Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures
Given Christianity's valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety.\ In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic...
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Crossing Borders explores cross-cultural representations of gender and sexual practices in the medieval French and Arabic traditions. Amer demonstrates that the medieval Arabic tradition on eroticism played a determining role in French literary writings on gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages.
Note on Transliteration viiPreface ixCrossing Disciplinary Boundaries: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Same-Sex Love Between Women 1Crossing Linguistic Borders: Etienne de Fougeres's Livre des Manieres and Arabic Erotic Treatises 29Crossing Sartorial Lines: Female Same-Sex Marriage in Yde et Olive and The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Princess Boudour from the One Thousand and One Nights 50Crossing the Lines of Friendship: Jean Renart's Escoufle, Saracen Silk, and Intercultural Encounters 88Crossing Social and Cultural Borders: Jean Renart's Escoufle and the Traditions of Zarf, Jawaris, and Qaynas in the Islamicate World 121Conclusion: Beyond Orientalist Presuppositions 161Notes 167Bibliography 217Index 239Acknowledgments 251
\ From the Publisher"Crossing Borders is a bold and groundbreaking work. Situated at the nexus of queer theory and postcolonial medievalism, it interrogates and seeks to conjoin two significant areas of inquiry: the literary representation of lesbianism and the influence of Arabic traditions on medieval French narrative. Working across a range of genres in both languages, Sahar Amer unearths hitherto unrecognized allusions to lesbianism in Old French texts, arguing that these represent traces of Arabic influence on the key genres of romance and epic."—Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz\ "A must read for scholars working in Arabic and European medieval studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, gender and sexuality, comparative literature, and a variety of other disciplines."—Journal of Arabic Literature\ \ \
