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

Amer's book is a bold, imaginative look at the multitude of borders between east and west that are crossed in medieval French literature. She focuses on the Islamic east, and her borders include those between disciplines, languages, gender, friendship and intimacy, and cultures. Her goals are set out from the beginning: to bring into dialogue medieval French and Arabic literatures, to make medieval Arabic erotic literature available to western medievalists, to show the importance of Arabic eroticism in medieval French writings on gender and sexuality, and to insist upon the importance of a cross-cultural approach to theoretical discussions of gender and sexuality.

The first chapter sets the tone for the book by examining the history of same-sex literature in the eastern and western traditions. Amer shows that the development of terms to describe certain sexual acts may well have changed not the acts themselves, but our perception of the frequency or importance of those acts. Words for 'sodomy' tended to erase female homosexuality in the west, and specific terms for homo- and heterosexuality obscure the continuum and specificity that more specialized terms for lesbianism had in medieval Arabic. Amer is an engaging storyteller, which comes across in one of the most fascinating accounts of the book: her search for medieval Arabic-language erotic literature in the bookstores of Cairo. Turned away because the bookstore owner would not sell licentious material to a woman, Amer had a friend procure the illicit book for her, and even then the pages had been overprinted to escape censorship. Clearly, the medieval does matter today, and erotic stories of the past have apparently not lost their power to titillate.

Chapter two looks at a twelth-century French text and its use of military metaphors to describe sexual activities. Amer provides us with the cultural context in which the book was produced—the Anglo-Norman court and its established contact with Arabic scientific, cultural and literary traditions. The author of this French language text, Etienne de Fougère, describes lesbian sexuality as a joust, and with 'shield' banging against 'shield,' as opposed to the more natural sexuality in which a 'lance' would be involved. As Amer rightly points out, critics have marginalized this part of Etienne's poem, saying that as a bishop he would not have penned such base verses and used words of unattested origin. Taking these critics to task, Amer provides a convincing origin for both the metaphor and the unusual vocabulary found in the lesbian descriptions. At least three different Arabic-language writers, al-Jurjani, Ibn Nasr, and al-Tifashi used the shield metaphor to refer to women's genitals in their writings that precede or are concurrent with de Fougère's text. Amer gives plausible derivations for the unattested words in de Fougère's text, suggesting that they could be transliterated Arabic. Amer's work, while she very clearly claims that it is speculative, provides exciting possibilities for medievalists working in sexuality and gender studies. As more Arabic texts become available to modern scholars, we should begin to learn even more about the cross-pollination between east and west during the high Middle Ages.

Chapter three reads side-by-side two medieval texts: Yde et Olive from the French tradition and The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Princess Boudour from the Arabic tradition. Amer points out that in medieval French literary texts, lesbianism is approached indirectly through cross-dressing. When read next to the Arabic text, the French text shares remarkable similarities. Like Yde, Princess Boudour takes up men's clothing and soon finds herself married to a woman. Amer sees cross-dressing as a way of sublimating same-sex desire. In these tales, two women are placed in amorous situations because one of them is dressed as a man and the other is unaware of the disguise. There are various versions of both of these...