[I have been expanding and revising for publication this conference paper from a couple of years ago. Here is the text of the (provisionally) finished piece but without (esp. n.33!) finished footnotes etc. I will revise and repost when those are done but for now I would value any thoughts or responses. There are some quite important difference of argument from the previous version.]
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 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.[1] One of these was that the abbess kept about
the nunnery a man dressed as a woman, so that he could attend to her without
arousing any sort of suspicion.
Chlothild pointed the man out.
And so a man stepped forward, dressed as a woman. He said that he could not do ‘manly work’ 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 had heard of the abbess, he had never actually met her. This testimony was enough for the bishops
(including Gregory) who were sitting in judgement and the charge was dismissed.
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 ideal 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. It is, furthermore, interesting
to speculate about why we would want to dismiss the nameless Poitevin’s own
account. His testimony, that something
as disturbing and seemingly ‘modern’ as cross-dressing might have occurred in
early medieval society, is perhaps just too troubling, so we seek reasons to
discount it.[2] Thus we silence a voice from the past but put
blame the on the tribunal. Nonetheless,
as stated, it might just have been that the bishops did simply ignore evidence
of Leubovera’s back-sliding, by accepting an invented story.
Alternatively, however, one might side with the bishops and 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. It made no
condemnation of her lifestyle but there is no reason to suppose it would not
have done so, had the evidence been compelling.
After all, female power was troubling in the early middle ages and women
in positions of authority, judged by men, were always in a difficult
position. 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.[3] Accepting the Poitevin’s account might be
somewhat naïve but he might have been telling the truth.
Gregory’s narration provides little to help us decide between
these alternatives. He largely relates
what the participants said, and 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 could not 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 of
the tribunal is a broadly accurate depiction of what he witnessed, the Poitevin
had come up with this explanation in the first place in the expectation that it
would be believed and had come to the assembly dressed as a woman. If Chlothild’s accusation were correct, it
certainly seems odd that the abbess’ former attendant should have attended to
tribunal in his usual disguise. This,
however, is not something that the historian can second guess.
There are two areas where an interpretative decision is
required. The first concerns what
Chlothild and Basina’s accusation concerned, and the second is what the
Poitevin meant by his explanation that he could not perform opus virile. A further problem is the unauthorised
assumption, made in most readings, that the Poitevin’s explanation related
directly to the nature of the accusation.
Previously, such readings as this passage has received have
assumed (possibly on the basis of a misleading translation given by Lewis
Thorpe) that Leubovera wanted to have sex with the man, to keep him as a sort
of male concubine. The female costume
was a disguise. Thorpe, in keeping with
this ‘sexual’ reading of the passage, understood the man’s excuse, that he wore
women’s clothes because of his incapacity for opus virile as meaning that he was impotent. Gregory’s Latin, however, provides no support
for such a reading.[4] He simply reports that Chlothild accused the
abbess of having a male personal servant, dressed in women’s clothes. This would be in flagrant breach of the
monastic rule in itself, even without any additional charge of sexual
incontinence. In this reading the term opus virile would not have any sexual
connotation; the term is attested elsewhere as simply meaning ‘manly work’,
agricultural labour in the fields.[5]
Neither reading is entirely satisfactory. The latter turns a blind eye to the sexual
reasons for the segregation of nuns and thus the fundamental reason why it was
deemed wrong for a man to be in attendance on the abbess. It fails to consider why, even if the
accusation was simply a breach of the rule’s stipulation that no man be allowed
in the monastery, the abbess would want a male servant or why she would conceal
his presence. As noted, both readings
assume a direct correspondence between the accusation and the man’s
justification of his costume, which is by no means necessary. The rebellious nuns might have accused their
abbess of sexual misconduct with a man dressed as a woman, and the
cross-dressing Poitevin might still have explained his choice of costume with
reference to an inability to work outside in the fields. Alternatively, the accusation might simply
have been that Leubovera had allowed a male servant to work in the abbey, in
disguise, and the excuse might have been that he wore women’s clothes because
he was impotent. The double explanation
– that he had never met the abbess and
that he had another reason for the choice of costume – in many ways only makes
sense in the sexual reading: that he dressed as a woman because he was
impotent. If he dressed as a woman
because he was only capable of work inside the house, as a servant, that would
hardly dispel any of the fundamental problems about the abbess having a male
servant in the first place. At its core,
whatever Gregory’s exact words, this was an accusation about sex.
