Introduction

Trans people in medieval history and literature may not have understood themselves as trans in a modern sense, but transphobia – the enforcement of cisgender roles and fears of gender-nonconformity or gender change – already existed in many forms.1 It is in this sense of being subjected to transphobic judgements that two types of character emerge in literary narratives written in North-Eastern French-speaking lands between c. 1175 and 1350: the ‘bad’ trans lover and the ‘good’ trans kid.2 They occur in strikingly similar plotlines in the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar, the Latin Historia septem sapientum and the Old French Roman de Silence and Marques de Rome. The trans lover is a sexually transgressive trans feminine character who is harshly condemned in the plot and by the narrator. The trans kid is a young or infantilised individual who is accepted by both other characters and the narrator (although under strictly circumscribed conditions), and less violently punished by the narrative. Attention to these two character types contributes to medieval trans studies by broadening the range of trans characters and of expressions of transphobia considered. It also allows individual cases, such as the relatively well-studied eponymous trans kid in the Roman de Silence, to become visible as part of a broader pattern that includes Silence’s ‘evil twin’, a demonised trans lover so far marginalised in scholarship on this romance. To studies of the Seven Sages/Sindbad tradition, to which Marques, the Historia and the Mishle belong, this article contributes by identifying a significant spatiotemporal cluster of Seven Sages/Sindbad texts, by relating it to the Roman de Silence as part of its literary context, and by offering a trans reading that might also serve as a model to better understand some of its other versions.

Marques de Rome, the Roman de Silence and the Historia septem sapientum each feature the same distinctive plotline with a trans feminine lover: a courtier who had been living as a woman is outed as having a body that the other courtiers read as male, and at the same time as having had an illicit sexual relationship with a female member of the ruling family. This is a courtier called Otebon in Marques, a nun in Silence, and an empress’s attendant in the Historia. The Historia, Mishle and Silence also involve the Potiphar’s wife motif of a ‘jilted’ woman falsely accusing a boy of attempted rape, and the motif of an inability to speak or some other impediment to a declaration of innocence. The trans lover’s perceived ‘gender deviance’, that is, their deviation from either male or female cisgender norms, coincides with or leads to the supposition of ‘sexual deviance’, that is, their deviation from the norm of sexual intercourse between a husband and wife: the ruler and the assembled court see the courtier’s nude body as immediate proof of an adulterous or immoral relationship with a female member of the ruling family. Both the (presumably cis) female ruler and the trans feminine lover are quickly condemned and brutally executed in all three texts.

The trans misogyny enacted upon the trans feminine lover in Marques, Silence and the Historia stands in contrast to the positive valuation of the trans kid in Marques, Silence and the Mishle Sendebar. The trans kid is a young, naïve character who submits to their parents’ wishes and whose gender is changed without their assent: a prince drinking from a magic fountain in the embedded story ‘Strigae/Fons’ in the Mishle; the protagonist Silence in Silence; the young Otebon in Marques; and St Marin/e in one of the embedded stories in Marques. This figure can be both trans feminine (the prince in the Mishle, Otebon) and trans masculine (Silence, St Marin/e). The positive judgement by the other characters and by the narrator comes at the price of the trans kids being infantilised, objectified and placed in situations in which they lack the ability to make decisions, or to prove their innocence.

We will here investigate how both character types’ gender variance is conceptualised across different narratives in relation to their (suspected) sexual activities. While the whole of the Seven Sages/Sindbad story matter can be understood as a debate about the merits and usefulness of misogyny and the question of whether all women are devious and inferior to men, in the Historia and Marques, this discussion ends abruptly with the introduction of the trans feminine lover, whose right to life is not under debate, but immediately denied. In Silence, the protagonist is allowed to live a gender-nonconforming life, before a trans lover is introduced into the plot, only to be swiftly eradicated. We suggest that the trans lover and the trans kid exist in relation to one another, with the trans feminine lover framed as the rightful recipient of violent expressions of trans misogyny, and the trans kid released – albeit not unscathed – from the clutches of this particular form of transphobia.

Terminology

Our guiding concept throughout this article is the term ‘trans misogyny,’ which was coined by Julia Serano in Whipping Girl (2007). Serano specifies that trans misogyny relies upon both oppositional sexism (the belief in the rigid, binary and mutually exclusive categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’) and misogyny. It is combinations of ‘the delegitimization [of] gender non-conformity’ and ‘the delegitimization of femaleness and femininity’ that produce trans misogyny (Serano, 2016: xiv). We also make use of the definition of trans misogyny as laid out by Jules Gill-Peterson: ‘the targeted devaluation of both trans femininity and people perceived to be trans feminine, regardless of how they understand themselves’ (2024: 8). This clarifies that the subjects of such devaluation need not share a unified identity or position; what unifies them instead is that they are the focal point of a specific logic and its correlative violence. This logic and violence predate the contemporary period and can be observed in our corpus of texts.

What links the three fictional trans lovers from the Historia, Silence and Marques more than their gender or sexuality (about which we can only speculate) is the way in which trans misogyny as a force is acted upon them. We refer to these characters as trans feminine because of their positionality in relation to the narrators’ normative expectation, as their own understanding of their genders remain unvoiced within these texts. The commonality that they share is that their fates are controlled by the same punitive regime, one which uses the perceived contrast between their clothing and social role on the one hand, and their bodies on the other, as a sign of culpability and, necessitates their deaths to end the narrative. Introducing the rubric of trans misogyny into our analysis of these texts relieves the contemporary scholar of the burden of gendering these subjects whose lives and embodiments are either over-determined (Marques) or radically truncated and obfuscated (Silence, Historia). The same punitive logic also governs the trans kids, who are exempted from experiencing physical violence and being erased from the plot only because they meet certain conditions such as obedience, youth, sexual abstinence, and the ability to return to normative gender roles in the end.

