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June 2022 Vol. 59 No. 10

This multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the plurality of gender experiences in the West in the premodern era. Editors LaFleur (American studies, Yale Univ.), Raskolnikov (English, Cornell Univ.), and Kłosowska (French, Miami Univ.) take up the contemporary category of transgender to study gendered, gender-nonconforming, and transgender experiences from late antiquity to the 18th century. Some essays focus on individuals, such as Kłosowska's analysis of a 1561 Polish court deposition that describes the life of an individual who had been publicly designated a woman, despite living as a man. Others focus on literary texts, such as Raskolnikov's exploration of the 13th-century French romance Le Roman de Silence or Zrinka Stahuljak's corrective translation of Vasco da Lucena’s Deeds of Alexander the Great. The collection’s concluding essays address methodological questions, frameworks, and terminology, offering many possibilities for approaching trans-centered analysis in medieval and early modern scholarship. Overall, the collection is an important contribution to the premodern era, and the diversity of sources, methodologies, and approaches will appeal to a wide variety of students and scholars.

--J. Werner, University of California Berkeley

Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.