Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages w/ Melanie Holcomb & Nancy Thebaut

You might not think about love, sex, and gender when you think about the Middle Ages, but you might be surprised! We are joined by the co-curators of the Spectrum of Desire exhibition at The Met Cloisters to talk about topics like queering the past, gender identity, and what art can tell us about those things during the Medieval period. 

Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of sex, misogyny, genitalia, adultery, transphobia, and sexual assault. 

Guests

Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut are the co-curators of the Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages exhibition at The Met Cloisters. 

Nancy Thebaut is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford & tutorial fellow at St Catherine’s College. Her research interests range widely, from Carolingian & Ottonian liturgical manuscripts to the study of gender & sexuality across media. 

Melanie Holcomb is a curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has organized or co-organized numerous exhibitions including Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages (2009), Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven (2016). Melanie’s projects have been fueled by a career-long fascination with how art works—the functions it serves and methods it uses to communicate.

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Cast & Crew

- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin

- Editor: Bren Frederick

- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod

- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman

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About Us

Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.

Transcript

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AMANDA:  Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.

JULIA:  And I'm Julia.

AMANDA:  And we are joined today, I am so excited, by the curators of the exhibit Spectrum of Desire, Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, currently on view at The Met Cloisters. It's Nancy Thebaut and Melanie Holcomb. Welcome to the show.

MELANIE:  Thank you for having us.

NANCY:  Yeah, delighted to be here.

JULIA:  It is our pleasure. This is a really exciting episode for me because not only did we get to see the exhibit, which we'll be talking about in this episode, but I also got to edit the interview that you did with our sister show, American Medieval. So I am very excited now to be on this side of the microphone, getting to talk to you and asking questions.

MELANIE:  We love nothing more than talking about this show, which was four years of love and labor, so you might not get us to shut up.

JULIA:  No, it's incredible. And when you say love and labor, you can absolutely see that when you go to the exhibit. I think the first thing, to get us started, is I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they might not be familiar with the Cloisters. Can you tell us a little bit about the Cloisters and what it specializes in?

MELANIE:  Yes, I can. The Cloisters is this magical spot in upper Manhattan. So you head way on up to the end of the A train. And sitting in Fort Triumph Park is a building that was opened in 1938. So a little bit later than when The Met opened on Fifth Avenue. And it is an assemblage of architectural parts from many medieval monuments in Europe and it has its own extraordinary collection of medieval art that is set within it. If you are ever in New York or if you're in New York and you haven't been there, you are missing a treat. It's a— kind of a hidden treasure of town that will always transport you somewhere else the minute you step in our door.

JULIA:  Very much agreed. It feels like a place out of time and out of space in terms of where it is in New York. And it is both absolutely beautiful. I would say any time of year, we went on, like, a particularly like just had a snowstorm kind of day. But going in the spring and the summer is absolutely gorgeous as well. Mainly because— I mean, you can go for the art. It is absolutely beautiful. You should go for the art. It's incredible. However, the gardens there are fabulous as well.

MELANIE:  And we've had winter gardens too, as you saw, they really are— our horticulturists work year round, so it's a— if you need a dose of plant life, you can always hit the Cloisters up for that.

JULIA:  If you want to hit the Cloisters up for the Spectrum of Desire exhibit, can you tell the audience a little bit about the exhibit and sort of the thesis statement of what the exhibit is about?

NANCY:  Spectrum Desire is a show about the diverse and quite surprising ways, I think for many modern viewers today, that medieval people were thinking about love, sex, and gender. The show focuses on a particular part of the Middle Ages, so the 13th through 15th centuries in Western Europe, all the objects were made in that place and time. Melanie and I decided to focus on that particular period for a reason. It's because historians have, you know, long and rightly established that this is a moment when in the legal realm, ideas about how to live and whom to love are really, like, you know, tightening. They're becoming more restrictive. We were curious to see how works of art can complicate the story. And we found that while certainly as people will see when they visit the show, there are certain objects that reinforce this, you know, more restrictive thinking of their moment. More often than not, I think that, you know, viewers will be surprised to learn that these objects made way for quite like fluid, you know, forms of identity, gender expression, notions of desire that don't always seem to be running, like, completely parallel to what we see happening in the legal realm. We also wanted from the very outset to be sure this exhibition focused primarily on works of art in the Cloisters and The Met's permanent collections. And we're really lucky that the museum has an incredible collection of medieval art. I mean, really one of the best in the world. We wanted to tell the story with these specific objects that I think many viewers, they're very, like, you know, dedicated visitors to Cloisters who come here often and might— and I think we'll be familiar with a lot of the objects already in the— that are in the exhibition, but we wanted to invite people to see these objects, you know, in a new light. So make way for slightly different interpretations that haven't always been foregrounded or shared with the public, open up new lines of inquiry, ask new questions. And so that's something that we're also really trying to do in the exhibition. And we're using this method, and we talk about it in the introductory wall panel in the show of queering the past. And we can talk more, if you want, about, you know, what we mean by that.

