Medieval Trans Saints & Sex Workers

Gone Medieval

History Hit

History

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Gone Medieval for Pride Month, Matt Lewis takes a look at some transgender stories from the Middle Ages. Marinos was a 5th century monk mentioned in the trial of Joan of Arc. They shaved their head and changed into men's clothes to live in a monastery with their widowed father. Eleanor Rykener was a 14th century trans sex-worker in London, arrested for prostitution and sodomy. To discuss these and other cases that resonate with today’s discourse on gender, Matt is joined by Dr. Gabrielle Bychowski.

This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. To listen to all of our episodes,
0:03.9	add free and watch hundreds of history documentaries, download the History Hit app,
0:08.4	or go to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And if you're an Apple listener,
0:13.4	you can subscribe for new, add free episodes within the app.
0:22.7	Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. For a problem this year,
0:26.2	I wanted to investigate the history of transgender stories, and I'm delighted to be
0:29.9	joined by Dr. Gabrielle by Kofsky, an Annis Field Wolf fellow at Case Western Reserve University,
0:35.7	who teaches courses on transgender history, disability culture, racism, and medieval literature.
0:40.8	You can also find out more from Gabby on her website at thingstransform.com. Welcome to Gone Medieval Gabby.
0:46.5	I should have been here. To start off with one of the people that you mentioned to me as we were
0:50.5	we were planning this episode was something I've not heard of at all before, St Mary Nos the Monk.
0:56.2	Can you tell us a little bit about their story please?
0:58.8	It's fascinating digging into our archives, including major organizations and institutions
1:05.6	like the Catholic Church, where a lot of the conversations that we're having now
1:10.4	are not that new, and a lot of the fights we're having now are not that new,
1:16.0	and that these organizations have not come down the exact same way today as they have in the past.
1:24.3	Particularly in the early church, we find about a dozen or so transgender saints,
1:30.1	and we're not just discovering them. For decades they've been called transvestite saints,
1:36.3	cross-dressers saints, and it's mostly been cisgender scholars writing about them.
1:41.6	So the terminology is not necessarily kept up with the times, but as a new phase of transgender
1:48.6	scholars are beginning to filter into the field. We're updating language for bringing new insights,
1:55.4	and one of the big ones is correcting the major title that we're putting all this under
	...

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