Betancourt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Byzantine Intersectionality, we find ourselves in the center of my argument, in the midst of what is perhaps the book’s most valuable contribution: the rich demonstration of trans lives in medieval sources. Yet, it is also a page that finds itself in the moment where I pivot from detailing the complex narratives of trans monks (male monastics assigned female at birth) and shift to emphasizing that despite there being formal prohibitions by church councils and legal decrees on many practices categorized under “cross-dressing,” the stories of these trans saints nevertheless thrived in the religious culture of the Middle Ages.Learn more about Byzantine Intersectionality at the Princeton University Press website.
Much of page 99 features a long paragraph detailing these objections in order to demonstrate the nuanced dichotomies and complex realities of Early Christianity. Therefore, a reader who might only look at page 99, would not find in it the proud narratives of trans men and gender nonconforming persons in the medieval world. But, what a reader of the whole book could appreciate in this page is the striking survey of medieval legal, religious, and medical sources that the volume scrutinizes, reading these sources in their original Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic.
To me, this page is emblematic of the challenges of writing a careful and sophisticated history of the medieval world that does not just superficially take decrees or sermons as accurately reflecting the realities of religious life in any period. Practices of medieval theologians, for example, did not merely regurgitate the Bible or its teachings, but rather they confronted head-on all the questions, loopholes, gaps, and discrepancies that the New and Old Testaments presented.
My book acknowledges that the Early Christian and medieval worlds were deeply saturated in philosophical inquiry that worked well beyond fundamentalist modes of reading and reflected the complexities of their historical moment. Serving as the foundations of a living tradition, the realities of trans people in medieval sources speak to the intellectual wealth of a medieval Christian world that was immensely diverse and filled with startling narratives that have often been overlooked, downplayed, or ignored. In other words, page 99 should not be the only one you read, but it can be a way of orienting oneself within the book, serving as a bridge between the expected and the unexpected.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