AMANDA:  Oh, professor, we will, as Julia and I fist pump.

NANCY:  Okay, great.

AMANDA:  Can I ask, like, maybe a very simple, silly logistical question?

MELANIE:  We love those.

AMANDA:  Nancy, you work at Oxford. I assume you live in Britain. Is that true?

NANCY:  Yeah, that's right.

AMANDA:  Melanie, you work at both The Met Cloisters and The Met Fifth Avenue here in New York. How does one get sort of, like, invited or introduced to— how did you meet? How do you come together to say— okay. Melanie works with this collection every single day. Nancy works on this period on these kinds of objects. I'm going to ask you about your difficult depictions and images of Christ book at some point in this episode. How did this come to be?

MELANIE:  Well, Nancy and I have known each other a long time. We, in fact, both began our careers specializing in the ninth century, which is a— not a lot of people do, so that we were already sort of brought together about that. But as it turns out, each in our— in different ways, me thinking about the collection and Nancy and her teaching turning in our head were a lot of these ideas about gender and sexuality and kind of how you can think about works of art, but I think especially The Met's collection in this regard. So it— like all good ideas, I think this one came about in a bar.

JULIA:  Hell yeah.

AMANDA:  Just like us.

JULIA:  That's how this podcast came about.

MELANIE:  Right. You know, with me talking about, "Well, here, I'm kind of thinking this could work as a show. What do you think?" And Nancy's telling me about her class and how well it's going and— you know? And then boom, "Let's put on a show."

JULIA:  Incredible.

AMANDA:  And how much of the physical space inspires you, knowing where in the museum, how people are going to encounter it? One thing I loved about the exhibit as we kind of get into the objects there and how you put them together and how you contextualize them is these huge, beautiful sweeping like royal blue teal curtains. It really felt like I was stepping into a boudoir only to be confronted, or perhaps met by, you know, a crucifix and, like, all kinds of images that I may not associate with that sort of, like, sumptuous feeling.

JULIA:  Uh-hmm.

NANCY:  I'm so glad you had that reaction. That's precisely, yeah, I think, how our designers would want you to feel. And we were lucky to work with a couple of really amazing designers at The Met, that designed of the exhibition. And I mean, that curtain really, I think, like, sets up the show as a space first of, like, intimacy with that blue velvet. But then if you notice on the other side, so on your way out, you see it has this kind of, like, glittering gossamer effect, too. And—

AMANDA:  Uh-hmm.

NANCY:   —the textiles do a lot of work in the exhibition. You might have noticed as well that all of the panel texts are on textile. That's a kind of, like, white shimmery fabric and creates these nice kind of intimate spaces for people to look at these often really tiny objects and have kind of, like, private, maybe emotional encounters with them. But I would say even beyond the work of the designers, like that space, Fuentiduena Chapel, you know, so it's a gallery, but at the very end, there's that 12th century Spanish apse with this incredible wall painting, crucifix hanging from the ceiling. I mean, the space also just sets you up to think about medieval Christianity. And indeed, like all of the objects in our show were— I mean, for the most part are, like, directly engaging with the ways that ideas about love, sex, and gender are— like relate to this central religion.

MELANIE:  Can I just add one thing about the curtain? Because that curtain proved to be so evocative. Not only does it give real intimacy to the space, there's a kind of a sensuous vibe that it creates, but it was a priest actually who reminded me that a curtain is also historically the entrance to a liturgical space or a sacred space. So that play between these two, which I think is for us, moderns is really kind of tough to square for medieval people.

AMANDA:  Hmm.

MELANIE:  The sensuous, the erotic, and the sacred could really go hand in hand.

JULIA:  Absolutely beautiful. I am very curious in sort of planning out the exhibit. Was there one item or piece that you knew that you wanted to include in the exhibit once you locked in? You're like, "This is the exact thing we want to do." What's the first one that you're thinking of?

MELANIE:  I'm sure it's the same one, Nancy. There's no— what— don't you think?

JULIA:  Ooh, okay.

NANCY:  Yeah, probably Jesus and John.

MELANIE:  For sure.

NANCY:  Yeah.

JULIA:  Yes! Okay, good. I wanted to talk about Jesus and John. Can you tell us a little bit about that and sort of what it represents in terms of the exhibit?

MELANIE:  For anyone who goes to the exhibition, you'll see, it is the— all eyes are meant to turn towards John. It is the culminating object. You see it, the design is set up so that you can't help but note that it is your end point. Pretty big, Nancy. I was trying to think about size-wise.