Narratives in the North-Eastern French-speaking region

The cluster of narratives that we analyse was likely composed and copied in the French-speaking regions of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, Lorraine and Alsace, in what is now the North-East of France and the South of Belgium, between 1175 and 1350:

  1. Roman de Silence (Story of Silence), Old French romance, composed by Heldris de Cornouailles in the North-East of France, c. 1175–1225.3 The sole surviving manuscript of this romance (Nottingham, University Library, ms. WLC/LM/6) was written near the border of Artois and Flanders, c. 1200–1225.

  2. Mishle Sendebar (Tales of Sendebar), Hebrew-language version of Seven Sages/Sindbad, composed perhaps in Champagne, before c. 1215–1275. The earliest extant manuscript of this text (Oxford, Bodley Or. 135) was written in Champagne between 1215 and 1275.

  3. Marques de Rome (Mark of Rome), Old French continuation of Seven Sages/Sindbad, composed in Champagne (at the court of Guy de Dampierre) c. 1275–1300. One of the extant manuscripts (Arras, Médiathèque municipale, 657) was written in Picardy by Jean d’Amiens in 1278.4

  4. Historia septem sapientum (Story of the Seven Sages), Latin version of Seven Sages/Sindbad, composed probably in Alsace c. 1300–1342 (Roth (ed.), 2004). The earliest surviving manuscripts are from Austria. The earliest attested manuscripts from Alsace date from the late 14th and early 15th centuries (Colmar, Bibliothèque Municipale ms. 10; Strasbourg, Bibliothèque de la ville C. 83; and Strasbourg, Bibliothèque de la ville D. 73).

This clustering has become visible due to digital humanities methods. While the study of medieval literary texts is usually divided by contemporary national philologies, the Seven Sages of Rome Database (Bildhauer, Bonsall and Nöth, 2024–) comprises information about all known medieval manuscripts and prints across at least 32 languages, including a map view of the locations of text production. This has revealed the significance of North-Eastern French-speaking lands in the ‘long’ 13th century for the transmission of the Seven Sages/Sindbad material, including the Hebrew text, which its editor had presumed to originate in the South of France.5 Two other versions of the Seven Sages/Sindbad story matter – not discussed here because they do not feature the figures of the trans lover or the trans kid – are also found in this region and period. The Latin Dolopathos was composed by the Cistercian monk John of Haute-Seille in Lorraine between 1184 and 1212 and is extant, for example, in a manuscript from the Cistercian abbey of Orval in what is now Southern Belgium dating from c. 1250–1300 (Luxembourg, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. 110). The influential French Roman de Dolopathos was composed by Herbert for King Louis VIII of France between 1222 and 1225. While Louis’ kingdom – the likely place of composition – extended beyond North-Eastern French-speaking lands, the extant manuscripts include at least one written in Picardy between 1225 and 1250 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. français 1450). Together, these witnesses indicate the importance of the region for the transmission of the Seven Sages/Sindbad material between the late 12th and the mid-14th centuries, and an interest in trans characters that goes beyond this narrative tradition.

We are not suggesting that the Mishle, Silence, Marques and the Historia directly influenced each other, as we know too little of the circumstances of production for each of them. The motif of the outed and condemned trans lover in Silence, Marques and the Historia, however, is so specific that it is not likely to have arisen independently in three different books. It must have been part of the cultural imaginary and the oral narrative traditions of North-Eastern French-speaking lands in the late 12th to early 14th century, shared across the courts, monasteries and perhaps Jewish schools where it was written down. Other stories of gender change such as the French epic Yde et Olive were also written in this region during this period, though of course in many other places and times, too, betraying a broad cultural interest in this motif. The specific constellation of plot points found in Silence, Marques and the Historia, however, is distinct from those tales.

While it is hard to date the texts in a consecutive order, the embedded story in the Mishle Sendebar that features the trans kid motif (known as ‘Fons/Strigae’, The Fountain/The Witches) is an adaptation of two stories that are attested in the earliest extant version of the Seven Sages/Sindbad story matter: the Byzantine Greek Σιντίπας (Syntipas) from the late 11th century. In this sense, this is the oldest securely dated tale discussed here. This is also the storyline in which trans misogyny is least violently expressed in the plot. The version condemning the trans feminine lover to the most brutal death is also almost certainly the latest: the Historia from the first half of the 14th century.

It may have been precisely the motif of gender change that attracted audiences in this region to the Seven Sages/Sindbad material as well as to the Silence story matter. The stories all feature at least one trans character, but each time do not simply copy the same character, but create a different gender change plotline. This suggests that it is the gender change itself rather than anything else about that character or motif that interests the adaptors. The same pattern of a consistent interest in gender change across different plotlines can be observed throughout the Seven Sages/Sindbad transmission. Most versions, with the notable exception of the ‘A’ versions, feature at least one trans character in the frame narrative or in embedded stories like ‘Iuvenis femina’ (The young woman), ‘Voluptaria’ (The pleasure-seeking woman), ‘Heres regni’ (The king’s heir), ‘Tonstrix’ (The female barber) and ‘Creditor’ (The creditor), the latter found in the Latin and French Dolopathos. What remains constant across these tales is an interest in gender variance.