I will proceed on the basis of the core element of Gregory’s
narrative of the event, of which he was a witness: that a man from sixth-century
Poitou attended the tribunal of the rebellious nuns dressed as a woman and
explained this decision as a result of his incapacity for ‘male work’, whatever
that may have meant. This decidedly
queer instance allows us to think through some changes that had taken place in
gender-construction since the late Roman period and 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 concealed by silence, which
is hardly unusual. What I want to
concentrate upon is the relation between 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.[6] I will not draw definite conclusions but
leave different possibilities open. Much
thinking remains to be done on this subject and a theme of undecidability will
run through this essay.
My analysis has two bases, neither of which is fundamentally
controversial. The first concerns the
nature of classical gender construction; the second involves the gendered distribution
of grave-goods within post-imperial cemeteries.
To take the first of these, it seems 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.[7] Roman accounts of the remote past saw their
ancestors as barbarous.[8] 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.[9] In Roman eyes, therefore, the very movement to
civilisation been gendered. What defined
the civic Roman male was moderation, reason, the control of passions and the
ability to see both sides of an issue.
This enabled their employment and reception of the law, it rendered
their government something other than tyranny and the performance of its ideals
justified a man’s involvement in such legitimate government.[10] 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.[11]
Yet, the non-possession of civic male virtues was not
restricted to women. A too-emotional,
irrational character – similarly explained by imbalance of the humours – separated
barbarians (male or female) from the Roman civic ideal, and the barbarian’s
wild ferocity meant that he (or she) could be assimilated with the animal, a
third axis along which one might move away from the central masculine ideal. Equally, the child who had not yet been
inducted, via paideia, into society
could not be expected to demonstrate the true characteristics of the civilised
male. 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, as for example
in the instances of the puer senex or
the virago (in its initial sense).[12] Barbarian men could acquire the attributes of
civilisation so completely that their origins were entirely effaced and, of
course, male children could be educated, grow into and acquire these
characteristics.[13] A woman, though, no matter how virile, could
never entirely occupy that ideal centre, because of her sex.[14]
There are, naturally, different ways of reading this
construction. The immediately apparent
interpretation, and the one which doubtless structured Roman politics, is that,
in sum Roman gender was constructed around the masculine. The Roman woman was secondary, defined as an
incomplete version of the civilised man, defined by a fundamental lack.
However, one might simultaneously acknowledge that the figure of the
woman precedes that of the man, that incompletion and imperfection are
logically and necessarily prior to the ‘complete’ figure of the Roman
male. Indeed the historical and other
cultural aspects of Roman gender construction make it very clear that the
Romans themselves acknowledged this. As
mentioned, with the passage to civilisation the Roman male had moved out of a
situation wherein he was of a type with women, barbarians and animals. What this means is that the Roman concept of
sexual difference should not be seen as a totalising binary, with the
categories defined on the basis of two opposing, objectively-measurable sets of
criteria, adding up to a whole. In other
words, the idea was not that ‘woman’ was the opposite of ‘man’ and that the
whole human population could be simply divided into these categories on the
basis of that opposition. Biology was
not enough. Even men had to work to be
men, and the ego-ideal of the Roman male was always out of reach.[15] In some ways both of these ideas can be
represented in Figure 1. When the Poitevin said that he dressed as
woman because he could not perform manly work, this could suggest that the
Roman construction of gender continued into the late sixth century: the
feminine was seen simply as a falling away from the masculine.
This conclusion might, however, be questioned by the evidence
which forms the second basis of my discussion: the post-imperial symbolisation
of the masculine and the feminine in burial ritual. 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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19] This constitutes the second (I hope)
uncontroversial basis from which my argument proceeds.
The archaeological evidence suggests two conclusions. One is that masculinity was increasingly
coming to be defined by martial characteristics. The other is more
controversial or problematic and 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 a separate 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 (Figure 2).[20]
Some implications in the slender documentary corpus could
support this notion. The Pactus Legis Salicae suggests that the
basis of female status was the life-cycle, sex and reproduction.[21] The differing importance of the male
life-cycle in governing masculine identity, as hinted at in written sources,
might also strengthen the idea that there two gendered sets of ideals.[22] This potentially suggests something different
from the reading of the Poitevin’s statement alluded to earlier: that the
material construction of ‘woman’ simply represented the lack of the masculine,
the failure to be a ‘man’.