NANCY:   Now, like four feet tall or so?

MELANIE:  A beautiful sculpture— a wooden sculpture of Jesus with his beloved disciple, John, leaning very sweetly on his breast. And the sculpture is from the Cleveland Museum of Art. While most of the show, as Nancy said, is from The Met's collection, this was a key piece. We— I didn't really even want to do this exhibition unless Cleveland would agree to lend it. They are— they're good friends. They have a wonderful collection, and forever grateful for them in trusting us with this object. It's hard to start our conversation with John and Jesus because in many ways, you can't really understand the import of this extraordinary object without going through the whole show because it brings together so many of the themes of the show, whether it's this idea of marriage as an ideal of union, whether it's the importance of the very expansive ways that medieval people thought about kinship and devotion to how they understood bodies, the way that bodies read and carried meaning. And it's also a devotional image. It speaks in such complex ways through these two bodies about, honestly, the love of God, but I think ways that are probably quite alien to many modern visitors.

NANCY:  I definitely want to add something that you were saying this morning to a group that was visiting a museum. We know that— I mean, so these type— this type of statue, there are, what, like a couple of dozen of them, I think, that still survive?

MELANIE:  Uh-hmm.

NANCY:  Were mostly nuns, were the primary viewers. They were primarily, we think, in like Dominican communities of— Dominican nuns. And there are even, like, firsthand accounts written by some of these nuns about what it was like for them to look at these sculptures, or even them watching fellow sisters look at the sculpture and pray before it. And these texts are incredible. Like in one moment, one of the nuns says that she levitated when looking at the sculpture.

AMANDA:  Wow.

NANCY:  And then in another instance, one of the sisters sees a fellow sister glowing like a crystal when viewing the sculpture. So it's a reminder of just, like, how powerful and moving these works of art were for people in the Middle Ages, and I think for many still quite moving today.

JULIA:  I also really love the juxtaposition of the Jesus and John statue right there. And then I recalled you telling the story of the, like, interior glowing, like a crystal about the nun. And then right across from John and Jesus are these two statuettes of, I want to say Mary and I don't recall who the other figure is.

MELANIE:  Elizabeth!

JULIA:  Elizabeth. And they have their wombs made of crystal and it's such a beautiful image. If you know that story, knowing that they're right there as well, absolutely gorgeous.

AMANDA:  Uh-hmm.

MELANIE:  So beautiful. Kind of one of the great masterpieces of The Met's collection. This sculpture of Mary and Elizabeth was in a convent known as the Katharinental. And we know that that sculpture sat kind of kitty-corner to a very similar sculpture to the Cleveland sculpture. So that juxtaposition was quite purposeful. I love that you saw it. It was a very deliberate juxtaposition. And I love that it was meaningful to you, actually, just in the exhibition space because it was obviously a very charged juxtaposition in its original context, too. So it's perfect.

JULIA:   Oh, that's so cool.

AMANDA:  And that is something that I really appreciated in experiencing the exhibit and learning more and just kind of spending some time with these objects is how many of them return to the body. There are rings and combs. There's a saddle. There are lots of statues and paintings of people touching. As somebody growing up in a, you know, Catholic suburban, US context in the '90s and 2000s, it just feels anathema, that religious devotion.

JULIA:  Uh-hmm.

AMANDA:  Or even just chaste and heavenly forms of love could involve being embodied and touching— and maybe even touching and admiring the body and the pubic hair of St. Sebastian, for example.

JULIA:  Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.

AMANDA:  So can you talk a little bit about why the— you know, one of those defining words and defining experiences is the body?

MELANIE:  It's such a paradox, isn't it, really? Because I think the idea is in some ways to move out of the body, but you do it by being in the body, right?

JULIA:  Hmm.

MELANIE:  And I always say when I'm introducing people to medieval art, if you're struggling to read it, if it seems kind of alien to you, you have to start with the body. That is the locus of most of the expressiveness of medieval art.

NANCY:  In listening to you talk, Amanda, it made me think about how, like, yeah, for you, you thought about, like, chastity as kind of the opposite of this focus on the body. But I think, if anything, for me, something that, you know, has always surprised me in medieval art history and really, like, hit home when we were working on the show together is that, you know, some of the most actually, like, erotically charged images in medieval art and that are in our exhibition were either made for or depict people who were chaste, like who were supposed to be virgins or had committed to a life of chastity. And—

JULIA:  Hmm.

