[
Next week I am off to Padova to the VI Congresso della Società Italiana delle Storiche, where I've been asked to speak about a n episode in Gregory of Tours Histories
. I think that what the organisers wanted was my paper on the implications of this for the gendering of grave-goods, as published in Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul
(2010), ch.9. What they're getting though is this doubtless cock-eyed cod-Derridean meditation... Mwahahahahahaha.....]
Until quite recently, one of the
stranger stories in Gregory of Tours’ Histories
had largely gone unremarked upon, in spite of its interesting possible
implications, or its possibly implied possibilities. When the Nuns’ Revolt at Holy Cross, Poitiers
(590) was supressed, says Gregory, the nuns’ leaders, Chlothild and Basina,
made a series of accusations against Leubovera, their abbess. One of these was that the abbess kept about
the nunnery a man dressed as a woman, so that she could have sex without
arousing any sort of suspicion. Chlothild
pointed the man out. And so a man
stepped forward, dressed as a woman. He
said, though, that he was impotent and that that was why he dressed that
way. In any case, he claimed, he lived a
long way off and, though of course he’d heard of the abbess, he’d never
actually met her. This testimony was
enough for the bishops (including Gregory) sitting in judgement and the charge
was dismissed.
Now, one might say that the
bishops had been surprisingly easily duped by this implausible tale and assume
that Leubovera had indeed been rather less than virginal in her abbacy. The presiding bishops had a vested interest
in suppressing the rebellion and so simply squashed the evidence that it had
been justified. That possibility should
be no means be ruled out, although the story rather loses its potential interest
in the process. One might also wonder why
we would want to dismiss the nameless Poitevin’s own account. It seems to mark a double suspicion. Firstly a suspicion of the Church – the Catholic
Church, the medieval Church – and a suspicion of testimony that something as
troubling and seemingly ‘modern’ as cross-dressing might have gone on in early
medieval society. This leads to the
preference of one greater ‘conspiracy theory’ over a lesser, local one, of one
story over another. Nonetheless, as
stated, that might have been what happened.
 |
Venantius Fortunatus riffs on the subject of plums
(Carmina 11.18, 11.20; cross-dressing Poitevin [probably]
not pictured) |
Alternatively, one might take the
Poitevin’s testimony at face value; the rebellious nuns’ were searching
desperately to justify their actions and made up a story based around the
presence at the tribunal of the man in women’s clothing. The judgement was not entirely uncritical of
Abbess Leubovera; though it made no condemnation of her lifestyle, there’s no
reason to suppose it would not have done had the evidence been compelling. The rebellious nuns were frequently of the
same aristocratic senatorial origin as the presiding bishops and two of their
leaders, Chlothild and Basina, were royal princesses; other reasons stated for
the nuns’ actions included resentment of the abbess’ strictness. Nonetheless, Venantius Fortunatus’ poems to
the abbey’s founder, Saint Radegund, do not suggest that the abbess’ dinner table
was as ascetic as one might have expected.
Accepting the Poitevin’s account might be somewhat naïve but, again, he
might have been telling the truth.
Gregory’s narration provides little
to help us decide between these alternatives.
He largely employs reported speech, about which he passes no
comment. There is no analytical resource
in his silence. For him the whole
episode illustrated a key theme of the Histories:
that transient worldly life and status cannot be translated into the eternal
merit of the truly saintly. The only
thing that might help us evaluate the story is the fact that, if Gregory’s
account is truthful, the Poitevin had come up with this explanation in the
first place in the expectation that it would be believed, and that he had come
to the tribunal dressed as a woman. If
Chlothild’s accusation were correct, it certainly seems odd that the abbess’
former lover should have attended to tribunal in his usual disguise. This, however, is not something that the
historian can second guess.
I am going to proceed on the
basis that Chlothild’s was a groundless accusation and that a man from
sixth-century Poitou did feel compelled to dress as a woman because of his impotence. This allows us to think through some changes
that had taken place in gender-construction since the late Roman period and
perhaps others that were under way when Gregory was writing. It is quite interesting that, within a house
of female religious, the accusation of sexual transgression was entirely in terms
of heterosexual activity. The
possibility of same-sex desire among the women of the abbey is simply concealed
by silence. This is hardly unusual. What I want to concentrate upon is the
relation between sexual activity, reproductive or otherwise, clothing and
gender-construction. In particular, I
want to explore the origins of the social space within which the anonymous
Poitevin acted. This, as I have written
before, enables us to read some aspects of post-imperial funerary archaeology
in more nuanced and less essentialist fashion.
My starting point in understanding this story might be mistaken; it is
certainly not the only one. And I will
not draw any definite conclusions but leave different possibilities open. That is not simply out of methodological
honesty, but also because I cannot myself decide which interpretive possibility
I prefer! Much thinking remains to be
done on this subject and a theme of undecidability runs through this short
communication.
