Adding to the Odd Shelf

In her essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader Anne Fadiman writes:

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. - Anne Fadiman, 'My Odd Shelf'

I love the concept of the Odd Shelf, and have been known, when I visit other people's homes, to wander around their libraries trying to see if I can spot one.

My Odd Shelf consists of anthologies. From The Best Science Fiction Stories (a very seventies collection); to The Wild is Always There, an astonishingly beautiful collection of writings about Canada; to Tellers of Tales, W. Somerset Maugham's 1939 attempt to define what makes a good short story via idiosyncratically selected examples; to A Stash of One's Own, a book of essays about yarn collecting by knitters, anthologies appear in almost every section of my carefully organised bookshelf. (In another delightful essay, 'Marrying Libraries', Fadiman describes her and her husband's approach to organising books. Like her, I am a 'lumper', wanting to keep similar books together so I can find them more easily. My lumping occurs by subject rather than type of book, so A Stash of One's Own and The Best Science Fiction are several shelves away from one another.) 

My collection of anthologies introduces me to writers and writing that are new to me. I'm fascinated by the role that a good editor plays in curating an anthology, selecting and arranging poems or essays or stories around a central theme so that together they say something that a collection of work by one author could never say on its own.

On one of my latest trips to Lincoln Central Library, I was delighted to discover the anthology Queer: LGTBQ Writing from Ancient Times to the Present, edited by the Irish literary translator Frank Wynne.  

I love the design of this book.

When I brought it home, I discovered something odd. Let me share the first page of the table of contents with you:

Table of Contents of Queer, edited by Frank Wynne

The excerpts are organized by the approximate date of birth of the writer. In his introduction, Wynne explains that he wanted this to be an "own voices" anthology, so it focuses on the inclusion of writing about queer experiences written by queer people themselves. 

Have you spotted it? We go from Catullus (c. 84-c. 54 BCE) to Shakespeare (1564-1616 CE). This leaves a gap of over fifteen hundred years which is explained as follows:

The history of queer literature is filled with gaps, with silences. While the poems of Sappho were celebrated in her lifetime, while the great Arab poet Abu Nawas could openly write poems about same-sex desire, for much of recorded history, queer voices have been smothered and suppressed. Many of those who dared write did so in private. (pp. xii-xiii)

As you can see from the table of contents, poems by Abu Nawas (c. 756-c. 814 CE) aren't included in the anthology, leaving readers with the impression that the period from c. 50 BCE to the time of William Shakespeare was a dead zone for queer writing and experience worldwide. 

Was it, though? In a wonderful talk for the American Historical Association, "Premodern Pedagogies: Queer Medieval Materiality," (a recording is here), historian Hilary Rhodes discussed some of the difficulties of researching and teaching premodern queer histories. Dr Rhodes spoke about the idea of the "conspiracy of historians" that a lot of people bring to the study of queer history. The main argument of the conspiracy runs: people in the past didn't share our contemporary understanding of sexuality and didn't see themselves as queer, therefore we modern folk shouldn't say they were queer. In other words, historians' focus on understanding gender and sexuality in its historical context erases queer experience by claiming it didn't exist. 

Like any criticism of the way historians do their work, this one contains two truths and a lie. It is undeniable that historians have ignored, silenced, or even just backed away slowly from non-normative sexualities and genders in our texts. A second truth is that language and meaning are complicated things: the line between 'a medieval person might not have thought of herself as bisexual' and 'there were no bisexual people in the Middle Ages' is easy to elide, especially when a historian isn't sensitive to how a marginalized reader might react.

Here is the conspiracy's lie: premodern people did define, describe, and portray sexuality and gender in ways which were culturally and historically specific. This makes it challenging to determine whether premodern authors "qualify" (Wynne's word) as queer, given that the way an author from this time period would have defined their identity is sometimes hidden from history. And yet, if we take the writing themselves as evidence--in the sense that there was a whole chain of people, from the initial premodern author down to the chain of people who bothered to copy a text down the centuries, who must have cared for us to even have the text in the first place--perhaps we might start to see our way to a sort of answer, where we can both be sensitive to the enormous cultural gap between the modern and premodern, acknowledge the silences of history, and recognise that queer people have existed everywhere, always.

It seems to me that the gap in Wynne's collection inadvertently reinforces the idea that the period between 50 BCE and 1550 CE contained no writers or writing that can be recognized as queer. In effect, this serves to reinforce the "conspiracy of historians" by presenting these centuries as a time without queer voices. 

I want to stress my non-expert status here, refer you historians who know more than I do, and share recommendations for texts that you might enjoy reading to learn more about premodern approaches to gender and sexuality. Here are three to start out with.

1. The poetry of Shmuel haNagid (and other writers from Al-Andalus)

As an undergraduate student, I took a brilliant course on "Living Together: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Iberia". Covering beginning of Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in the eighth century to the fall of the kingdom of Granada in the fifteenth, this class contained some of my favourite reading of my entire university career, especially the poetry of Shmuel Ben Yosef HaLevi HaNagid (993-1056 CE) as translated by Peter Cole. We also read Cola Franzen's Poems of Arab Andalusia.

 

Same-sex desire is a theme of many of these poems and any of them would have made wonderful candidates for inclusion in the anthology. The third of HaNagid's  three love poems, here, particularly stands out.

 

And for more medieval homoeroticism in verse, see here. 

2. Der Gürtel (the Belt) by Dietrich of the Glezze/Gletze (13th century)

I learned about this story from a twitter thread by historian Eric Wade, who cites the anthology of translations Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany ed by Albrecht Classen. Read the full thread for an amazingly bonkers tale of medieval gender and sexuality.

 

3. Le Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle (13th century)

I learned about this from the medievalist blog Jeanne de Mountbaston, written by Dr Lucy Allen. In her post 'A "Queer Medieval" Reading List", Dr Allen recommends her favourite primary and secondary literature for teaching about medieval gender and sexuality. Le Roman de Silence is one of several texts of her list that seem like they could have been added to Wynne's list.

 

Finally...

Will I add Queer to my Odd Shelf? At this point, halfway through reading it, I'm not sure. On the one hand, the anthology has introduced me to many authors and works that are totally new to me; I am grateful for this and excited to read more.

 

On the other, the false advertising of the subtitle 'from ancient times to yesterday' bugs me rather a lot. Fifteen hundred years is an enormous gap. On the other hand, the book reaches the twentieth century on page 42 (out of 601) so this may simply reflect the difficulties of applying the selection criteria--by a queer writer about queerness--to any pre-twentieth century writing, not just writing from the Middle Ages. Perhaps Queer has a place on my Odd Shelf after all.