NANCY:  —I mean, you might have noticed that in that final section of the show on Mystical Union, we have this tiny manuscript known as the Rothschild Canticles made around 1300. And there's this amazing— and it was probably made for a nun. And there's this amazing image of a woman who represents, like, the soul or the bride that we read about in the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible and the image of Christ, like her beloved above. He's, like, leaning down from behind a sun with these sort of tentacle-like rays reaching towards her. And she's in a bed. She's lying down beneath the sheets.

JULIA:  Uh-hmm.

NANCY:  Like, you know, her legs seem to be slightly spread. She's raising her arms in ecstasy. And I mean— and this was a devotional image for a nun. Like, you know, ostensibly someone who did not have sex. And the language of eroticism, I think, and these expressive bodies that are, yeah, really erotically charged. We see them, I think, most often in medieval art in these moments where sex is supposed to be off the table.

JULIA:  This is just so fascinating. And I think also when we're talking about assumed lack of sexuality and lack of romance that happens for people who are called to the clergy, like in particularly talking about the nuns and the, like, marriage to Jesus, there is something very still sexually charged about that relationship, even though it is supposed to be this sort of, like, holy and therefore, chaste thing. And you see a lot of that in a lot of the art that is in the exhibition. And I think that is something that if you don't know what you're getting yourself into going there might surprise you.

NANCY:  Yeah. I mean, there even some historians that have talked about, like, this erotic language that we see among like, you know, members of the clergy, but I'd say especially monks and nuns as a kind of mystical sexuality.

JULIA:  Hmm.

AMANDA:  Yeah.

JULIA:  That's such a cool phrase. Mystical sexuality is an incredible phrase.

AMANDA:  And I have to say, so we're recording this a few days before the episode will actually come out. In the moment that we're speaking, I will, in a few days, be watching one of my friends become a nun. She is marrying Jesus on Valentine's Day, taking her first profession of vows.

MELANIE:  Oh, wow.

NANCY:  Wow.

AMANDA:  And she was like, "Listen, we didn't plan for it to be on Valentine's Day, but when that was one of the options, I couldn't not." Because you are marrying Jesus. And, you know, my earlier kind of surprise and frustration— or not even frustration, but like curiosity, I snagged on it. I was like, "Ooh, like what— why does my brain think this is, you know, not two things that should go together?" In fact, it's about, as you said, Melanie, like using the body as the vehicle and the site with which we experience something holy. Like, the whole point of religious devotion, I think depending on where you come from is you can't quite grasp it. Like, we are here in the mortal and the corporeal and the here and now. And one of the ideas for why we fast or abstain from any number of things is to kind of sharpen our focus. And so it makes sense that, you know, not perhaps using the body for a mortal coming together with others might make some room and open us up for something a little more.

MELANIE:  Nicely put, Amanda. We're going to put you on the tour circuit here with our show.

AMANDA:  Yeah. My job is to listen to you and then parrot it back a little bit.

JULIA:  Speaking about bodies, one of the things that really spoke to me in terms of pieces in the exhibition was the book that featured several of the stories of saints and a particular— I don't have the language for the time period, but the, like, transing of several of the saints in that book. Can you tell us a little bit about what exactly that book was and a little bit more about the background on it?

NANCY:  I think you're referring to the manuscript known as The Golden Legend that's on loan from the Morgan Library. We're really delighted to have that in the exhibition. So it was made in the late Middle Ages, I believe 15th century for a knight of the Golden Fleece named Jean d'Auxy. And in that book, we have several texts written in Old French paired with one painting about that particular saint that the story is retelling. And the Golden Legend, I should say, was like one of the most popular text in the Middle Ages. It circulated widely and it has, yeah, all these different stories about saints with which people were highly familiar. There are a number of historians that over the past, like, I would say 10 years or so, have done a really important work on saints who changed their gender presentation over the course of their lifetime. In fact, one scholar, Clovis Maillet, who writes in our catalog, has made a chart in his book about this, over 30 saints according to his count, change their gender presentation almost always from female to male. So we turned the page at one point during the exhibition because, you know, for— we have the parchment and the painting is sensitive to light. And so we were showcasing two different saints who changed their gender in that book. So the first we showed was Saint Moran of the Marines, who was known as Marinos. And now we have on view an image of Saint Theodore or Theodora. These stories about saints have a lot in common. So they're born female, and then at a certain point, they become a monk. And according to the narrator, this can happen for lots of different reasons. In the case of Theodore or Theodora whom you can currently see in the galleries, this is because she commits adultery, feels terrible about it, and so decides to repent by becoming a monk. In the case of the other saint that we showed just about a month ago, or since the start of the show, Saint Moran of Marines, so this saint decides to start presenting as a male monk. because his father joins the monastery and so he wants to join him. And you'll see that I often go back and forth with pronouns. I'm little unsure myself sometimes how to refer to these people because, you know, these are narrative constructs. The narrator of the Golden Legend often will switch back and forth between male and female pronouns too when recounting their story.