How might this possible change from the classical situation
have come about? At the core of the
situation, I suggest, lay the gradual demise of the model of civic
masculinity. A major problem in 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 emerged,
establishing a claim to legitimacy that was accepted by all other factions
outside Italy.[23] Given that the civic model relied heavily
upon links to the emperor, the ultimate guarantor of legitimate authority, this
meant that, particularly in the provinces, any claim to traditional civic
masculine virtue stood on shifting grounds.
Furthermore, a different model of Roman masculinity had emerged during
the fourth century, following the separation of the military and civil branches
of imperial service under the Tetrarchy.[24] This ‘martial model’ more consciously
incorporated elements of the animal and the barbarous, antithetical to the
classical ideas of the virtuous civilised man.
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. By the seventh
century, it had become dominant across the West, with only the model of
Christian religious masculinity existing as an alternative.
It would, however, be mistaken to think that the civic model’s
demise was simply connected to the western Empire’s fragmentation by 476.[25] After all, although by the late 470s contemporaries
were doubtless aware that the western Empire was effectively not functioning,[26]
they had no reason to suppose – and there is no evidence that any of them did suppose – that the West had
definitively ‘fallen’. The ‘fall of the
West’ and its consequent need for ‘reconquest’ was something only decreed
outright by eastern imperial ideology from the 520s.[27] In the sixty years between the deposition of
Romulus and the beginning of Justinian’s wars, the West lay in a sort of ‘twilight
zone’, notionally inside the Roman Empire but with no effective imperial
government. Most western rulers had, nevertheless,
claims to be legitimate imperial officers and the titles to go with them,[28]
and it is should not be assumed that none harboured ambitions to take over the
currently-vacant western throne.[29] For that reason, a ‘Roman’, civic masculine
model continued to be effective, even if losing status to the ‘barbarian’ or
‘barbarised’ martial model. Indeed, in
the absence of a western emperor of contested legitimacy, the status of this
form of masculinity may have stabilised, linked now, as it was, however
nebulously, to the indubitably legitimate Emperor in Constantinople. The Pactus
Legis Salicae, illustrates this situation well when it sets out different
rates of compensation for the murder of free Franks and Romans of different
grades.[30]
This situation ended with the Justinian’s wars and especially
with their ultimate failure. The
imperial proclamation that the western realms lay outside the Empire cut the
ground from beneath any claim to legitimate Roman authority in any area which
found itself beyond the newly-redefined imperial frontiers.[31] It was Justinian’s invasions of Africa, Italy
and Spain, rather than Odoacer’s deposition of Romulus, that instigated what
turned out to be the final crisis of the classical Roman civic model of
masculinity. By the later sixth century
then, by the time of the tribunal in Poitiers, we can identify masculine and
feminine ideals. These, however, related
primarily not to each other, in an antagonistic binary, but were instead, I
suggest, constructed in opposition to civic masculinity, a central, definitive
norm that was, by the late sixth century, disappearing from actual existence. This gives us, in the sixth-century cemetery
data, the appearance of two opposed poles.
Both gendered ideals were based around concepts that had hitherto been
subordinated to the ideals of the Roman male.
All signs are 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, which is also to say haunted by his imagined pre-civilised past. Nevertheless, for the Romans the civilised
man acted as a sort of quilting point for the signifying system.[32] I have argued before that in the fifth
century this ‘point-de-capiton’ became unfixed.[33] Yet it had never represented an absolute
point of origin because as just mentioned it had always contained within it –
even in Roman terms – the image of its pre-civilised Roman precursor. The latter was the supplement without which
the ideal could not exist. That
historical dimension meant that the space for that central ideal or image was rounded
out by what it was not. What is
different about the sixth-century situation is that while, of course, male and
female were partly defined by what they are not, the ‘supplements’ completing
their meaning came not primarily from what we might think of as their
structural opposites – man:woman – but from an ideal that was fading from
social reality leaving only its spectre: the civic Roman male. This was the ghost that haunted the gendered
identities of sixth-century men and women; male and female ego-ideals related
more to that spectre than to each other.