In the following, we will discuss the four narratives in roughly chronological order and focusing on the six trans characters: the trans kid in the Mishle; both the trans kid and the trans lover in Silence; two trans kids, one of which turns into a trans lover, in Marques; and the trans lover in the Historia. In each case we will highlight the confluence between transphobia and misogyny and between perceived gender variance and sexual deviance, as well as the conditions for an acceptance of trans kids and the concurrent condemnation of trans lover in the stories.

Mishle Sendebar

The trans kid

A trans kid portrayed empathetically is found in the Mishle Sendebar in the embedded story ‘Fons/Strigae’, told by the king’s consort. This trans girl, transformed after drinking from a magic spring, is acceptable both to the narrator and to the other characters, even when she is sexually active outside of marriage. At the start of the brief narrative, the young person is introduced as the King of Bozrah’s only son, whom his father does not allow to leave the city. We do not find out his age, but he must be old enough to get married, and young enough to still be unmarried and in his father’s control. Having successfully begged his father to be allowed to go hunting with his counsellor, he gets lost in a field. The counsellor returns without him and tells the king the lie that a lion ate his son. The son meanwhile encounters a beautiful maiden who promises to help him, but who turns out to be a demon. The boy observes her having sex with other demons, and overhears her tell them that she will bring them the boy for their amusement. The frightened kid manages to scare the demon by invoking god, and she is thrown from her horse and dies. Lost in the field again, the kid chances upon a fountain with gender-changing effect:

והשותה ממנו נקבה תשוב לזכר וזכר ולנקבה. והוא לא ידע וישת מן המעיין

.וי(ה)פך לנקבה

…females who drank (from it) became males, and males who drank became females. Now he knew nothing of this and he drank from the fountain and was transformed into a female (Epstein (ed. and trans.), 1967: 159).

The kid turns not into a human woman, but into a female demon, now referred to with ‘she’ pronouns in the text. She spots some maidens and starts ‘cavorting’ with them:

שנחקת

(Epstein (ed. and trans.), 1967: 152–3).

One maiden offers to help her to return home if she promises to marry her, and the kid does so. The kid then drinks again and ‘became a male as before’:

יהי זכר כבראשונה

(Epstein (ed. and trans.), 1967: 160–1).

At this point the narrator also reverts to using male pronouns for him. The maiden guides the kid home, he tells his father everything, and the father orders to execute the counsellor.

The kid’s gender variance here falls together with sexual promiscuity. While watching the demons’ sexual activities initially frightens the youth, she starts having sex with other female characters immediately after the gender change. The narrator does not pass any judgement on the ‘lesbian’ sex nor on the gender change, simply switching pronouns without further comment. Instead, the narrator guides the recipients’ sympathies towards the kid and against the first demon and the counsellor. The youth is the protagonist and main focaliser from whose perspective the recipients see some of the plot, especially at the start of the narrative. The narrator, the king’s consort, in her interpretation of the story paints the lying counsellor as the villain of the tale, advising the king not to trust counsellors. While her other stories often aim at discrediting sons, she makes no such suggestion here. The narrator also presents the first demon negatively, as an enemy of God who betrays and threatens the prince, and whose sudden change of appearance and behaviour reveals her to be the stereotypical misogynistic fantasy of a femme fatale, an attractive girl who turns out to be sexually promiscuous, dangerous and demonic. The narrator, however, does not judge the kid for trusting her, nor for repeating this problematic behaviour by trusting the second demon. On the contrary, the plot rewards the kid’s continued naivety when the second demon delivers on her promise and guides the kid back to his father. Nor does the father judge what he hears about his child’s behaviour, gender change, extramarital sexual activities and acquisition of a bride of unknown, possibly demonic, origin. He instead instantly sides with his child against the counsellor.

This trans kid is allowed more room to change gender, become demonic and be sexually active than the characters in the French and Latin texts under consideration. The trans demon girl is not condemned for her gender variance or sexual variance, or even for her change into a different supernatural species. Trans misogyny is still in operation here, however, insofar as this variance is only allowed to exist within specific parameters: without the character’s clear intention or even assent, in a remote location outside the city with supernatural elements, and during a limited (presumably short) period of time, at the transition from youth to married life, before the cisheteropatriarchal order is reinstated at the end. Having been changed accidentally by magic and then having had lesbian demonic sex, the girl jumps at the opportunity to return to the paternal court and to the male gender which the narrator initially assigned to them, suggesting that she prefers the role of a son. The kid returns not only to his initial male gender, but at the same time to what is described not as his home or family, but specifically as his father, and his father’s house. The king immediately aims to take control over and identify the culprit of the events by punishing the counsellor. The story ends here, at the moment when the kid has reverted to his role as a son in the patriarchal household. Though it is not clear if he will make good on his promise to marry the demon, the text mentions no other future scenario either, such as a return to female or non-binary gender. This suggests that his assumption of the role of heterosexual cisgender husband is likely, albeit with a wife of unknown origin.

Le Roman de Silence

The trans kid in Silence

The protagonist in Silence is also a trans kid – though a trans masculine one – who is similarly presented empathetically. At the onset of the story, King Ebain bans female inheritance, so a young couple conspire to declare their child a boy regardless of the baby’s anatomy. The baby’s gender is deliberately misassigned at birth, and the child, named Silence, is proclaimed male. Silence is then brought up as a boy and proves himself as a successful jongleur and later knight. The youthfulness of this character is constantly reiterated throughout the text. He is referred to as an ‘enfant’ (‘child’) from the moment of birth (Heldris, 2023: l. 1784) until he is knighted, aged 17-and-a-half (Heldris, 2023: l. 5128, 5132).6 So ubiquitous is this characterisation of Silence that even when he is falsely accused of raping the queen, the king brushes off this assault as having happened ‘par enfance’ (‘because of youthfulness’, Heldris, 2023: l. 4237), a construction that exculpates Silence of both agency and intentionality within this action. That the queen’s accusation is false does not alter the fact that youth, masculinity and innocence are bound together in both this romance and its eponymous protagonist.

