Consider another story from Gregory of Tours’ gallery of the unexpected: the case of the cross-dressing Poitevin at the tribunal of the rebellious nuns of Holy Cross (Histories 10.15). Nancy Partner (1993, p.418, 439) noted that Gregory describes this person as a man in woman’s clothing, not as a woman, but are we authorised to take that as any sort of basis for discussion, any more than we should take modern Republicans’ insistence that a transgendered person is a man ‘dressed up as a woman’ (Badash 2016)? Are we permitted to refer to the Poitevin as ‘he’ rather than ‘she’ on Gregory’s say-so? Whether the Poitevin lived her life as a woman or lived his life dressed as a woman is impossible to say. Gregory reports that, when questioned, the Poitevin said that s/he had made the decision to dress as a woman because s/he was incapable of manly work (opus virile) but we cannot know what to make of this because the whole text, above all its evident distinction between biological sex and material cultural gender, is soaked in a gendered discourse of power. One of the story’s attractions is that it is so undecidable at so many levels that trying to claim what Gregory, or the Poitevin, ‘really meant’ by any of the crucial phrases is quite pointless. In noting the story’s separation of the ‘man’ from the ‘clothing’ we are however presented with a difficult course to chart between the Scylla of essentialism and the Charybdis of endless, disabling relativism. How do we investigate agency or resistance to normative views? How might we identify the difference between a man who dressed as a woman and a biological male who lived as a woman?
If this person was born anatomically male, that clearly did not determine the construction of his/her gender. We do not know what was meant by the claimed incapacity to perform opus virile, or whether or how this related to her/his sexuality (Dailey 2015, p.000; Halsall forthcoming). Thorpe’s somewhat misleading translation, upon which Partner (1993) relies too heavily, suggests that (qua man) the Poitevin was impotent. If so, his gendering did not relate to his sexuality. Perhaps he was married; perhaps his sexuality had little bearing on his decision to marry and try to raise a family. Other sixth-century options visible in the story include gendering oneself as male, but refraining from all sexuality (as a monk or secular ecclesiastic), or as a married woman and similarly abstaining from sex (as a nun – married to Christ). Even what we might suppose was the normative Frankish family unit, with a mother, father and children, was not the sole vehicle for socialisation. The masculine child could leave his natal family and spend a long period either in another family household or in the overwhelmingly masculine society of a retinue (Halsall 2010a; 2010b).
The rebellious nuns’ accusation, that the Poitevin dressed to conceal his masculinity and thus work in a house of religious women (with no implications for his sexuality), adds yet a further dimension. If we accept the bishops’ decision that the accusation was groundless and trust the Poitevin’s own account of the reasons for his/her costume, another unanswerable question arises: if identity is an ‘enacted fantasy’, what was the mental image or ego-ideal in question? This story illustrates how anatomical sex, sexuality, gender, living arrangements, marriage and so on combine in a galaxy of historically-contingent ways.[2]