Why have I referred to this process as ‘classical gender in deconstruction’? I should say at the outset that I employ the
term deconstruction in its correct, Derridian sense.[34] Deconstruction (a term which had long been in
desuetude until Derrida revived it as a sort of translation of Heidegger’s term
‘Destruktion’[35])
is a word habitually misused by historians and others,[36]
and one about which Derrida himself came to be ambivalent). It lays stress upon the fact that even
putatively original meanings emerge from a (logically but not necessarily chronologically)
preceding structuring semiotic ‘trace’.
This emergence involves a process of deferral (because a final,
originary meaning can never be reached) and difference (because all signs
derive their meaning from the position within signifying chains of difference),
for which Derrida coined the neologism différance.
The trace is the space and the moment
of différance. One of the crucial points made by Derrida is
that these features apply to all forms of semiotic conveyance: written, spoken
or otherwise. There is thus no vantage point
that exists outside the play of différance, from which to proclaim a true,
originary meaning. This was what Derrida
meant by his much- (often deliberately-) misunderstood phrase ‘il n’y a pas de
hors-texte’ (‘there is no outside-text’).[37] Given that gender construction within society
is a matter of language, concepts, signs and signifying behaviours,
deconstruction is an appropriate analytical concept.
As has been thoroughly explained by Simon Critchley,[38]
deconstruction cannot be reduced to a simple method or analytical process, in
which structural binaries are identified and reversed in importance, although
this is certainly an element. It is, as
Derrida said, something that happens: ‘ce qui arrive’.[39] Instead (although I am over-simplifying a
complex argument) Critchley insists that it is a form of double-reading which
he terms ‘clôtural’. One reading remains
a faithful commentary upon the text; the other an interpretation based on its aporias, points at which a non-empirically-based
choice has to be made. An ‘oscillation’
between the two readings takes place.
There is no question of establishing a ‘true’ interpretation;
indeterminacy is key to deconstruction.
How, then, might that relate to sixth-century gender-construction? As noted earlier, the orthodox construction
or ‘reading’ of classical gender saw Roman civic masculinity as the dominant, central,
gendered ideal. That had nevertheless been
partly defined by its difference from the ‘negative’ feminine and
barbaric. In the course of the fifth and
sixth centuries, as we have also seen, identities which actively played upon their
difference from that once-dominant ideal came to the fore. However, it must also be recalled that, while
there were some shifts in the power-relationships between the civic and martial
modes of masculinity, both forms rested squarely upon an ultimately Roman,
imperial form of legitimation, at least up to the middle of the sixth
century. The ‘martial model’ played on
concepts that inverted the ideals of civic masculinity but the strength or
cachet that it drew from such strategies relied ultimately upon the legitimacy
and prestige of those traditional Roman ideals.
Further, the ultimate Roman-ness of this barbarising identity found its
warranty in a link to the regional kings in whose person were brought together
military and civil offices, and both models of masculinity – and the legitimacy
of the royal titles or offices was, however theoretically, underpinned by a
link to the emperor. At the same time,
although the wild, fierce, animal, barbarism of martial masculinity may have
been emphasised to suggest (in a late imperial context) a weakness in civic manhood,
it could never be forgotten that those characteristics were regarded by anyone
with an education as lesser, uncivilised – even feminising – traits. The orthodox ‘reading’ of the material and
other symbols therefore remained in place even as an alternative ‘reading’ that
flagged up its blind spots was taking place.
Thus the situation that had emerged by the middle quarters of
the sixth century should not and cannot be seen as straightforwardly inverting
or reversing the relationship of ‘Roman’ and ‘barbarian’, of ‘civic’ and
‘martial’, or even as a process under
way towards such an inversion. The
socio-political identities based on the two masculine models existed in a
dynamic relationship of tension, or a
semiotic oscillation, in which the strengths of each were simultaneously
its weak points, in which each reading of the signs inevitably led back to the
other. Put another way, the power
relationship was, as yet, indeterminate.[40]
That indeterminacy, I would suggest, freed female identity
from its former position, defined purely with reference to the civic male. After all, some of the features now held (in
one reading of late Roman masculinity) to valorise the martial model were, in
classical thought, shared with the feminine.