Later in the romance, Silence is charged with the impossible task of catching the sorcerer Merlin, a feat that can only be accomplished by ‘engien de feme’ (‘woman’s ingenuity’, Heldris, 2023: l. 5803). Silence succeeds and finds himself stripped alongside a nun, the trans lover figure whom we will discuss in more detail below. In this moment, Silence’s body is read as proof of his inability to rape. He is thereby found innocent of the queen’s accusation. Though the text does not overtly punish Silence for his gender variance, the ending of the text enacts a form of discipline on the young knight by obliging him to become a woman. His body is transformed by the allegorical figure of Nature, who reinstates her control over it, and he is forced to marry his great-uncle, the king. Silence’s supposed virginity transforms him into the ideal surrogate bride to replace an adulterous queen. Though this represents an example of trans masculine embodiment employed as proof of chastity and innocence, Silence’s gender variance is nonetheless violently corrected by the end of the text.

Though valued positively throughout the romance, the trans kid’s innocence relies on the logics of trans misogyny. Silence’s visual proof of innocence rests on the assumption that he is a woman, and that women cannot rape. Neither the narrator nor the characters consider the possibility that Silence could have sexually assaulted the queen regardless of his anatomy. Naked, Silence’s culpability is rendered unfathomable. As with Marin/e, discussed in more detail below, the price for not being condemned is a misogynistic diminishing of the sexual agency of all but cis men.

The trans lover in Silence

Silence features not only an empathetically portrayed trans kid, but also, more briefly right at the denouement of the romance, a trans feminine lover: the nun who is disrobed together with Silence and accused of being the queen’s lover. The revelation of the lover’s gender variance and their sexual deviance occurs in the same short passage. There is no room for one to exist without the other. At the end of the narrative, after Silence has captured Merlin, Merlin is brought to the court and, to the infuriation of the king and the court, cannot stop laughing at all that he witnesses. The nun is first figured as part of a crowd who heckle, push and shove Merlin in exasperation at his behaviour. The nun joins in with the throng and mocks him: ‘Oho! fait ele, quel truant! / Confaite prophesie il dist!’ (‘“Oho”, she said, “what a wretch, what prophecies he pronounces!”’, Heldris, 2023: ll. 6250–1). It is in this moment that Merlin notices the nun and begins to laugh again. He has laughed, too, at the queen, at Silence, and at himself, though he refuses to divulge the source of his mirth. It is only after being threatened by the king with three days of imprisonment that Merlin finally sets out to explain his outbursts. From then on, the nun’s fate is tied to that of Silence, as Merlin pairs them together through their clothing: ‘Li doi de nos, cho sachiés vos,/ ont escarnis les ii. de nos,/ Sos fainte vesteüre et vaine’ (‘Two of us, you should know, have shamed the other two, through feigned and meaningless garb’, Heldris, 2023: l. 6484).7 Silence and the nun are framed as shaming or mocking two other characters, though which two out of the King, Queen and Merlin is not clear from this utterance.

As this episode progresses, Silence realises in horror that by capturing Merlin, he has inadvertently ensnared himself in a trap from which he cannot escape, as his clothing will be under scrutiny too, and his history of gender variance is about to be revealed to all. The nun cowers. Unlike Silence’s, the nun’s fear is framed as an addendum to that of the queen, whose physical and emotional reaction is reported in detail (Heldris, 2003: ll. 6433–7). The nun is given a single line of interiority: ‘Et li none forment s’esmaie’ (‘The nun was also very frightened’, Heldris 2023: l. 6438). The spectators at court (whom we might assume to be cisgender) experience their own dread that Merlin’s final speech will reveal their wrongs and misdeeds. Their fear is expressed in the same terms: ‘Cil de la cort s’esmaient fort’ (‘Those at court were very frightened’, Heldris 2023: l. 6497). The nun who appeared from a crowd still seems to echo its sentiments, through the repetition of the verb esmaier with an intensifier. The thoughts of each character, even those of the nameless crowd are painted in more detail than that of the nun. Unlike the queen (or Silence), the nun is not individuated, but a member of the court who has been singled out.8 She is merely a nun who is not like the other nuns (Heldris, 2023: ll. 6512–3), an opposition so vague as to allow a reader to conjure any manner of sinful behaviour, embodiment or godlessness onto her.

At the end of Merlin’s speech to the court, both Silence and the nun are stripped at the order of the king: ‘La nonain: sil fait despollier (…) / et Silence despollier roeve’ (‘he ordered the nun to be stripped (…) and Silence to be stripped’, Heldris, 2023: ll. 6570–1). In the manuscript at least one line is omitted immediately after the nun is disrobed. The line ‘La nonain: sil fait despollier’ is missing its rhymed counterpart, though the sentence is grammatically complete on its own. The denuded body of the trans lover is not described in the text; if such a description ever existed, it has been redacted. This missing line perhaps echoes the rubbed out nude miniature of Silence in the single extant manuscript ( Figure 1), an ambiguous image further obscured through material damage. Any obvious outward signs of physical gender have been effaced through damage to the miniature, though as Christopher T. Richards suggests, this image may never have depicted a legibly binary body (Richards, 2025: 28).

Figure 1:
Figure 1:

Silence’s illegible nude body. Silence. Nottingham, University Library, ms. WLC/LM/6, fol. 222v (detail).

