Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe by L'Estrange Elizabeth; More Alison;

Author:L'Estrange, Elizabeth; More, Alison;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Hypsicratea was the wife of Mithridates the Great, who filled with a mighty heart, upon seeing her husband subjugated and banished by Pompey in this fashion, went off […] to look for her beloved husband. And because her beauty provoked desire in every man, and because, two or three times, passing through the kingdom, she thought she was going to be raped, in order to deal with this threat and to remain faithful to her husband, she changed her clothes and cut her hair […], putting on full body armour so that she would no longer be importuned or solicited. Moreover, the better to find him whilst passing through Roman lands, she pretended to be one of Pompey’s soldiers who was pursuing Mithridates […] Eventually she found him […] she declared herself to be his wife, and thus divested herself in order to put on her feminine attire, which was such a great joy to Mithridates […]30

Dufour’s innovation to her representation is to inscribe a symmetry of transvestite acts in the narrative recounting her pursuit of Mithridates on the battlefield. When she sets out, she changes her clothes and cuts her hair for the respectable reason that she fears for her chastity; her transvestism is approved as the act of a loyal spouse. Once reunited with her husband, she can therefore divest herself freely and resume feminine attire. Hypsicratea’s doffing and donning of garments highlights her external transvestism, not only as acts motivated by prudence and propriety, but also as an art of role-playing: she temporarily performs a male identity in order to get what she wants. This idea of performance is all the more significant as Dufour stresses the superficiality of her transvestism. Unlike his sources, he does not characterize the courtly wife’s transformation into a warrior as an acquisition of the internal qualities of a ‘manly spirit’, animus virili.31 Similarly, he changes her motives for wanting to disguise herself. Dufour’s sources held that it was a question of decorum; to appear as a woman on the battlefield would have been indecent.32 In the Vies, however, Hypsicratea is motivated, not by regulatory social norms, but by what we might see as the more active, practical and immediate reason of wanting to protect herself from sexual attack in order to remain a loyal wife. Dufour’s alteration here could, of course, be seen as a retrograde step, a way of circumscribing Hypsicratea’s activity to her accepted social role as faithful spouse.33 However, in the same way that Dufour’s selection of vocabulary must be considered within his work’s intertextual context, it is also necessary to consider any extratextual influence operating upon his choices, specifically as regards his patronage. Dufour was writing his Vies as a commission from Anne of Brittany (d. 1514), wife of King Louis XII (d. 1515) and, formerly, of Louis’s predecessor, Charles VIII (d. 1498). Thus his alteration of the motive of decorum could be seen as a strategic deletion of any acknowledgement of female inferiority since such an

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