As the ‘natural’ claims of the civic male to domination became more
contested, and as chastity and sexual renunciation became more associated with
the behaviour of dedicated religious, outside the realms of family life, it may
have been possible for the female role in the household and reproduction to be
stressed. It is also conceivable that,
as I have argued before, the political changes of the fifth century meant that
the role of marriage alliances in local and regional politics created a space within
which female sexuality and status connected with that could be emphasised. Notably, this emphasis was placed upon sexual
reproduction, the body and ultimately the biological differences between man
and woman; those aspects which, in the view of Lacanians like Copjec, could
never be incorporated in a purely linguistic or symbolic discourse of gender.[41] These issues may have – reciprocally –
contributed to the stress upon leaving the household and the sphere of sex and
marriage in female saints’ lives. As
markers of status associated with sex, marriage and the family became very
important in secular feminine status their rejection became more obvious and
more significant as an act of piety.
All of these developments, I suggest, 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. Yet, those
classical notions differ somewhat 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,[42]
it is worth noting that the account describes the Poitevin as a man (vir) in women’s clothes (vestimenta muliebria; in veste ... muliebri), not as a woman,
or a woman who turned out under closer inspection to be a man. The implication of the story might be that
the man was not considered female by his contemporaries, although the modern
refusal by many to accord appropriately gendered pronouns to transgendered
individuals is probably relevant. The
extent to which the Poitevin lived life as a woman cannot be guessed at.
It is nevertheless interesting that the Poitevin’s construction
of identity revolved not simply around the absence, or lack, of masculine items
but the active employment of feminine ones.
It was not enough for Gregory’s Poitevin simply to be considered less of
a man, and more feminine as a result, by being incapable of opus virile; he dressed as a woman to
show this. He (or she) claimed that his (or
her) decision to dress in women’s clothing was motivated by the fact that, as
he put it, he (or she) could do nothing of manly work. As mentioned earlier, this might be seen as
in line with classical ideas of gender.
And yet, this was not – or so it seems – some sort of punishment; as far
as we can tell, the Poitevin had chosen this course of action him/herself.
This is where the archaeological evidence can provide a
different view. It is interesting to
wonder what exactly this costume – these vestimenta
muliebria – comprised. Grave 32 at
the cemetery of Ennery (Moselle) contained a skeleton sexed as male but been
buried wearing a necklace and accompanied by an item of pottery normally (on
that site, at that time) only found in female graves.[43] No traces or indications of the type, shape
or cut of the clothing survived, but the absence of a buckle suggests that
there was no belt. This assemblage would,
on that cemetery at that date, have been appropriate for a woman of an age
above forty; 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.[44] 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.[45] 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.[46] 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’.[47]
This is underlined in the archaeological example, if we
assume that the physical anthropological analysis was correct (and there is no
decisive reason not to do so). The deceased’s
family displayed this feature of identity in the grave, in public ritual. One might wonder whether this suggests
something more positive about the reception of identity. Sixth-century furnished burials were carried
out in public, in view of the community; indeed this point is essential for
understanding the deposition of grave-goods.[48] Although the precise motivations of the people
responsible for determining the nature of the burial (and indeed who those
people were) lie beyond our purview, it seems reasonable to conclude that the
deceased’s family appear to have acknowledged the dead person’s choice of life
style. However, as elsewhere at this
date, the community and its norms seem to have played a significant role in the
sixth-century northern Gallic burial rite.
There might therefore have been an expectation that the deceased person
was buried in feminine costume, regardless of their biological sex, whether or
not the family wished to do this.
Nonetheless, the dead person was allowed burial in the communal
grave-yard. Although the grave was
oriented north-west:south-east, this orientation was shared with the
neighbouring interments, one of which (grave 11) was an unusually
well-furnished burial of an adolescent.
Its location seems peripheral but we do not know whether, or where, the
edges of the cemetery were reached.[49] A NW-SE
orientation was used to display distinction at Ennery but not necessarily in a
negative way. Such graves included the
clearly prestigious and equally peripheral burials 70 and 71 (which broke other
community rules to emphasise masculinity).[50] However one looks at this burial, it suggests
that views of a biological male who lived life as a woman were not simply
negative.
This social identity was not, therefore, seen simply in terms
of a distance from the masculine ideal, but also – perhaps – as something more positive:
a movement towards valued feminine ideals.
If so, and this can only be a suggestion, this underlines the increased
‘bipolarity’ of sixth-century secular concepts of gender. In this reconstruction, the ‘oscillation’
discussed above, between civic and martial models of masculinity, the tension
within which masculine ideals remained contested and their relationship undetermined,
permitted the expression of antitheses without necessarily implying a negative
judgement. If my reconstruction is
correct, it underlines that, as in many other areas, this was a quite unusual
period of western European history.
