Welcome to episode 1! It’s been a long time coming, but we’re excited to share our first episode with you. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
This week, I spoke with Dr. Alicia Spencer-Hall, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London whose work brings together hagiography and fandom, celebrity and material culture. She is the author of Medieval Saints, Modern Screens, and the co-editor, with Blake Gutt, of the recent collection Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. We talk about her work on gender fluidity in medieval hagiography, the importance of paying attention to lived experience in history, and how non-normative experiences of time can give us new ways to survive– and maybe thrive?– in the academy.
Listen here.
Overview
Hagiography is one of the first things many people learn about when they encounter the medieval period, but it often gets a bad reputation. As a genre, hagiography tends to be written by (male) clerics for a particular purpose- spiritual instruction, or demonstrating a particular lesson. For this reason, it can feel more indirect- and more stuffy- than a lot of medieval works.
But as we discuss in this episode, hagiography can be many other things- silly, scary, and frequently completely wild! Stories of saints’ lives provided entertainment in the medieval period, and still do so today. They also, importantly, provide some clear examples of trans representation, both autobiographical and from observations by historians, that help build a history of transness in the medieval period.
Recommended Reading
Hagiography
Medieval hagiography is a crowded field, one that has a plenitude of stories and approaches.
The Medieval French Hagiography Project restores focus on vernacular hagiography of the medieval period, attempting to rectify some of the gaps that exist in current hagiographical knowledge.
Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Literature
As prominent medieval queer theorists have pointed out, it is difficult to recover a history if it is assumed to be nonexistent in the first place. The work of recovering trans stories in a medieval context is being done in a variety of fields, from literary studies to sociology and history.
A starting point is Gabrielle Bychowski’s essay “Were There Trans People in the Middle Ages?”, which dispels some of the usual myths about medieval trans subjects.
Blake Gutt’s article “Transgender Mutation and the Canon: Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune” focuses on a prominent French writer best known for another work, The City of Ladies, and the narrator’s experience desiring another gender. In doing so, it takes up the problem of canonicity: medieval literature must be read outside the canon, Gutt argues, in order to recover trans experience.
Last but not least, the anthology mentioned in the episode, edited by Gutt and Spencer-Hall, Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, which is out now. The accompanying language guide, which outlines gender-inclusive language to use when speaking about medieval and modern trans subjects, can be found here.
Capital-A Academia
This piece by Liz Bowen in Post45, about being disabled and on the academic job market. (Check out the whole Post45 pain cluster here.)
Maybe the work itself is the problem for many of our bodies; maybe the work we’re good at, good enough to do, isn’t work we are capable of doing at the pace and volume currently demanded of those who do it. Maybe that’s still too terrifying a prospect for many of us to admit.
“Escape from New York” in Contingent Magazine, about Columbia University’s response to the pandemic and the ignoring of grad student labor.
Alicia’s website is here: medievalshewrote.com You can find her first book, which is open-access, here.