AMANDA:  Hmm.

NANCY:  And it's really interesting to see how artists represent the gender of these saints. So in the case of Theodore and Theodora, the artist has made the decision to depict Theodora in a woman's dress on the left side of the image and Theodore as a male monk on the right side.

JULIA:   Hmm.

NANCY:  In the case of Moran, though, what's really interesting about the representation of this saint is that the artist has chosen to depict him as only male, really at the risk of, like, confusion, I think, on the part of the viewer. And, you know, we sometimes get— like, catch glimmers in these stories of maybe how the saint was imagined to feel about their own gender identity. Like Roland Betancourt has written on this extensively and he notes in some stories, the saint will say like, "I don't want anyone to find out that like, you know, that I was born female. I want everyone to believe that I'm a male monk as if they're like have this almost sincere attachment to the identity." In other cases, the gender transition is explained more as kind of, like, a convenient or as a way to repent in the case of Theodora. But these are stories, I think, many people aren't familiar with today and yet there are over 30 of them. And I think it's important to remind ourselves— and Melanie and I, you know, talk about this a little bit in the beginning of the exhibition that while we have these moments of gender fluidity and transition in the lives of saints, we know that in the legal realm, like, people who were presenting in a way that did not correspond with, like, the gender that they were, you know, assigned at birth, they were prosecuted for this. Like, we know of real people like Eleanor Reichner, who went to trial because of, you know, so-called cross-dressings. But somehow within the realm of these stories about saints, it becomes not only okay, but it's actually a sign of, like, holiness and sanctity.

JULIA:  And I think that's really fascinating because, then, you have this sort of thing where it's like as long as God was the inspiration for why you were doing what you're doing, it's okay. And at that point you're like, "Well, everyone should just claim that that's the case, right? If God said it's okay, then it's okay."

NANCY:  Yeah. I mean, so there was this idea that when women started presenting as male monks, when the gender transition happens from female to male, that these people were essentially ascending the gender hierarchy. I mean, so there is a heavy dose of misogyny actually too in these stories about what we might term today transmasculine saints.

AMANDA:  The Moulin effect, as we call it.

NANCY:  I mean, in fact, we have a bit of a, like, counter example of this phenomenon in the case of Saint Jerome. So we have an image— a really complicated image that scholars are still trying to kind of wrap their head around in the galleries in this amazing prayer book made in late medieval France that depicts the moment when Saint Jerome, translator of the, you know, Latin Bible, huge, like, you know, Christian theologian, I think, known to many—

MELANIE:   Father of the church.

NANCY:  Yes, father of the church.

AMANDA:  Big deal.

NANCY:  He's visiting a group of monks. The monks decide to play a trick on him one night while he's asleep. And we see this in the image. A monk is leaving this blue woman's dress next to St. Jerome's bed so that when St. Jerome wakes up really early in the morning for matins, so morning prayers, when it's still dark outside, Jerome accidentally puts on this really tight woman's dress. And in fact, it's really, like, women's underwear because you can see his forearms and his elbows and—

AMANDA:  You got some deep back. It's like a—

NANCY:  Yeah.

AMANDA:  —mid-back neckline.

NANCY:  Yes, exactly. Clarisse Malet has, like, gone into, you know, like medieval fashion history under— to help us understand this is really like underwear. So doubly humiliating, basically, is the idea for the saint. And you can see when Jerome shows up in church, wearing this woman's dress or woman's underwear, the monks are whispering. Like, there's something awkward about it. And so you can see that when gender transition happens here, from male to female, I mean, it's like the cause of mockery in the case of Jerome. And one of the reasons why, according to even the narrator of The Golden Legend, the monks played this trick on Jerome was because they wanted to have people believe that he had slept with a woman the night before in his cell. Because Jerome, like, you know, wrote extensively and preached extensively on the importance of celibacy and chastity. And in fact, some monks even thought, like, he was a little too, like, hardcore when it came to his principles.

JULIA:  It's never good when the other monks are like, "All right, buddy, calm down."

MELANIE:  He was also known as someone who never had a sense of humor. I mean, that is a part of his legend. So I think that trickery also plays into that, yeah.

AMANDA:  Hmm.

NANCY:  Actually, very soon we're going to have a piece published on The Mets website about this image and a few different people, including a contemporary artist, are responding to the image and trying— we're just still trying to work through, like, what to make of it and how we respond to it today.