Let me start by re-stating some
fairly uncontroversial bases for the analysis.
The first concerns the nature of classical gender construction; the
second involves the distribution of grave-goods within post-imperial
cemeteries. It seems to be well
established that Roman gender was constructed around a central masculine ideal:
the notion of civic Roman masculinity.
This was historicised; the Romans did not think their men had always
possessed such advantages in spite of the biological reasons for it that they
proposed. Roman accounts of the remote
past saw their ancestors as barbarous.
The moment when such barbarism was transcended came with the discovery
of law and – entirely related to that – the restriction of the choice of sexual
partners. The very movement to
civilisation had in their eyes, therefore, been gendered. What defined the civic Roman male was
moderation, reason, the control of passions and the ability to see both sides
of things. This enabled their employment
and reception of the law, rendered their government something other than
tyranny, and its performance justified a man’s involvement in such legitimate
government. This was not simply
psychological. As mentioned, in
classical thinking it was entirely bodily, biological. The female body’s different constitution, in
terms of the humours, made women less capable of such ideal behaviour. Yet, the non-possession of the
characteristics of civic male virtue was not restricted to women. A too emotional, irrational character –
justified similarly by imbalance of the humours –separated barbarians (male or
female) from the civic ideal, and the barbarian’s wild ferocity made him
assimilable with the animal, a third axis along which one might move away from
the masculine. The animal, the
barbarian, the feminine and the infantile could therefore be condemned by their
distance from the civic masculine ideal or praised for their closeness to
it. Indeed, barbarian men could acquire
the attributes of civilisation so completely that their origins were entirely
effaced. Male children, of course, could
be educated, grow into and acquire these characteristics (through the processes
of paideia). A woman, though, no matter how virile could,
because of her sex, never entirely
occupy that ideal centre. In sum, then,
Roman gender was constructed around the masculine. The feminine was envisaged in terms of a
fundamental lack.
Now, from around the end of the
first quarter of the sixth century in various parts of what had been the
western Roman world – particularly those where a social structure based around
the villae had gone into crisis with
the Empire’s political disintegration – it became common to inter artefacts
with the dead. What matters for the
purposes of this discussion is the well-known distinction in grave-goods
assemblages between men and women. This,
as has now been pretty well established in several different areas of the
post-imperial West, was modified by social age and position in the
life-cycle. Feminine grave-goods centred
upon clothing and the adornment of the body, although some symbols of female
work are occasionally also found.
Masculine artefacts on the other hand focused on weaponry, although,
again, in some areas other types of artefact were at least as significant. In the area I know best, northern Gaul, the
latter comprised items such as flints, strike-a-lights, awls, tweezers and so
on, often originally placed in a pouch attached to the deceased’s belt.
The archaeological evidence
suggests two conclusions. One – quite
unsurprising – is that masculinity was increasingly coming to be defined by
martial characteristics. The other is more controversial or problematic and that
suggests that there were two opposing poles of attraction in the material construction
of sixth-century gender: a masculine and a feminine. In other words, the feminine was not a
simple, relative absence of the
masculine but was constructed around its own set of ideals. The patterning in the funerary data suggests
that these ideals were structured around sex, by which I mean the female role
in reproduction.
How might this shift from the
classical situation have come about? I suspect
that the gradual demise of the model of civic masculinity lies at the core of
the situation. One of the main problems
of the factional civil wars that ended the Western Roman Empire in the fifth
century was that – especially after Valentinian III’s murder in 455 – no clear
winner managed to establish a claim to legitimacy that was accepted by all
other factions outside Italy. This meant
that, particularly in the provinces, any claim to traditional civic masculine
virtue stood on very uncertain, shifting grounds. A different model of Roman masculinity had
emerged during the course of the fourth century, following the separation of
the military and civil branches of imperial service under the Tetrarchy. This ‘martial model’ more consciously incorporated
elements of the animal and the barbarous, antithetical to the classical ideas
of the virtuous civilised man. As time
passed, this model became dominant across the West, with eventually only the
model of Christian religious masculinity existing as an alternative. As a model constructed (at least in part) in
opposition to the civic male, the martial model was less affected by removal
from the legitimisation of the central government. Thus I propose that what we are faced with
during the course of the fifth and especially the middle quarters of the sixth
century is two gendered ideals, both to some extent constructed in opposition
to civic masculinity, a central definitive norm fast disappearing from actual
practice. This is what gives us, in the
sixth-century cemetery data, the appearance of two opposed poles. Both gendered ideals here are based around
concepts that had hitherto been subordinated to the ideals of the Roman
male. The raising of these to the
surface, as positive bases of identity, seems to me to be a kind of analogue, in
social practice, to the processes of Derridean deconstruction.
All signs are, of course,
inhabited, or haunted, by their opposites.
