Cartwheels down the aisle

When an innkeeper’s​ daughter accused the monk Marinos, a hardened ascetic, of fathering her child, his brethren were appalled. But Marinos, meekly confessing his sin, accepted the punishment of exile and even nursed the infant with milk supplied by shepherds. After several years, the monks readmitted him to the usual monastic routine, along with extra penitential labours. It was not until Marinos died that the monks discovered his secret: he was a biological woman – now honoured liturgically as St Marina.

Marinos, who may have lived in the fifth century in what is now Lebanon, is one of more than thirty transgender monks commemorated in Byzantine and Western texts. Many are revered as saints. Despite an explicit biblical prohibition on cross-dressing, reinforced by canon law, trans monks caught the imaginations of worshippers because they so fully embodied the ideal of ‘becoming male’, which allowed women to rise above their sex and achieve parity with men. According to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, ‘every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven’ – a doctrine that transcends even as it reinforces the misogyny of classical culture. The legends of trans monks offer endless variations on a theme. St Pelagia (or Pelagios) had once been a glamorous prostitute. Athanasia and her husband, Andronicus, after losing both their children in one day, decided to separate and enter monastic life, but Athanasia chose to become a monk rather than a nun. Much later, the couple reunited and spent their last twelve years cohabiting chastely in a single cell. Andronicus, it’s said, never recognised his former wife.

What did it mean – physically as well as metaphysically – to ‘become male’? In his provocative study of Byzantine sex and gender, Roland Betancourt points out that more than the adoption of masculine dress was at stake. Ascetic fasting withered the breasts, hardened the facial features and caused menstruation to cease. Skin hues could also change: both cis female and trans male ascetics are described as having the rough, dark complexion of men. Like other cultures from Minoan Crete to Victorian England, the Byzantines coded whiteness as feminine and darker skin tones as masculine. Eunuchs, members of a third gender who held prominent roles at court, were portrayed in art with light skin and soft features. But we have ample evidence for the lives of eunuchs, whereas no one knows whether the trans monks were real people or mere literary characters.

For Betancourt it doesn’t matter: not only because the evidence is inconclusive, but for moral reasons. He wants to give these figures ‘an agency … that treats them as real and viable possibilities for lived subjectivities’. In other words, he believes so deeply in the historical reality of trans and non-binary lives that to fail to affirm them is, he claims, ‘to be complicit with violence … not just in the past but also in the present’. For all its erudition, Byzantine Intersectionality is not just an academic book but a moralising one, though its morals run counter to most previous explorations of the subject. Betancourt warns readers that ‘we must’ call out medieval authors for their rhetorical violence against non-normative subjects, even as we appreciate the room to manoeuvre such people could enjoy.

Betancourt also implores us to avoid ‘toxic respectability politics’, a demand that comes through most sharply in his treatment of Empress Theodora, the anti-heroine of Procopius’ sixth-century Secret History. Procopius accuses Justinian’s low-born empress (who had been a stage performer and sex worker) of the most sensational depravity, ranging from the invention of new sexual positions involving ‘all three orifices’ to procuring abortions to forcing men to perform sex acts against their will. Like the historicity of trans monks, Procopius’ credibility has been hotly debated. Some Byzantinists see his work as our most reliable source on the period, while others think it a malicious fiction. Betancourt calls it ‘slut-shaming’ and asks the reader to tread a fine line in response. To praise the empress for her shamelessness (as a form of queerness) would be to endorse the Secret History’s ‘violent bullying’, while – conversely – to laud her supposed repentance and public works is ‘neither feminist nor ethical’. Instead, we must embrace the image of ‘a sexually active, promiscuous, abortion-having, orgy-partaking, oral-sex-enjoying, sodomitical Theodora who nevertheless persisted and thrived’. Everything is celebrated, whether or not it actually happened. But it’s hard to admit or understand Betancourt’s distinction between true queerness and slut-shaming. While he is keenly sex-positive, such matters will always be contentious and readers have a right to make their own ethical and historical judgments.

Such harangues are rare, however, and offset by Betancourt’s immersion in his sources and an astonishing amount of fresh evidence. Considering medical treatises, he notes that the Byzantines significantly advanced existing surgical techniques. Castrations were routine, breast cancer was successfully treated with mastectomies and doctors could perform both medical and surgical abortions. Although the Church strongly disapproved, the procedure was in demand. ‘Those with recourse to safe, reliable, effective and private abortions’ were not impoverished sex workers but members of Constantinople’s elite. In other words, Theodora could have ended her unwanted pregnancies more easily as empress than as a prostitute. We even find a Byzantine-trained surgeon in Visigothic Spain (a bishop, no less) performing a C-section to remove a dead foetus from its mother, who lived. In the West, this operation was only attempted after the mother’s death, in the hope of baptising the infant before it also died.

Trans women are vanishingly rare in the historical record, since for a man to assume a female gender identity was invariably shaming. Betancourt finds one: the third-century Roman emperor Elagabalus. A fragmentary work by the historian Dio Cassius, reconstructed from Byzantine sources, goes into lurid detail about Elagabalus’ gender and sexuality. She (Betancourt’s pronoun) imitated the dress and behaviour of prostitutes, calling one lover her ‘husband’ and even – no doubt to prove her femininity – taking special delight when he abused her. Elagabalus wore a feminine wig, preferred to be called by a woman’s name and even sought ‘gender-affirming surgery’, offering large sums of money to any surgeon who could give her an artificial vagina. But this was one procedure no one dared attempt.