How one reads opposite instances, where biologically female
skeletons are associated with masculine grave-goods, like weaponry, is
something I cannot address.[51] 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 offered. Indeed the tribunal at Poitiers took place at
about the time that the unusual situation I have suggested was coming to an
end. The Justinianic Wars redrew a
frontier between the Roman Empire and a new barbaricum
in the former Western provinces. As
stated earlier, within the western kingdoms any link with the emperor or
imperial office lost its value in legitimising status and authority. New forms of legitimation, and new foundations
for ideology, were required. In this
context, what had been an ‘oscillation’ between the orthodox reading of gender,
with a dominant civic masculinity, and an alternative view, valorising the ‘supplements’
that rounded out the orthodox interpretation, slowed and changed into a more
straightforward reversal and inversion of the earlier imperial hierarchy.
Seventh-century cemeteries reveal the change. One difference from sixth-century sites is
the reduction of feminine gendered grave-goods and a greater stress on the
masculine.[52] Although the numbers and variety of the weapons
deposited with the dead are reduced, the percentage of masculine burials with
weapons increases.[53] This
seems to represent a final triumph of the martial model of masculinity, which
had by now entirely supplanted the civic.
This situation may be more akin to the Roman, in that it saw a central
masculine ideal, with the feminine judged by proximity to or distance from
this.[54] What was different from the situation in c.300 was the nature of that central
masculine ideal, which was 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 of which I am aware allows us to
discuss. I suspect, however, that in a
society more defined by masculine heads of lineages, that it was rather
different: 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.
[1]
Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum
10.15. MGH SRM 1.1, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison (Hanover, 1951),
pp.501-6.
[4]
This was pointed out to me by Dr Erin Dailey, whose very good University of
Leeds PhD thesis on Gregory’s women will I hope be published at some point.
[14]
If I understand her correctly, Joan Copjec argues that (for Lacanians) sexual
difference resists complete representation in language because it exists,
effectively, within the sphere of (in Lacanian terms) the Real. That would indeed give sexual difference an
important qualitative distinction from differences between identities based on
class or ethnicity. This could be
assimilated with the Roman world-view.
J. Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Boston
MA, 1994; repr. London, 2015). See also
S. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative:
Kant, Hegel and the critique of Ideology (Durham NC, 1993).
[25]
An important role in bringing about these changes was doubtless played by
Christian debates on sex and whether the chastely married might be valorised
over the virgin. Similarly, the role of
asceticism and of competitive display of extreme renunciation would move
behavioural ideals in some areas away from traditional civic norms of
moderation. Regrettably I am not able to
pursue these issues here.
[29] Theoderic
and Clovis styled as augustus. The notion that ‘barbarians’ were prevented
by their birth from becoming emperor is a modern fiction.
[32]
The idea of the quilting point or point-de-capiton comes from the
psychoanalytic philosophy of Jacques Lacan.
Here I am assimilating it with Derridian thinking by interpreting it
more pragmatically, within the Symbolic order.
I do not see it as representing a metaphysical, absolute point of
origin, present unto itself. Lacanians might
regard this move as illegitimate (cp. Copjec, Read my desire).
[35] On which see J. Derrida, Heidegger: La question de l’Être et
l’Histoire. Cours de
l’ENS-Ulm 1964-1965, ed. T. Dutoit (Paris, 2013), pp.23-44.
[36] E.g.
A. Rio, . Deconstruction does not simply mean a close analysis of the
various parts of a text or topic, or the breaking down of the latter into its
component parts.
[38]
Above all, S. Critchley, Ethics of
Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (3rd edition; Edinburgh,
2014).
[40]
Again, I must draw attention to, without being able to explore, the effect of
Christian ideals in this process. Some
areas of the civic masculine ideal – most notably its stress on moderation –
were appropriated by the Church. This
may have led to the association of such ideals with the celibate, outside
family life. At the same time, the
practice of extreme asceticism by holy men and women served, in some views, to
weaken the claims of ‘mere’ restraint and chastity.
[47]
Ref. An interesting foreshadow of
Freud’s idea that such ‘perversions’ were things one left behind after
youth. Elizabeth Freeman refers to this
as a teleological view of heteronormativity.
[49] A
chance discovery in the 1980s suggests that a seventh-century phase of the site
remained unexcavated. Ref. Simmer.
