motifs in works like the Roman de Silence or interpreting nuns’ adoration of vulva-like images of the wounds of Christ as homoerotic is somewhat beside the point.
