1 - Assigned Female at Death: Joseph of Schönau and the Disruption of Medieval Gender Binaries

Summary

Abstract

Sometime after 1188, Engelhard of Langheim composed a story about a Cistercian monk named Joseph. Engelhard insisted Joseph was a woman, but he also undercut normative assumptions to display gender fluidities for which he lacked a conceptual vocabulary. He preserved a binary gender system that controlled the dangers of a woman in a male monastery. Yet his willingness to ventriloquize Joseph's male voice presents a Joseph who, with God's help, successfully performed his male trans identity, while his depiction of Joseph's death suggests Joseph's soul miraculously became female after he died. Engelhard did not explicitly acknowledge either possibility, but in a world in which the miraculous could break naturalized categories, both transitions remain beneath the surface of his tale.

Keywords: Cistercian, Engelhard of Langheim, Hildegund of Schönau, nuns, exempla, gender fluidity

Sometime in the last decade of the twelfth century, the Cistercian author Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of stories to the nuns of the Franconian abbey of Wechterswinkel. Engelhard's tales portray things that are not what they seem. The Eucharist looks like bread but is really the body of Christ, sweat is perfume, woollen cloth is purple silk, and monks are not always as holy as they appear. Engelhard's last story, which depicts the life of a young monk named Joseph and his death at the Cistercian abbey of Schönau, continues this theme. ‘This man was a woman although no one knew it’, Engelhard proclaims as he begins his tale, this time asserting distinctions between male and female as the reality that could not be discerned from visible signs. But his story about the invisibility of gender differences diverges from his tales of the Eucharist and other holy objects. Whereas most of Engelhard's stories teach how to imagine connections between the signs provided by everyday objects and an invisible and transcendent reality, the story of Joseph breaks connections between visible signs and the binary categories of gender that behaviours and physical characteristics conventionally signify. Engelhard could not find in Joseph's outward appearance and behaviour markers that referenced normative gender distinctions.