In the case of the nun and Silence, the gender-variant body beneath the unambiguously gendered clothing remains unfixed and obscure. Unusually for the garrulous and bombastic narrator of Silence, he defers his definitional authority over these two nude bodies, declaring: ‘Tost si com Merlins dist les troves’ (‘It was found to be exactly as Merlin said’, Heldris, 2023: l. 6572). Though Merlin had declared Silence to be a ‘meschine’ (‘young girl’, Heldris, 2023: l. 6536), he has made no such determining statement in relation to the nun. Though the body of the nun remains ambiguous (through avoidance or erasure), it is used unambiguously as evidence of the queen’s infidelity. That the lover is here more specifically a nun adds a further element of immorality to her presumed sexual relationship, as members of religious orders took vows of chastity. Gender variance here becomes an irrefutable sign of sexual deviance, and leads to the execution of both women. Even the nun’s mode of death is left undetermined by the text. Unlike the queen, who is drawn and quartered, the nun is merely described as ‘deffaite’ (‘brought to an end’; literally ‘undone’, Heldris, 2023: l. 6655), rendering her death invisible, unmournable, unnoticed.

The depiction of the nun in the text is rife with lacunae, gaps that can be projected onto by medieval and contemporary audiences alike. The violence of this ending is habitually understated in scholarship of the romance.9 Because the nun’s stripping coincides with Silence’s, she is mostly mentioned in a cursory fashion in the analysis of the significance of this scene to Silence (Jewers, 1997: 93; Ringer, 1994: 11–2.) Though the text is often described as misogynistic, the trans misogyny of the nun’s death is completely elided. Whilst Silence’s gender has been parsed under a variety of rubrics over the years, scholarship regularly portrays the trans lover as simply ‘a man disguised as a nun’, and this disguise is framed as being in aid of ‘gain(ing) sexual access to women’ (Ravenhall, 2022: 74; Kinoshita, 1995: 408). The concatenation of gender variance and sexual deviance is sustained here by the critic, who, in reading gender variance as disguise, presents the nun’s gender as merely a means to an end, ascribing motive where none is provided by the text.

Marques de Rome

The trans kid turning trans lover in Marques de Rome

In Marques de Rome, a continuation of The Seven Sages set some years later at the court of the emperor’s grown-up son from The Seven Sages, the lover figure is given more consideration than in the other texts that contain this trope (cf. McCracken, forthcoming). This figure is introduced, though briefly, at the very beginning of this romance-like text when still a trans kid (Foehr-Janssens, 2023: 13-14). A young lady in the entourage of the empress decides to bring her young son with her to Rome:

Une en i ot de ces .VI, qui seignor avoit eü et l’en estoit remes .I. filz; cil filz avoit entor .IIII. anz. La demoisele ne le volt pas lessier, ainz l’en amena ovuec soi et ovuec sa dame a Rome (Panvini (ed.), 1993: 42).

One of these six (women) had had a husband, and a son remained (from this marriage); this boy was around four years old. The young lady did not want to leave him, so she brought him with her and her lady to Rome.

This child is brought to a gender-segregated space, the women’s quarters at court, to enable continued proximity to the mother. After much action and several years have passed in the elaborate and protracted frame narrative, the child, whose name is now given as Otebon, has grown up amongst the women in the chambers of the new empress of Rome. After the death of Otebon’s mother at an unknown juncture, the empress takes on the child as her ‘norriz’ (‘ward’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 220) and hides the existence of the child from her husband. Later, the emperor and empress’s own daughter, who was being raised by a chatelain, returns to court at the age of twelve to live in the empress’s quarters, and she and Otebon start a sexual relationship. Unlike in Silence, the illicit relationship is reported in text, as opposed to inferred from the body alone. Although Otebon is described as a ‘lou’ (‘wolf’) and the daughter a ‘berbiz’ (‘sheep’), the relationship between the two young lovers is portrayed as reciprocal (Panvini (ed.), 1993: 220). Chiasmic constructions such as ‘et se jooit au valleton, et le valletons a li’ (‘and (she) played with the boy, and the boy with her’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 220) depict a parity of desire and agency.

When her daughter becomes pregnant, the empress takes the opportunity to incriminate Marques, who is the only man officially allowed in the empress’s chambers. She instructs her daughter to implicate Marques to protect herself from being punished for allowing Otebon to live amongst the women. This accusation precipitates a Seven Sages-style exchange of stories between the sages and the empress, as Marques’ life hangs in the balance. After the stories have been told, the sages study the moon and discover that the ‘malfeteurs’ (‘wrongdoer’) is hidden in the empress’s chambers (Panvini (ed.), 1993: 272). On hearing this, the empress dresses Otebon in women’s clothes: ‘si li fist vestir robe de feme et l’acesma molt gentement’ (‘She made him dress in women’s clothes and adorned him elegantly’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 272). Once in these clothes Otebon is described as more feminine than the women in the chamber: ‘ainz resemble mielz feme, que demoisele nule, qui i fust’ (‘in this way he looked more like a woman than any of the women who were there’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 272). Otebon’s womanly appearance queerly echoes the superlative language of the romance heroine, who is often presented with comparative language that foregrounds her exceptional and superior qualities. This evaluation is borne out in the text, as, in searching the empress’s chambers, the sages cannot find the culprit they seek.

