By Devon Russell
It’s the thirteenth century and a story is circulating Aragon, Spain about the incestuous nature of the king. King Florent is adamant on marrying his young daughter, Yde, in honor of her late mother’s beauty, which she had inherited.
Yde et Olive is a medieval tale presenting ideas of expression through gender identity and sexuality. This is not a classic queer tale as religious ideologies dictate the plot.
Carissa Harris, professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and global studies at Temple University, has dedicated herself to the study of sexuality within medieval texts.
“What often happens is that you have two people who are kind of in a relationship with each other and other people,” Harris said. “And one of the partners is not aware that the person that they’re in love with is actually same sex assigned at birth.”
Narratives such as these can confuse the message being delivered to its audience. The older the tale, the more traditional the values. Hidden in the fine print, harmful depictions of LGBTQ+ relationships often translate to real world beliefs.
Yde et Olive, a French epic, details the life of Yde — a princess on the run from her incestuous father. Disguised as an LGBTQ+ tale, Yde is portrayed as Ydé, a transgender man, for most of the story. In truth, Yde was forced to disguise her gender and marry a princess in order to maintain the facade.
Yde is eventually discovered to be a woman disguised as a man and is forced to strip or be burned at the stake, along with her wife. Dropping to his knees, Yde begs for mercy and forgiveness from God. In response an angel is sent down, ultimately turning Ydé into a man in order to make the relationship “acceptable” and allowing them to produce an heir for the aristocracy.
“For the king’s daughter has fallen in love with me,
And I do not know how to get out of it.
If I tell them that I am really a woman,
They will immediately kill me and tear me to pieces,
Or tell my father the truth”
Yde et Olive, 897-901
Although Yde’s transition did not negatively impact their relationship and her marriage to the king of Rome’s daughter remains faithful and true, the story cannot be spun as representative of queer relationships. Yde does not have a choice in her transition and originally did not want to marry a woman. All of her choices were out of pure survival.
“Nature has to ‘make it hetero again.’ They have to take away the queerness in some senses,” said Harris.
The truth of the matter is that a tale in which an angel has to make a queer relationship heteronormative to save both characters is not empowering. They, literally, prayed the gay away. Yde is not a trans-masc individual; she’s just a woman hiding her biological sex in order to survive.
“Those kinds of tales can be useful in being able to trace out that history and also see some kind of representation even if that representation is not as positive as one might hope,” Harris says.
All representation is not good representation. Medieval tales are filled with harmful depictions of the queer community and, as a result, might even foster internalized homophobia in queer audiences who are hoping to see themselves represented in media.