AMANDA:  And Nancy, like it couldn't be more present in, you know, thinking about the sort of, like, different cultural receptions of transfeminine and transmasculine people today, where, you know, we may have more vocabulary and identity about how, you know, individuals kind of navigate these changes, fluidity, feelings about gender and presentation. But the fact that, you know, transgressing the gender binary in the femininity direction carries with it a higher degree of risk and social judgment, at least here in North America—

JULIA:  Uh-hmm.

AMANDA:  —in part because it's seen as, you know, a sort of, like, stepping down that I think you really point to beautifully as a bias and belief that humanity has carried for a long time.

MELANIE:  For sure.

JULIA:  I really have a lot of other questions and I definitely want to talk about the queering of history as a whole. Before we do that, we're going to quickly go grab our refill.

AMANDA:  Let's do it.

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JULIA:  Hey, it's Julia, and welcome to the refill. As a reminder, we are donating our ad space for the foreseeable future to small businesses and mutual aid efforts in Minneapolis that benefit immigrants, protesters, and activists. If you are a podcaster and you want to join us in this effort, please go to bit.ly/, M-N, podcastads. This week, I want to feature Comma. Comma is an independent bookstore in Minneapolis that sells books and helps to build community. with a focus on deepening connection with their community and drawing connections between ideas. Something I really appreciate that they're currently doing is running a resistance book club, specifically focusing this month on Dean Spade's Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). You can support Comma by purchasing from them online at the link shared in our description. They have some great book recommendations on topics like immigration as well as books focusing on democracy and fascism. Check them out, order some books, or just support them by purchasing a gift card from their site. Thank you to our newest patron, Fred M. [28:11] You join the supporting producer-level patrons like Uhleeseeuh, Hannah, Scott, Anne, Matthew, Lily, and Wil. And of course, our legend-level patrons, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Audra, Sarah, Bea Me Up Scotty, Morgan, Bex, Rikoelike, Chibi Yokai, and Michael. And hey, if you'd like to support us on Patreon, go to patreon.com /spiritspodcast where you can sign up for a seven-day free trial and get cool rewards like ad free episodes, bonus urban legends episodes, and of course, recipe cards for every single episode. Go check it out. If you love Multitude and you're glad that we exist as a company in these times with a capital T, we could use your support with the MultiCrew. This is our membership program where we release weird, cool podcasts with new combinations of Multitude hosts. We share behind the scenes details about making our shows and we have exclusive monthly hangout sessions with you, the MultiCrew members. You can get exclusive access to stuff like the entire back catalog of our friendly debate show, Head Heart Gut, our rewatch podcast all about the Emmy award-winning show, The Pit, or even immersive medieval ASMR episodes. There's a lot of cool content that's happening over there. And now if you're like, "Wow, it's really annoying to sign up for new accounts." Great news. You can actually enjoy our bonus MultiCrew podcast right in Apple podcasts. All you have to do is just search for the MultiCrew podcast and click join now. So check that out. MultiCrew is a really good time. And now, let's get back to the show.

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JULIA:  We are back. And one of questions we love to ask our guests every episode is, what have you been drinking lately? Whether that is cocktails, mocktails, coffee creations, what has been your drink of choice?

MELANIE:  I've been experimenting with Kvasses.

JULIA:  Ooh.

AMANDA:  Ooh.

JULIA:  Okay.

MELANIE:  So lightly fermented infusions of fruits and vegetables. It's been fun of late. That's been— that's in my fridge right now.

JULIA:  Do you have a favorite flavor right now or—

MELANIE:  You know what? The classic beet, I'm all in.

JULIA:  Ooh, okay. I love that.

AMANDA:  Nancy, how about you?

NANCY:  Well, I mean, I'm typically a red wine girl, but I've had a cold the last week. So I've been living off of this thing, they— that people swear by in the UK called Lemsip.

JULIA:  Hmm.

AMANDA:  Ugh, Lemsip. I love you.

NANCY:  Yeah, it's basically like paracetamol and, like, lemon flavoring and maybe other kind of cold drugs in powdered form that you put in hot water. It actually is quite good and really makes you feel better. I even, like, brought some over with me to the states this week.

AMANDA:  Can I ask you a follow-up? I didn't prepare you for this, which, you know, I do deeply apologize. If you could drink out of a— any vessel in The Met's collection, which vessel would you drink from?

JULIA:  Amanda, an amazing question. Thank you for that.

AMANDA:  Because I am looking here, as you buffer a little bit, as you think, there is a goblet in the exhibit from like a Murano, you know, Italian goblet, which has, like, not only full bush on it, but also like on the other side, a sort of, like, fallen woman, sort of, like, morality tale, fascinating. And I was like, "How— what would it be like if I went to The Bush and drank like a gin and tonic out of this goblet? Like I just— I think my life would be complete. I'd be prosecuted, that'd be bad for art, but like, it's a fantasy.