So indistinguishable is Otebon from the other women that a line-up of ‘les damoiseles l’emperiz’ (‘the empress’s ladies’) is brought before Marques, the emperor and the barons (Panvini (ed.), 1993: 274). In this extraordinary scene all the women (save the empress and her daughter) are evaluated by their appearance, voice, and movement. Like in Silence, the anxiety that any woman could be a man underneath her clothes is figured in this episode of judgment, which irrevocably connects gender variance with sexual deviance. It becomes clear that Otebon not only looks like a woman, but speaks like one too. It is at this moment in the interrogation that Marques experiences ‘grant peor’ (‘great fear’), as he will not be able to prove he did not impregnate the emperor’s daughter, if he fails to find the true culprit (Panvini (ed.), 1993: 274). It is only the final test, walking from one end of the room to the other, which differentiates Otebon from the other women through ‘grant pas et la jambe, qu’il gitoit plus loing qu nule des autres’ (‘large steps and legs, which he extended out further than any of the others’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 276). Marques seizes upon this difference and demands Otebon be stopped and stripped.

Unlike in Silence, the ambiguity of Otebon’s gender provokes enough doubt in those present that the stripping of clothes is deemed too risky to undertake in public. The emperor, who has been instructed by his barons that he should ‘garder entre .II. jambes’ (‘look between the legs’) takes the youth to a private chamber to be denuded ‘seul a seul’ (‘one to one’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 276). Alone with Otebon, the emperor strips the youth, finding ‘tel signe, qui ne li plut mie’ (‘such a sign that did not please him at all’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 276). This sign acts as proof not only of the gender of the naked person who is discovered to be, in the narrator’s eyes, ‘.1. hom vestuz de robe de feme’ (‘a man dressed in women’s clothing’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 276), but also enables the king to perceive his treatment of Marques and the seven sages as unfair, and to finally discern his wife’s disloyalty. This is not the first evidence presented before the emperor of his wife’s nefarious behaviour; amongst other wrongdoings, he has witnessed her upend courtly customs, undermine the court’s civic responsibilities, attempt to cut off Marques’ hand and demand Marques’ execution under false pretences. Yet in a narrative rife with imperial prevarication, the nude body of Otebon induces a state beyond doubt in the emperor for the very first time.

Finally, in an act of boastful violence, the emperor brings the naked youngster before court, and asks ‘Seigneur, a il ci beau joel? Est ce beaux tresors a garder es chambre a dames?’ (‘My Lords, is this here a beautiful jewel? Is this a beautiful treasure to be kept in the women’s chambers?’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 276). This outburst models Sara Ahmed’s definition of trans misogyny, in that it frames trans femininity as a ‘monstrous parody of an already monstrous femininity’ (Ahmed, 2016: 29). The evocation of jewels as a symbol of feminine adornment, material value, or as a stand-in for the beauty of a woman herself, is deployed by the emperor with cruel irony. The youth, beyond sparking the clarity that enables the story to come to a close, holds no value to the emperor. Though Otebon can less readily be understood under the rubric ‘trans’, having lived as a boy amongst women until he is dressed as a woman at the empress’s behest shortly before being killed, the treatment of this figure at the end of the text is undoubtedly steeped in trans misogyny. The retribution provoked by Otebon is swift. A pyre is immediately set outside the city where the empress and Otebon are both to be burnt. As the pair are transported to their deaths, the reader is not reminded of the sexual misconduct which led to this moment, that the emperor’s daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, but instead that Otebon is ‘vestu de robe a feme’ (‘dressed in women’s clothing’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 278). Significantly, in this narrative, the trans lover’s method of execution is the same as the empress’s: burning. Indeed, in some manuscripts, such as Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Français 93 (Figure 2), this burning scene is illustrated with Otebon unquestionably depicted as woman in a dress, standing beside the empress on a scaffold beside the fire.

Figure 2:
Figure 2:

The execution of the empress and Otebon. Chanson de Marques. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Français 93, fol. 59v (detail).

Although Otebon’s role at the close of Marques de Rome is comparable with that of the trans lover in Silence, he begins it as a trans kid, equivalent to Silence himself. Otebon is introduced into the narrative with the same tropes as the trans kid, by being depicted as an innocent party to gender manipulation by a member of the parental generation. There are many more avenues for sympathy for this character, who was brought to court as a young child, whose mother died, and who was kept hidden in the women’s quarters. It is this long history that individuates Otebon and makes clear that he had little choice in life. Indeed, rather than Otebon, it is the empress who may attract the audience’s negative judgement for attempting to hide him, for suggesting he wear a dress and for making her daughter lie in accusing Marques, in a manner that resonates with misogynistic clichés of devious women. Though he also engages in extra-marital sex, this relationship is framed by the narrator as a consensual, inevitable and even natural result of the empress’ decisions. In this sense, Otebon is different from the figure of the trans lover in Silence and the Historia, and rather resembles the figure of the trans kid elsewhere in Marques and Silence and in the Mishle. Nonetheless, Otebon is executed at the end of the story specifically as a trans lover. In a text of imperial failure to make decisions, it appears that only the trope of the executed trans lover can restore order and bring the narrative to its conclusion.

The trans kid in Marques

In Marques de Rome, one of the embedded stories told by the sage Anxilles concerns Saint Marin/e, whose biography mirrors Otebon’s. Marin/e is assigned female at birth but lives as a monk due to his father’s wishes. Though he never engages in any sexual activities, he is falsely accused of fathering a child, which would be immoral both in sense of being extramarital and violating a monk’s vow of chastity. Marin accepts without complaint his unjust punishment for this transgression that he did not commit. When Marin dies, his body is discovered to have ‘les mameles et tout ce que feme doit avoir’ (‘breasts and all that a woman must have’, Panvini (ed.), 1993: 236). This discovery exonerates Marin and the monk is sainted, and referred to as a ‘pucele vierge’ (‘virgin girl’) in a statement that reframes the adult monk in terms of gender, age and chastity (Panvini (ed.), 1993: 236). St Marin/e offers a narrative in which gender variance is used as proof against the accusation of sexual deviance (sex outside of marriage, sex with the clergy).

