Courtly And Queer By Charlie Samuelson Summary

Courtly Love and Trans Critique: An Extended Review of “Courtly and Queer” by Charlie Samuelson In "Courtly and Queer," Charlie Samuelson confronts assumptions about courtly literature, complicitly constructing patriarchal hegemony by unearthing the inherent deconstructive queerness at its core. His interdisciplinary approach integrates literary, medieval, and queer studies by juxtaposing modern queer theory with high medieval French verse romances (romans) and late medieval French dits about courtly love from both well-known and obscure texts. Samuelson argues that the distinction between romans and dits is an artificial one which obscures their complex relationship; analyzing them in-tandem allows him to locate queerness at the center of medieval court
Biologically, a hermaphrodite would have been what we now refer to as intersex: a person born with sex characteristics outside of the male/female binary. Socially, the phrase may refer to a gender non-conforming or transgender person. Ethically, a hermaphrodite is something or someone aberrant, a hybrid monster acting against Nature and the will of God. The chapter “Concerning Monsters in Nature” in De Secretis Mulierum—credited debatably to Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth or fourteenth century—described hermaphrodites as such due to the fact that “a certain part of their body are outside the bounds of the common course of the nature of the species” (Lemay 112). The creation of a hermaphrodite was never on the part of Nature’s intentions, which were always pure, but rather a production mishap of some sort. In Alain de Lille’s twelfth-century De planctu supernaturale, the hermaphrodite is specifically condemned as “subject and predicate: and the same term is given a double application. The figure here more correctly falls into the category of defects”