MELANIE:  I've never wanted to drink out of that.

NANCY:  Me, neither.

JULIA:  Not that one particular? Okay, fair.

MELANIE:  Never, because the story that it tells is so—

JULIA:  Yeah.

MELANIE:  —disturbing.

AMANDA:  It's depressing. It's bad.

MELANIE:  Hard to tell, hard to look at for me. I think we have these other sort of fantastic, luxurious things made out of different kinds of hard stone. These fantastic double cups that sort of stack on top of one another that are just elaborate and ostentatious. I'm all in for those.

NANCY:  I mean, I feel like it's sacrilegious for me to say a Eucharistic chalice, but those are some of my favorite medieval cups. Though I wouldn't drink out of one of those. I think that— I— actually, I'd go earlier than medieval. There are— and the Greek and Roman collections at The Met, there's some pretty amazing, like animal drinking vessels I might go for, but I can't name a specific one right now.

AMANDA:   Particularly when I see glassware from— you know, especially in BCE eras, I just think, like, so many people had to not fuck up for this beautiful piece of glass to still be whole and able for me to look at beautifully, like, polished under glass. It just— it astonishes me.

JULIA:  They do a lot of work, and I appreciate it every time I go to a museum.

AMANDA:  But I did want to talk about this goblet because there is a real kind of morality tale that it tells. Can someone take us through what this story is and why you thought it was so important and kind of meriting a place in this exhibit?

MELANIE:   It's a story you don't hear much today. Let's put it that way. The cup depicts a medieval story about the ancient poet Virgil. In the medieval way of thinking, Virgil is not only a poet, but he's a magician. The story is about his own kind of obsession with a princess, often a Roman princess whose name is often Fabilla. [33:42] He wants to meet up with Fabilla, and so she agrees to meet up with him and invites him to her tower and begins to pull him up in a basket. But then she leaves him hanging.

JULIA:  Literally.

MELANIE:  Literally hanging. So he never makes it up to the tower. And in some versions of the story, he's actually naked, even. So— but on view for all to see his unrequited love.

JULIA:  Hmm.

MELANIE:  Part two of the story, after this moment of humiliation, Virgil's revenge is to also humiliate her, and the method of doing so is that he extinguishes all the lights of the city of Rome and puts the only source of light inside of Fabilla. So that if the citizens of Rome want to relight their city, they have to stick their candles inside of her.

JULIA:  Not the end you would guess, is how I would say.

MELANIE:  Not the end you would guess. And this cup that you're talking about actually has been sitting outside of my office for a long, old time. It's always been a very difficult story to parse. And I think part of why Nancy and I wanted to include it was because we— like we just want to know what is going on here. So as you mentioned, in this version, which we think was probably a cup used in a, believe it or not, on marriage setting.

JULIA:  Oh, geez.

MELANIE:  It's highly moralizing in this particular context. And it's really— I think the message is in this version, it's only the women of Rome who are lined up with their candles. They're reverting their eyes. They have their candles. And it's— to be a message of— to women sort of reminding them to not humiliate your man, kind of asserting social conformity as a virtue.

JULIA:  Wildly, the— not the only Fabilla storytelling in the exhibit.

MELANIE:  Not at all because— and it— this was a big discussion we had, was there's this from The Met's collection and we pair it, it's not alongside it, but sort of the other side of the room, a different version of this very same story. And it is told on a little ivory tablet and it couldn't be more different, really, in its take on the story. Where there, Fabilla is sitting there with her skirt pulled up, she's kind of looking directly at the men who are ready with their candles. There's something kind of sassy about it. She seems far more sort of in control of the situation. The ivory is really an eroticized version of this story. It's really kind of medieval, kink fully on view. To kind of have these two versions kind of playing off one another, I think not only took people to— part of the Middle Ages probably most people would never know to go to. But also I think just gives you a sense of the kind of complexity of medieval storytelling, of medieval images, the way they often don't mean the same thing every time you see them. They became kind of important for us as part of our curatorial work, even as we were really grappling with the disturbing nature of the story.

AMANDA:  I really appreciate that things we may think about when— as laypeople and non-scholars, we think about the medieval period or about the medieval Christianity around the policing of desire sex bodies. I found so much more joy, transcendence, and, like, interest in this exhibit than I possibly expected. So I would love to close this episode out in talking about how we queer the past, how we queer desire. Open invitation, tell me all about that because I loved it and I walked away texting so many close-up photos of the images and objects to my various queer group chats.

NANCY:  Oh, I'm so glad to hear that.

MELANIE:  That thrills us.

