Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (review)

This comparatist study counterposes Old French estates satire and romance and their Arabic-language sources and intertexts to draw a number of useful conclusions. First, Old French literature is best interpreted in a multicultural context, since it was produced by writers alert to or influenced by literary production and oral storytelling from Eastern and especially Arabic-language sources. Consequently, familiarity with Arabic literary traditions and genres can clarify otherwise inexplicable French textual cruxes. Second, Islamicate socio-cultural practices devoted to erotic literature, the enjoyment of a range of homo- and heterosexual practices, and courtly erotic and intellectual self-fashioning (zarq) were nurtured in Abbasid and Andalusian courts, and were circulated through various Mediterranean and Near Eastern contact zones to the West, where they were used by Western writers to bespeak an otherwise hidden history of female same-sex eroticism. To speak of it at all, they had to speak circuitously, favoring the detour through orientalist fantasy and borrowings from Arabic writing. Careful comparatist study of shared metaphors, transliterated words, distinctive literary tropes, and socio-cultural structures can unveil this history, illuminating a neglected and fascinating strand in the history of sexuality.

Throughout the study Amer draws on a range of theories of culture, sexuality, and postcolonialism to define the particular cross-cultural, inter-textual, and sexual encodings through which the voices of same-sex female desire can be enticed into hearing. Amer deploys Judith Bennett's definition of 'lesbian-like' behavior to avoid being caught up in the ongoing debates about pre-modern sexualities: essentialism or constructionism, acts or identities. She profits from Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity, to avoid similar false binaries vexing orientalist and postcolonial studies, though at times she does work within an Orientalist east and west, and speak of an Islamicate or Western tradition in the singular. Amer characterizes her study as a careful decoding, a stripping away of textual and cultural veils to find bodies, voices, presences whose value lies in their pleasure, and the threat that pleasure poses to medieval socio-cultural and literary norms: 'By unraveling what lies just beneath the surface of French textuality, beneath its Western and heterosexual veneer, Crossing Borders will recapture alternative female same-sex sexual voices, long thought to be absent because they are dressed in Oriental garb' (28).

How difficult is this Old French 'recapture' emerges in the small range of Old French writings Amer searches: seven stanzas in Etienne de Fougères's twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Livre des manières, the romance of Yde et Olive in its three poetic (thirteenth-century), dramatic (fourteenth-century), and prose (fifteenth-century) exemplars, and the richest of all, Jean Renart's thirteenth-century romance, Escoufle, to which Amer devotes two chapters. On the Arabic end, by contrast, stands a wealth of erotic texts whose illumination constitutes one of the greatest contributions of Amer's study: Abu al-Faraj Ibn Muhammad al-Isfahani's tenth-century Kitab al-aghani (Book of Songs), Ibn Nasr al-Katib's tenth-century Jawami' al-ladhdha (Encycopedia of Pleasure) and its subsequent rewritings, notably in Ahmad al-Tifashi's thirteenth-century Delight of Hearts and Ibn Falita's fourteenth-century An Intelligent Man's Guide to the Art of Coition; as well as two works on the refinements of literary language, Abu al-Qasim al-Husayn Ibn Muhammad al-Raghib al-Isfahani's eleventh-century Muhadarat al udaba' wa isharat al-bulagha' (Lectures by the Literati and Conversations in Poetry and Eloquent Speech), and Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Jurjani's eleventh-century al-Muntakhab min kinayat al-udaba' wa isharat al-bulagha' (Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech). Each of these books treats a range of sexual practices explicitly and scientifically with a focus on pleasure, and each contains at least one chapter on female homoeroticism as a sexual practice among many. Although...