The Roman civic male was haunted by the irrational, the emotional, the
feminine, the infantile, the barbarous and the animal. For the Romans the civilised man acted as a
sort of quilting point for the signifying system. I have argued before that in the fifth
century this point-de-capiton became unfixed.
Yet it had never represented an absolute point of origin because it had
always contained – even in Roman terms – the image of its pre-civilised Roman
precursor. That historical dimension
made the central image occupied as much by what it
was not as by what it was.
What is different, I think, about the sixth-century situation is that
while, of course, male and female are defined by what they are not, the
‘supplements’ which round out their meaning come not primarily from what we
might think of as their structural opposites – man:woman – but from an ideal
that was fast disappearing from social reality leaving only its spectre. This ghost of the civic Roman male, haunts
the gendered identities of sixth-century men and women but these relate more to
that than to each other.
 |
Statue of Dionysius from the National
Museum of Roman Archaeology in Rome |
I would like to suggest that this
process opened up the signifying space within which the Poitevin mentioned by
Gregory of Tours was acting. The
classical world, of course, had concepts of mixed gender or sexuality: the
hermaphrodite and the figure of Dionysius come to mind. And yet I think that the classical notions
are somewhat different from what is signified by the man at the Nuns’ tribunal,
not least in their removal from the field of the mortal. Here, again, we must take Gregory’s account
at face value. As Nancy Partner said, it
is worth noting that the account describes the Poitevin as a man in women’s
clothes, not as a woman, or a woman who turned out under closer inspection to
be a man. The implication of the story
is that the man was not considered female by his contemporaries, and the extent
to which he lived his life as a woman cannot be guessed at. He claimed that his decision to dress in
women’s clothing was motivated by the fact that he was impotent – or, as he put
it, that he could do nothing of manly work.
It is interesting to wonder what exactly his costume comprised. Here an archaeological example might
help. Grave 32 at the cemetery of Ennery
(Moselle) contained a skeleton sexed as male but the deceased had been buried
wearing a necklace and with an item of pottery normally only found in female
graves. The assemblage would on that
cemetery have been appropriate for a woman of his age, above forty, as it did
not stress the sexuality of the deceased in the way that was common with
younger women still involved in the processes of reproduction, especially
teenagers.
What is at stake in this
relationship between gendered costume and sexual reproduction? Masculine objects in Frankish burials
probably refer – at least obliquely – to the ability to start a family and
govern a household. The distribution of
goods does not seem to relate directly to sexual potency, at least in purely
‘biological’ terms – Frankish adolescents are rarely buried with masculine items,
in spite of being of an age-group whose sexual proclivities could worry
Christian moralists and which was linked in the law-codes to the kidnapping of young
women. One penitential text suggests,
however, that before the age of about twenty (the age, interestingly, when
Frankish males start to be buried with weapons) male sexual practice, same-sex
or otherwise, was more a matter of experimentation, of ‘games’.
What interests me is that the
construction of identity revolves not simply around the absence, or lack, of
masculine items but the active employment of feminine ones. This is underlined in the archaeological
example, where the dead man’s family displayed this feature in his grave, in
public ritual. One might wonder whether
this suggests something more positive about the reception of identity, whether
this was not simply negative, a distance from the masculine ideal, but also
perhaps something positive, a movement towards valued feminine ideals. If so, and this can only be a suggestion,
this underlines the ‘bipolarity’ of sixth-century concepts of gender.
How one reads opposite instances,
where biologically female skeletons are associated with masculine grave-goods,
like weaponry, is something I cannot address.
I suspect, however, that this is a rather different circumstance,
perhaps more akin to the classical situation and thus, I suspect, not to be
read crudely as ‘transgression’ – perhaps quite the opposite.
The subsequent history of
gender-construction in Francia perhaps supports the tentative reading I have
made. In seventh-century cemeteries, in
a change beginning at about the time of the nuns’ revolt, cemeteries show
important changes. One of these is the
reduction of feminine gendered grave-goods and a greater stress on the
masculine. This seems to me to represent
a final triumph of the martial model of masculinity, which has now entirely
supplanted the civic. This situation
seems more akin to the Roman, with a central masculine ideal and the feminine
judged by proximity to or distance from this.
What has changed is simply the nature of that ideal, which is now based
upon the martial model and a different, more warlike, set of virtues. How male sexual impotence was judged, and
whether it was marked at all, within that system is not something the evidence
I have allows me to discuss. I suspect,
however, in a society more defined by masculine heads of lineages, that it was
rather different though, not symbolised in clothing and certainly not valorised
by a family. The case of Gregory’s
Poitevin suggests a glimpse of a historical moment when, however briefly,
something different was possible. The
importance of that is that it cautions us not only against seeing modern
categories as ‘natural’ but against positing an essential, unchanging
‘medieval’ set of categories with which to compare them.