Despite the familiar idealisation of the trans saint, it is never considered that despite having an anatomy construed as female, Marin actually could have sex with a woman. The price for his gender variance not being judged negatively is his presumed sexual abstinence: the erasure of the possibility of two women having sex with each other, or of a trans man having sex with a cis woman. The impossibility of Marin impregnating the young woman is transformed into the impossibility of Marin ever being able to have sex with a woman. His gender variance here is not only lauded, but acts as proof – of abstinence and forbearance – within the evidentiary framework of sainthood. Just as his clothes are removed in death, so too is his acquired role as monk, his gender and even the years he has lived. This infantilises the adult monk, reversing time to turn him back into a (female) virgin child.

The infantilisation of Marin is also expressed in what is omitted from this retelling of the saint’s vita. Typically, Marin is figured raising the child whom he is falsely accused of fathering.10 Although, in Marques, the baby is placed in Marin’s arms when the family complains of the pregnancy, this child does not feature again in the narrative. The depiction of Marin’s hardship and lack are recounted in the singular, and the child disappears from the story. The appropriation of this devotional material to plead Marques’ innocence necessitates not only this truncating of the story-matter, but a reorientation of the reader’s focus away from Marin’s paternal forbearance and his self-sacrificing role in bringing up a child in destitution. Anxilles instead highlights the haste with which the parents of the pregnant woman and the monks believe her accusation, shortening the time frame. Rather than as a father, Marin is here depicted as a child, rendering his gender variance acceptable.

Historia septem sapientum

The trans lover in the Historia

In a strikingly similar scene to the nun’s outing in Silence, a trans lover in the Historia septem sapientum is outed and then dispatched. Again, the revelation of the lover’s gender variance and their sexual deviance occur at the same time and mutually confirm each other. Again, the episode takes place at the end of a long narrative, which, as is typical of the Seven Sages/Sindbad story matter, centres on a female ruler’s sexual deviance, specifically her sexual assault on her male partner’s young son. This violence gives her the role of a sexual aggressor, which is traditionally associated with male gender. The victim-survivor initially chooses not to reveal the fact that he was sexually assaulted because he believes in a horoscope that had predicted that speaking during a period of a week would endanger his life. Even when he permits himself to speak again, he does not disclose the assault, but instead asks for the queen to appear ‘coram omnibus (…) cum omnes dominas et domicellas’ (‘in front of everyone (…) with all her ladies-in-waiting and maids’, Roth (ed.), 2004: I, 423). He then picks out a woman not from the general crowd at court as in Silence, but specifically from the group of female attendants surrounding the queen: the one in the green dress, whom he asks to be stripped. This woman, like the nun in Silence, is not individuated: we hear nothing about her feelings, her body or her features, other than the colour of her dress. The emperor, however, recognises her as the empress’ favourite maid. That the stripping is an act of violation is emphasised in the text, with the emperor initially refusing on grounds of decorum, not wanting to shame a woman in public. He only agrees when the son threatens to undress the attendant himself. The discomfort is dispelled and the violation justified, with the victim turning culprit, when this woman is now outed as a man:

Cum vero spoliata fuisset, vir erat. Omnes eum videntes ammirati sunt. ‘Ecce, domine’, inquit filius, ‘ribaldus iste toto tempore eam in camera tua adulterauit’ (Roth (ed.), 2004: I. 423–24).

When she was truly undressed in front of everyone, there was a man. All who saw him were astonished. ‘See, my lord’, the son said, ‘this rascal all along committed adultery with her in your bedroom.’

This character, who has been living as a woman, is exposed as gender deviant and sexually deviant at the same time. The fact that this is ‘a man’ is obvious to everybody – presumably because of visible physical features read as male, though again the otherwise outspoken narrator does not describe her body in any detail and even leaves it to the son to identify her adultery. That this woman is picked out from a group without having been individuated suggests a certain transphobic paranoia, the idea that underneath every woman’s dress might lurk a penis.

While the gender variance of the physical features is left curiously unspecific, echoing the lack of detail in Silence, the gender assignment by the narrator and ‘all who saw him’ is clear: this is ‘a man’. This transgression is immediately conflated with the more familiar moral transgression of sexual deviance, specifically adultery. The knowledge that this is ‘a man’ immediately proves to the court that this attendant engaged in sex, and in extramarital sex with the empress at that. The fact that the son uses male nouns and pronouns in his accusation once again erases any possibility that the sex between these two people living as women could be read as anything other than heterosexual. There is no logical explanation for how the prince who makes the revelation might have come to know this, seeing that he had been away from court; nor does the assembled court ask for any proof. The point seems to be that gender deviance and sexual deviance always coincide. Perhaps the moral outrage at gender deviance would be hard to categorise and punish. If the maid had simply been living as a woman, what would be her crime? Yet trans misogyny requires that she must be punished. Making her an adulteress provides a neat reason for doing so.

This gender deviant and sexually deviant character, moreover, is almost instantly eradicated from the text again as soon as she is mentioned. The emperor immediately wants to execute both lover and empress, but the son asks him to delay for one more story, and then to give both transgressors a proper trial. This happens, and then the empress is burned and the lover drawn and quartered, which forms the conclusion of the narrative. While the lover is executed in a more spectacular fashion than in Silence, the main plot requirement – resulting from trans misogynistic panic – seems to be that the lover has to disappear. Her sudden introduction into the narrative, as in Marques, allows the emperor to finally make up his mind and punish his wife, but the suddenness and brutality of their execution might also give us pause to think about the force with which transphobic and misogynistic structures are enforced here, especially as the narrative as a whole is centrally concerned with warning the emperor against taking rash decisions that he may regret.

