Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #31 – Rieger 1989 “Was Bieiris de Romans Lesbian? Women’s Relations with Each Other in the World of the Troubadours”

While Bogin was primarly an edition of the texts of the works of the Trobairitz, this is a collection of scholarly papers by various authors. Rieger considers the question of the relationship of the text of “Na Maria, pretz e fina valors” to the nature of the relationship between the text's author and addressee. While there are other troubadour lyrics addressed from a woman to a woman, these either fall in the conversational genre of the “tenso” or are explicitly framed as a woman speaking as a go-between for an absent male lover. To consider the hypothesis that this work expresses lesbian desire, Rieger looks at: evidence for the existence of lesbian relations at the time; evidence for attitudes toward homosexuality in troubadour lyrics in general; the linguistic basis for the poem’s “persona” being interpreted as female; possible textual corruptions that could have turned a male authorial persona into a female one or that might undermine the erotic aspects of the text; and the context of conventional language used between female friends in poetry where no romantic intepretation is suggested. There are significant weaknesses in the first two items in this list in that Rieger’s analysis (and her sources) rely too much on an assumption that evidence regarding male homosexuality can be extrapolated to women. (As seen in other articles in my blog series, it was normal for male and female homosexuality to be treated very differently not only in law but in popular opinion.)

Rieger considers the arguments that Bieiris was the pen-name of a male author to be unsupported, and then applies the evidence to consider three hypotheses: 1) that the poem is an expression of lesbian love; 2) that the interpretation of the poem as being erotic in nature rests on potentially corrupt elements in the text (and thus is being "read in" by modern editors); and 3) that the poem is indeed addressed between women but represents only the conventional and stylized language of friendship within that genre. A significant part of the article involves adducing literary examples of women praising each other in language similar to that of Bieiris’s lyric. Rieger settles on the third hypothesis, concluding that there is enough doubt in the manuscript transmission of three key words to question the most overtly erotic passages in the text, and noting the commonness of laudatory language between women in Provencal literature.