NANCY:  So what do we mean when we say queering the past? So I mean, you'll note the word queer isn't in the title, but we do talk about our method, what we mean by queering the past in that first intro panel in the show. And I think for us, I mean, it really just means setting aside modern presumptions that we might have about who these people were, setting aside modern categories like heterosexuality, homosexuality, cisgender normativity. Making sure we kind of leave these at the door so we can take medieval people on their own terms. And I think for us, you know, queer theory and— we've been so inspired by the work of people like Eve Sedgwick and then medieval art historians in recent years who have used queer theory in their work like Karl Whittington, Roland Betancourt, Emma Lepuisa. [38:25] But we found that, yeah, it makes us better historians because it allows us to kind of open up and sort of just see all the different ways that medieval people were thinking about Love, Sex, and Gender that are more often than not quite different from the way that we think about them today. Like one example of this would be, for instance, you know, today, we strongly understand like, you know, when we think about what sexual orientation is today, it relates close like your identity and your sex acts closely relate to one another. Your— the act, you know, constitute your identity essentially, and is how many people would feel. This is largely though like, you know, a 19th-century concept, but in the Middle Ages terms like heterosexual homosexual would have made no sense to people They did not see their identity in these terms, but the exception to this, and I think this is quite surprising for many of us today, would be something like virginity. People who were chaste, who were virgins. I mean, there was so much time spent thinking about, you know, a kind of whole hierarchy of non-sex, different ways one could not experience desire and not have sex. That would constitute as many people like Robert Mills have argued a veritable sexual orientation, like virginity could be actually an orientation for someone. And so I think we're really inviting people to come into the space and kind of allow themselves to be, like, surprised and open up to new ways of thinking about identity and desire in the past, and just ask new questions about these objects, too. I mean, we really like this line that, know, Eve Sedgwick has about queerness being, you know, embracing the open— and open mesh of possibilities. We try to do that when we approach some of these objects, like for instance, with leather box, [40:04] the beginning of the show, where it's not entirely clear, like, how to read some of these supposed couples or pairings of people, sometimes two men, more often men and women. Like, what do we make of their relationships or not? And so, you know, I think we're not trying to, like, shut down meaning and say, like, "This is the only singular way to read an object." But say like, "Okay, let's pause and actually, like, take a moment and think about, well, what if these two male figures depicted on either side of a heart, in front of this leather box [40:31] aren't necessarily only two men fighting for the heart of a female lover? Like, could there be some other relationship to consider here? And so I think that was another thing about, like, the— a queer approach that really appealed to us.

MELANIE:  Nancy and I, we love the Middle Ages. We love how wacky and strange it is. And in some ways, we really want visitors to just go there with us, just embrace what is strange, what is unusual, what's hard to understand. Just be there with us. I think that's part of this project. And at the same time, we want you to make connections. We want you to kind of create community with the past, if that doesn't sound too woo-woo-ish in looking at this era that is very different from our own, although many of the things that were happening then, as you so beautifully pointed out earlier, Amanda, they still play out today. This world that is so not our own. There's a lot to say to us today.

JULIA:  I think that, absolutely, was the experience that we both had in seeing the exhibition. If that's what you set out to do, I definitely feel like that was something that I felt going into it.

AMANDA:  We are so excited that folks can still get out there and see the exhibit at The Met Cloisters. There also is a fabulous online catalog. You can also buy or request from your library, the book version from The Met publication just to enjoy all of the wonderful writing that I am certain that you both put into it. I didn't buy it at the time, but I think I'm going to go back on my repeat visit to make sure I can have that on my shelf forever. And Nancy and Melanie, do you want to share any other ways that folks can engage with you, your scholarship, and your work online?

NANCY:  I would encourage people to go to the exhibition website. There have been really some exciting digital features going online about the show. We've had, for instance, a poet and a novelist write beautiful pieces in response to specific works of art, including that visitation statue that you mentioned earlier, Julia. I don't know if you know the author Selby Wynn Schwartz, who wrote After Sappho, but she wrote a really gorgeous piece to the— that statuette base of Eve and the Female-Headed Serpent. We're going to have a conversation go online soon about Jerome. So, yeah, I would encourage people to look there.

JULIA:  So wonderful. Well, this was an incredible conversation. I feel like I'm walking away wanting to talk for another hour about this, so that's always how I know this is a good episode. But thank you so much for joining us. And remember, you can go see the exhibition before March 29th and enjoy the experience that Amanda and I got to have as well.

MELANIE:  Thank you both so much. It's really been such a pleasure.

JULIA:  It's our pleasure to have you here.

AMANDA:  So, folks, next time you walk through a beautiful, sumptuous velvet curtain to be confronted with an image of Jesus and his groom on a bench, remember—

JULIA:  Stay creepy.

AMANDA:  —stay cool.

JULIA:  Later, Satyrs.

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