The 11th-century philosopher Michael Psellus anticipated contemporary thought in treating gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. Here Betancourt’s close attention to the nuances of Greek literary language pays off. Psellus claimed to have a compassionate, deeply emotional – and therefore feminine – soul, ‘receptive towards every form of both Muses and Graces’. The historian Anna Komnene, by contrast, lived as a woman but felt her spirit to be male, blaming nature for giving her female genitals while bestowing a penis on her effeminate husband. Gender fluidity, in short, was well recognised, and though many writers deplored it, some were proud to claim identities that would now be called non-binary.

Much of the book draws on Betancourt’s expertise as an art historian. His first chapter is a study of the Annunciation in iconography and homiletics. It was vital not only for the Virgin to consent to the angel’s message, but to do so prudently and after careful cross-examination. Eve, after all, had consented too hastily to the serpent’s lies; Mary as the new Eve had to reverse that disaster. And in a culture still steeped in pagan mythology, Christian theologians needed to show that their God was no rapist like Zeus or Apollo, but respected the free will of his bride. That is why the Virgin does not respond joyfully to Gabriel’s tidings, but turns away in fear and makes self-protective gestures while she ‘cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’, as Luke’s Gospel has it. Homilists emphasise Mary’s ‘rigorous inquiry and critical thinking’, for she is committed to her virginity and does not easily accept the miraculous. As Betancourt demonstrates, an intriguing change took place between the early Byzantine period, which treated Mary’s consent and conception more casually, and the post-Iconoclastic era, when some liturgists turned their praise into virtual treatises on the psychology of perception and assent. This development paralleled broader social changes. In many areas of Byzantine life, consent was becoming more important, not only to sexual intercourse and marriage but also to monastic life, since inconvenient people could be forced into monasteries to dissolve their marriages or eliminate them as political threats. Even in medicine, the patient facing a difficult operation had to hand the scalpel to the surgeon as a symbol of consent, absolving him from blame if things went wrong.

Another iconographic subject, Doubting Thomas, lends itself more easily to queer readings. Thomas is allowed to penetrate Christ’s open wound with his finger, a moment often treated as homoerotic (Mary Magdalene had been warned not to touch the risen Lord). Monastic frescoes of Thomas lead Betancourt to reflect more broadly on monasticism as a same-sex institution, even a kind of ‘queer utopia’. For instance, could the ritual foot-washing on Maundy Thursday have aroused or satisfied erotic desires? While washing feet myself as an acolyte, I once encountered a foot fetishist, who experienced such joy that he turned cartwheels down the aisle on his way out. Anything is possible. But Betancourt’s queer utopianism sometimes feels like special pleading, for surely not all monks were gay or trans. When he chides historians for neglecting ‘asexual subjectivities’ as yet another form of queerness, I had to wonder what he makes of the voluminous literature on chastity, celibacy and virginity. One possible orientation – rare today, but not in the Middle Ages – is the desire for God tout court, not just the physical body of Christ. The Byzantines distinguished between two forms of desire: eros, the longing for a present object, and pothos, the yearning for one that is absent. As the ultimate motivation for monastic life, that kind of desire deserves more attention from the apostles of queerness. It could even provide a bridge between an up-to-the-minute work such as Byzantine Intersectionality and more traditional accounts of spirituality and devotion.

Intersectionality itself surfaces most clearly in Betancourt’s chapter on the Ethiopian eunuch. This character, the high-ranking treasurer to the Nubian queen who was converted by the apostle Philip in Acts 8.26-40, occupied a privileged place in the early Church; the Episcopalians have recently added him to the calendar of saints under the name Simeon Bachos. Oddly, most Byzantine depictions portray him as white, despite the common use of ‘Ethiopian’ as a signifier for any black person. Betancourt argues that this is because the eunuch’s gender identity (feminised, hence fair-skinned) normally took precedence over his ethnic identity. But he dwells on one especially fine manuscript (c.1000) in which the Ethiopian is indeed black, an elegant figure dressed in the garb of a contemporary Byzantine courtier, while Philip wears classical dress. The eunuch appears as someone who would be perfectly at home in Constantinople in the painter’s own day.

In this respect, the culture of the Eastern Roman Empire differed starkly from the medieval West. While racism was not absent, it was less prominent and virulent: the Byzantines were proud of their empire’s ethnic diversity. A 12th-century courtier lauds the emperor’s multiracial subjects as a sign of his beneficent rule, while Michael Psellus boasts about the multilingual, multicultural students who sought him out. Artists did not paint all Ethiopians or Egyptians with the same skin tone, but emphasised their variety – itself an important aesthetic value. Hence Betancourt states that ‘the Byzantines were not white.’ Although they did use black to represent demons, a legacy of early Christianity, they also used it without prejudice to depict a wide range of imperial subjects, and sometimes delighted in turning stereotypes on their heads.

Even within medieval studies, Byzantium occupies a strangely marginal place. Few universities employ Byzantinists except as art historians, and many are liturgists or theologians in seminaries. Ever the provocateur, Betancourt asserts that this neglect is all about queerness. ‘Modern historians view Byzantium as very queer,’ he insists, beginning with Edward Gibbon, who disdained the ‘servile and effeminate Greeks’ and famously lamented the ‘triumph of barbarism and religion’. A fellow Byzantinist, Leonora Neville, agrees that ‘the Western denigration of Byzantium is a discourse about gender.’ While that is hyperbole, it is not altogether far-fetched, and Byzantine Intersectionality is poised to make a difference. Wearing his ideology on his sleeve, Betancourt aims to compel Western medievalists to pay more attention to the East, while persuading conservative colleagues in his own field to broaden their views.