Conclusion

Our discussion of the plot motifs of trans lovers and trans kids has revealed a surprising consistency of these characters over several different narratives. Trans women – the nun in Silence, Otebon at the end of Marques and the empress’s maid in the Historia – show up out of nowhere from groups of women, are accused of extramarital sex, punished and killed off as swiftly as they have emerged. Trans kids who are assigned their trans gender by their parents and who abstain from sex are judged positively: Silence in Silence, and young Otebon and St Marin/e in Marques. And a trans girl is even allowed to have premarital sex – albeit in a heavily circumscribed time and space – in the Mishle. The structures of trans misogyny are at work most obviously in the violent deaths of the trans lovers, but also present in the restrictions placed on trans kids.

Bildhauer (forthcoming) has read some of the trans characters in the Historia and the Mishle as embodiments of the instabilities of traditional gender roles that is at the core of the Seven Sages/Sindbad frame narrative’s plot: the sexual assault committed by a woman against a boy. Our reading here has not reduced the characters to functions within a cisheteronormative system, but has considered them in their own right, making their violent deaths, compulsory chastity and reduction to anatomical gender even more disturbing. In these texts, trans misogyny requires little justification. In fact, it enables the swift implementation of traditional misogyny as well. The executions at the ends of Silence, Marques and the Historia are all double, the fate of the trans lover and her cis ally (her suspected paramour in the Historia and Silence, and her surrogate mother in Marques) are irrevocably tied together. Trans misogyny and misogyny are thus intimately and causally linked in these texts.

Notes

  1. For basic parameters of medieval trans studies, see Wingard 2023; DeVun, 2021; LaFleur, Raskolnikov and Kłosowska (eds.) 2021; Spencer-Hall and Gutt (eds.), 2021; Maillet, 2020. ⮭
  2. We use the term ‘kid’ here despite its informality to acknowledge that these characters vary in age and life stage, and may not conform to normative life courses. The term kid is also used in organising by trans youth in both the USA and the UK (for example, Trans Kids Deserve Better), a choice made within the community, rather than imposed upon them. ⮭
  3. There has been debate as to the dating of Silence, which has moved from the originally suspected second half of the 13th century (Thorpe, 1972) to the first quarter of the 13th (Stones, 2010), with now some scholars now making the case for the final quarter of the 12th century (Ravenhall, 2022). ⮭
  4. Two further manuscripts are found in libraries in this region, suggesting they might also have originated there, though this is speculative (Mons, Bibliothèque publique, 330/215, XIII, written in France in 1300–1333; and Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts, cadre 882, nos III-VI, XIV, written in France in 1300–1400). ⮭
  5. Epstein had postulated an origin in the South of France for the earliest manuscript (Oxford, Bodley Or. 135; Epstein, 1967: 13), though the Bodleian library catalogue now lists it as originating in Champagne, home to prominent centres of Jewish learning such as Troyes. ⮭
  6. Translations from all French and Latin texts are the authors’ own. ⮭
  7. This line has been translated by Regina Psaki as ‘beneath a false and lying dress’ (Heldris, 1991: 174); and Roche-Mahdi as ‘by wearing borrowed finery’ (Heldris, 1992: 305). ⮭
  8. A similar episode occurs in the ‘Grisandole’ episode of the Vulgate Cycle. In this narrative, however, the trans lover is not a singular figure, but multiplied to comprise all of the empress’s twelve attendants, suggesting a similar transphobic fears of every woman potentially turning out to be ‘really’ a man (Sommer (ed.), 1908: 282–293). ⮭
  9. An exception to this trend exists in Katie Keene’s article examining the topos of the evil queen in Silence. In her analysis, she scrutinises the accusation against the queen in comparison to other scenes of adultery in romance, concluding: ‘We do not know if the two were ever alone together, and no proof exists of their implied intimacy’ (Keene, 2004: 12). ⮭
  10. For several examples of Old French vitae of Marin/e, see Clugnet 1906, pp. 150–191. ⮭

Competing Interests

One of the authors is also an editor for this Special Collection and has been kept entirely separate from the peer review process for their article.

References

Editions of medieval texts

Clugnet, L (ed.) 1906 Vie et Office de Sainte Marine (Textes Latins, Grec, Coptes, Arabes, Syriaques, Haut-Allemand, Bas-Allemand et Français. Paris: Picard.

Epstein, M (ed.) 1967 Tales of Sendebar (Mishle Sendebar): An Edition and Translation of the Hebrew Version of the Seven Sages, Based on Unpublished Manuscripts. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.

Heldris de Cornuälle 1972 Le roman de Silence: A Thirteenth-century Arthurian Verse-romance. Thorpe, L (ed.). Cambridge: Heffer.

Heldris de Cornuälle 1991 Le Roman de Silence. Psaki, R (trans.). New York: Garland.

Heldris de Cornuälle 1992 Silence: A Thirteenth-century French Romance. Roche-Mahdi, S (ed. and trans.). East Lansing, MD: Michigan State University Press.

Heldris de Cornouailles 2023 Le Roman de Silence. James-Raoul, D (ed.). Paris: Champion.

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Roth, D (ed.) 2004 Historia septem sapientum: Überlieferung und textgeschichtliche Edition. 2 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Sommer, H O (ed.) 1908 The Vulgate Version of Arthurian Romances Edited from Manuscripts in the British Museum, II, L’Estoire de Merlin. Washington: Carnegie Institution.

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