Tessera
Folgen

François·e Charmaille

@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Research fellow, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. They/them. Transing grammar; transing the climate.

20 Posts109 Follower111 Folgt
François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm so happy that my piece about nonbeenary monks made it into this wonderful issue of postmedieval! Alongside some great pieces of ecotheory, gender theory, creative and imaginative figuration, links between Italy and Asia... This issue is a dazzling picture of boundary-pushing research.

postmedieval@postmedieval.bsky.social · 2mo ago

while we are on the topic of our 2025 publications, take a look at our winter issue! what’s inside? pieces on idols and figuration, gender, ecocriticism, medievalisms, and whiteness on premodern and contemporary literatures spanning from west to east asia and from west to east europe!

François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · 6mo ago

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.

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.
François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · 7mo ago

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.

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.
François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · 8mo ago

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.

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?
François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · last yr.

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.

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.
Finn Longman is only here occasionally@finnlongman.com · last yr.

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...

bidh ionann leacht damh is dó

the thing about using modern labels to describe and delimit historical identities and relationships is that it implies that modern labels describe all of the types of identities and relationships that...

an-ruraiocht.tumblr.com

François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · last yr.

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.

François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · 2y ago

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/...

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...

journals.uchicago.edu

François·e Charmaille@fcharmaille.bsky.social · 2y ago

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....

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...

tandfonline.com