In last week's post, I lamented that I'm increasingly finding less new material in general medieval works such as this. But I was able to extract three new publications to track down from this book: two on pairs of women buried together with a common memorial (where it's clear they aren't family members), and one on the source of an anecdote I've been seeing references to for many years. This last is a description of a group of women showing up at a tournament dressed as men to take part in the activities. While women cross-dressing in the context of chivalric culture is a not uncommon literary motif, I've been a bit skeptical of how solid the evidence for this event was in the third and fourth-hand references I'd seen of it previously. Now I have a publication to track down and plans for a podcast topic on gender-transgressive women in tournament contexts.
It's been delightful to see some of the more recent research and discoveries on the history of homoeroticism (by "recent" I mean generally post-1980 or so!) being published as general studies such as this one and the text on sexuality in general by Karras that I covered last week. I recently had a request from a friend for research materials on male homosexuality in medieval England for a historic novel she's working on and was able to enthusiastically lend her Karras, the present volume, and Mills' book Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. I'm always delighted to know that people are using the results of this project for their fiction.
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