Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages w/ Melanie Holcomb & Nancy Thebaut
Spirits: Mythology, Legends, & Folklore
Multitude
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You might not think about love, sex, and gender when you think about the Middle Ages, but you might be surprised! We are joined by the co-curators of the Spectrum of Desire exhibition at The Met Cloisters to talk about topics like queering the past, gender identity, and what art can tell us about those things during the Medieval period.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of sex, misogyny, genitalia, adultery, transphobia, and sexual assault.
Guests
Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut are the co-curators of the Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages exhibition at The Met Cloisters.
Nancy Thebaut is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford & tutorial fellow at St Catherine’s College. Her research interests range widely, from Carolingian & Ottonian liturgical manuscripts to the study of gender & sexuality across media.
Melanie Holcomb is a curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has organized or co-organized numerous exhibitions including Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages (2009), Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven (2016). Melanie’s projects have been fueled by a career-long fascination with how art works—the functions it serves and methods it uses to communicate.
Housekeeping
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editor: Bren Frederick
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman
- Multitude: multitude.productions
About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The Welcome to Spirits podcast, a boozied dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:36.4 | I'm Amanda. And I'm Julia. And we are |
| 0:38.8 | joined today. I am so excited by the curators of the exhibit spectrum of desire, love, sex and gender in |
| 0:44.8 | the Middle Ages, currently on view at the Met Cloisters. It's Nancy Tebow and Melanie Holcomb. Welcome to the show. |
| 0:50.7 | Thank you for helping us. Yeah, delighted to be here. |
| 0:55.6 | It is our pleasure. |
| 1:01.1 | This is a really exciting episode for me because not only did we get to see the exhibit, |
| 1:03.1 | which we will be talking about in this episode, but I also got to edit the interview that you did with our sister show American Medieval. |
| 1:09.4 | So I am very excited now to be on this side of the |
| 1:12.4 | microphone getting to talk to you and asking questions. We love nothing more than talking about |
| 1:17.7 | this show, which was four years of love and labor. So you might not get us to shut up. |
| 1:26.1 | No, it's incredible. And when you say love and labor, you can absolutely |
| 1:29.8 | see that when you go to the exhibit. I think the first thing to get us started is I'm sure a lot of |
| 1:36.5 | people are familiar with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they might not be familiar with the |
| 1:41.4 | cloisters. Can you tell us a little bit about the cloisters and what it |
| 1:45.0 | specializes in? Yes, I can. The cloisters is this magical spot in upper Manhattan. So you head way on up |
| 1:55.8 | to the end of the A train. And sitting in Fort Trium Park is a building that was opened in 1938, so a little bit later |
| 2:06.3 | than when the Big Met opened on Fifth Avenue. And it is an assemblage of architectural parts from many |
| 2:14.0 | medieval monuments in Europe, and it has its own extraordinary collection |
| 2:19.3 | of a medieval art that is set within it. |
| 2:22.7 | If you are ever in New York, |
... |
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