There is, as E. Ann Matter put it in her article “My Sister, My Spouse”, a real “difficulty of speaking about women’s lives in a society which was solidly patriarchal […] and of speaking about sexual mores in a culture essentially hostile to sexuality, especially non procreative sexuality”.[1] Nevertheless, the past forty years have seen increasing scholarly interest in women’s histories in the Middle Ages, which has coincided with increased interest in the possibilities for “queer”, or LGBTQ+, histories in the medieval and early modern periods.[2] These impactful studies have paved the way for current research to speak openly about queer historical experiences and begin to write them back into the narrative. One of the ways to circumvent the difficulty of speaking about women who a modern reader might interpret as “lesbian”, is to instead let those women do the speaking. My own work aims to do just that by illuminating the homoerotic discourse present in female Germanic mystical poems, thereby recovering “lesbian” voices of the medieval past.

Unlike the Roman de Silence or Yde et Olive, secular romances often analysed from a queer perspective, the source texts of my doctoral research were all composed by women, sometimes with the help of female companions, and most likely with an imagined audience of women. These texts, then, were female-oriented by the very nature of their creation and intended circulation. I am undertaking a corpus linguistic study of the devotional poetry composed by four female mystics who lived in the Germanic-language regions of Western Europe: Hildegard von Bingen, Hadewijch van Antwerpen, Mechthild von Magdeburg, and Mechthild von Hackeborn. Devotional poetry differs from visionary texts in that it tends to be troubadouresque in style, lending itself to romance tropes evocative of the erotic. At the heart of this research is determining the mystics’ experiences of the erotic, situated in its medieval context, as female-oriented. The texts encourage us to ask: how do the mystics understand and construct the erotic in their writing? How do their lexical and semantic choices orient the (erotic) text – narrated by a woman – towards female figures?

Any attempt to establish a history of the “premodern lesbian”[3] must ensure that the material remain firmly situated in its historical context. I will depart from a foundational lexicon of the medieval literary erotic visible in both secular and religious texts. This circumvents the argument that they were “just friends” by situating the female-oriented relationships in a recognisably medieval erotic context, as well as responding to the demand for “incontrovertible evidence”[4] of sexual contact. Moments of sexual contact in twelfth or thirteenth century literature are almost never explicit, but rather implied through pre-established tropes. For example, the lover’s garden, which appears in Hildegard’s O Most Green Seedling:

Then came the time,

When you [Mary] blossomed in your branches.

Hail! Hail be to you,

Because the heat of the sun trickled through you like the scent of balsam,

Whence the dew of the sky was given upon the grass,

And made the whole world joyful,

Because that womb produced grain,

And because the birds of the sky had their nests within it.[5]

In this poem dedicated to the Virgin, Hildegard lauds Mary for conceiving and birthing Christ thereby restoring life and hope to the world, which is symbolised here through metaphors of plant growth in which Mary is the plant. Hildegard includes three key elements of the love garden trope (springtime, trees, birds) as well as follows the hierarchical ordering of description apparent in secular sources: vegetation then birds, or profusion to abundance.[6] Thus the poem is situated firmly in what scholars widely recognise as the “literary erotic space”;[7] indeed Mary’s female (human) body is itself the erotic space. We can qualify the body as female and human because of its reproductive qualities (blossoming, balsam, birth, grain) which, in the Middle Ages, were heavily associated with femininity and humanity.

Another common scenario is the lover’s embrace, examples of which can be found in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead:

In this instance, the Soul and Christ meet in the “love chamber” for a long-awaited secret tryst, and Christ asks the Soul to undress so that there might be “nothing between them.” This mirrors erotic interactions between lovers in both secular romances and the Song of Songs. Mechthild concludes the scene with a sort of “fade to black” common in secular romances when lovers meet and begin to embrace amorously: indicating that the information is not theirs or doesn’t belong in the story.[9] There are many other instances throughout the devotional poems through which the mystics construct a recognisable literary erotic space where female-oriented relationships exist.

Those are just a few examples of analytic approaches my research will take. Others will look at the affective devotional attention directed toward the female divine: minne (Lady Love), the Virgin Mary, and feminised Christ. I posit that the mystics textually construct a body for the object(s) of their affection which is indubitably human and female, suggesting they were not imagining erotic interactions with a male divinity, but a female one. Further, I will establish that textual evidence indicates that the narrators figure as female. Yet another approach will address the “lack” of sexuality in nuns’ lives: I will explore chastity (closely related to, but distinct from virginity) as a kind of “sexuality” in the medieval context. My hypothesis is that spiritual chastity embraces and encourages the possibility of erotic contact with the divine and that, in a medieval spiritual context, the mystics employ complex notions of chastity to establish the exclusivity of female bodies in this literary erotic space.

The goal of this research is to illuminate the voices of medieval female writers who composed female-oriented affective poems which are erotic in nature, establishing the very real possibilities for reading lesbian desire in history, whether or not these women are recognisably “lesbians” by today’s standard, or would have considered themselves as such. Indeed, I hope to show that this kind of desire has always existed and has been affirmed by, even flourished in, contexts we tend to think of as categorically oppressive to queer modes of desiring.

Hannah Victoria Johnson is a first year PhD student at the Sorbonne Université (STIH). Her current research takes a linguistic approach to the “lesbian” erotic in germanophone female mystical literature from the 12th to the 14th centuries. She has an upcoming publication entitled “Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction of the Female body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy” in Medieval Mobilities, and is also the co-founder of “Envisioning Visions: Medieval Mystics and the Modern Imagination”.

Image: Illumination from Hildegard’s Scivias, available from wikicommons.

[1] Ann E. Matter, “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman Identified Women in Medieval Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (1986): 81.

[2] See: Lucy Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance (Boydell & Brewer, 2020); Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Judith M. Bennett, “The L-Word in Women’s History,” in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 108-127; John Boswell, Les unions du même sexe dans l’Europe antique et médiévale, trans. Odile Demange (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1996); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1988); Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, Diane Watt (eds.), The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Blake Gutt and Alicia Spence-Hall, Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021); Anna Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Diane Watt, Women, Writing, and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100 (London/Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

[3] Giffney, Sauer, Watt, Lesbian Premodern.

[4] Ruth Vanita, “Naming Love: The God Kama, The Goddess Ganga, and the Child of Two Women,” in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. Giffney, Sauer, Watt (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011), 120.

[5] My translation. Latin source: Hildegard von Bingen, “O viridissima virga,” in Symphonia: Gedichte und Gesänge (Lateinisch und Deutsch), ed. W. Berschin & H. Schipperges (Lampert Schneider, 1995), 150.

[6] Marie-Pascale Halary, La Question de la beauté et le discours romanesque au début du XIIIe siècle (Paris : Honoré Champion, 2018), 121.

[7] Pierre Bec, “L’accès au lieu érotique : motifs et exorde dans la lyrique popularisante du moyen âge à nos jours,” in Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1981), 250.

[8] Mechthild von Magdeburg, “Chapter 44,” The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 102-103.

[9] For example : Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, ou le chevalier de la charrette, trans. C. Méla (Livre de Poche, 2016), v. 4672-4681).