Finding the Medieval

When I returned to higher education in my late 20’s, I was not anticipating a pivot into the world of medieval studies. It was my hope, after completing a two year degree in Library and Info Tech, that I would go to University only as a means to complete a BA, focusing instead on the Masters in Library Science program partnered with my community college in an accelerated 2+2 semester plan. As is the case with many students, my initial college plan was far from my eventual reality.

Instead, I remembered my deep and abiding love for English studies. When I graduated college in 2008, I was just 17 years old and full of bright idealism. I thought I wanted to continue studying literature, and I knew then I wanted to teach it to others. However, the housing market had recently collapsed, jobs were scarce, and a career in higher education looked near impossible for the liberal arts. I share this memory because it may sound incredibly recognizable. The world of 2022 has changed immeasurably from that of 2008, but in many ways we face the same struggles and conflicts I was unprepared to challenge at 17.

And then I arrived at Dominican University, the eldest member of a 12 person English majors group, and one of a handful with any real world experience. However, I quickly realized that my “real-world” experience as a white, upper middle class, person was in no way comparable to the struggles many of my peers had encountered whether through their race, their class, their family, or on and on. It was the first time I had confronted people that were truly different than me, and the first time I was old enough to listen to their words instead of responding with white guilt and defensiveness. 

Dominican had recently restructured the emphasis in their English programs. They included a focus on “social justice” requiring all English majors and minors to take classes that emphasized this tag. I don’t recall the full list from my time as a student, but a quick peek at the English department’s requirements page lists a number of similar classes including: African-American Popular Culture, Native American Literature, Critical Race Theory, Women Gender and Literature, Asian American Literature, and others. I took African-American Literature my first semester, and Black Women Writers my third. Both classes profoundly changed my life. 

Neither class was what I expected. While both classes were set up to explore beyond the USA’s territories, Black Women Writers in particular confronted works from women throughout the African Diaspora and across time. I learned how neglected my high school education, at a public high school in a highly religious and conservative Chicago suburb, had been in terms of the scope and trauma afflicted on Black generations. I was also, for the first time, confronting the ideas of social constructs and moral absolutism, white supremacy and patriarchy, intersectionality and the matrix of oppression.*

At the same time, I was confronting my own gender, having recently come out as a transgender man, and started HRT to masculinize my features. I changed my pronouns at school immediately, and was met with nothing but support and acceptance from students as well as faculty, a stark difference compared to my workplace, which continued to misgender me on a daily basis for the next 2.5 years until I ultimately left the environment. 

These were all background events, however, compared to the deep and abiding love that was rekindling in my heart every time I stepped into an English classroom. I loved reading and analyzing, sharing my thoughts with my peers, and even writing essays to justify my interpretations of the texts. My instructors were complimentary, pushing me to work harder, to use my love and passion as the backbone of my skills. I remember, after a particularly difficult Literary Theory class wherein we had been discussing the ways in which our social structure harmed so many of us, the instructor pulled me aside for a moment after class. I don’t recall the exact words, but the gist of the conversation was she thought I had an immense gift for teaching and educating, that combined with my skill in analysis, could be harnessed for an exemplary career in the English Literature field. 

To this point I had assumed working in libraries would afford me the greatest chance to educate, work with texts, and research my own topics of interest. I was quickly realizing, however, that for all the flaws inherent in academia, it could give me the chance to implement change in a way libraries could not. And then medieval literature found me. 

When I would tell my friends and family about my academic shift out of library school and into medieval literature, they were baffled. What could you possibly do with that education? They would ask me, what is the point of studying texts that are so old and no longer relevant? Similar comments were being directed at me because of my transgender identity. It seemed common knowledge, to everyone but me, that transgender people never exited before our current generation. If they had, after all, wouldn’t we have a record of it? There seems to be this pervasive idea that the middle ages were a time of strict gender norms, where men were manly and aggressive, and certainly never queer in any way, and women were feminine and delicate, silent in the presence of their husbands, and unable to possess anything for themselves. 

The reality is so much more complex. True, there are no records of anyone in the middle ages using the word “transgender” for themselves, just as there are no instances of the word “homosexual” before the 19th century, despite the myriad evidence we have of same-sex sexual and romantic relationships dating back to ancient Greece and beyond. The long history of medieval scholars has been, like nearly all fields of academia, populated by cisgender, heterosexual, white men. These men who have rarely, if ever, had to confront a reality wherein a person’s identity may not match the dominant model. If I am biased in my readings because of my queer and trans identity, as I am often told I cannot separate my personal life from my academic and therefore should not work with these theories, then how is a cishet man’s experience not likewise biased? I am uniquely placed to recognize in others a feeling of discontent or, as we might understand that feeling by the language of 2022, gender dysphoria. 

The medieval period is vast and tumultuous, and certainly not a homogeneous history wherein all people abided by one social structure that was somehow both more intense than our own and simultaneously a lawless world where might equals right. In reality, the social structures in place today, ranging from gender roles, religious affiliations, and even the racist way the USA has been created, owe their start to the changing political landscape of medieval Europe. It is my hope with this blog project that I can continue to educate and speak about the ways in which the medieval period have had a lasting and profound effect on modern ideals, ranging from the profound, such as the creation of the middle class in Chaucer’s England, to the silly, as when an episode of the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time emulates Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Thank you for exploring with me.

*for a deeper discussion of these concepts, start with: Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed, Routledge, 2009. And Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991 pp. 1241-99.