by Dr Mariana Bodnaruk (Masaryk University Brno), Dr Stephan Bruhn (German Historical Institute London), and Dr Michael Eber (University of Cologne)

On 22–23 May, the German Historical Institute in London hosted a conference titled ‘Trans Sainthood in Translation, ca. 400–1500’. Seventeen presenters from eight countries covered the translations and artistic depictions of the lives of the so-called monachoparthenoi. According to their legends, these saints were assigned female gender at birth but lived as monks in male monasteries. While most of their vitae originated in the Greek-speaking regions of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean, versions of their stories appear to have circulated in almost every Late Antique and Medieval Christian community. The conference focused on the five monachoparthenoi who received full-length biographies in both Greek and Latin (Eugenia*us, Euphrosyne*Smaragdus, Marina*us, Pelagia*us and Theodora*us), but papers also covered these vitae as they appear in Syriac, Coptic, Ge’ez, Church Slavonic, Old English, Old French, Middle High German and Old Norse. Visual depictions and relics from Constantinople, Cyprus, Palestine, the Balkans, Rome and Iberia were also explored (the programme is available here).

Although the stories were literary constructions written mainly by monastic authors, they had an original historical core and a long oral tradition. Evidence of historical gender-crossing is reflected in other sources from the Middle Ages and early modern times, such as monastic anecdotes, hagiographic iconography, and church and state laws. These narratives and images furnished models that shaped the gender subjectivities of their readers and viewers. While the stories of our five saints are fictional, they were not created or read as such in the Middle Ages and beyond. In their late antique contexts of production, as well as in their later translations and reception by Christian audiences across the broader Mediterranean and Europe, these texts were perceived as recounting “true” stories. Transgender saints were not only “real” to believers; they also received embodiment and possessed materiality through icons, shrines, and especially relics, such as those of Pelagia*us and Eugenia*us, the earliest and most popular of this group. It is this transmateriality of the gender-crossing saints, and the hopes the faithful connected with them as intercessors, that the conference participants discussed.

Some researchers have taken the ubiquity of these trans masculine saints as a sign of their insignificance. Until very recently, those few who had studied them did so almost exclusively within the limiting and pathologising framework of ‘transvestism’ or ‘cross-dressing’. By contrast, over the course of two days of lively discussion, a wide range of approaches to these saints emerged (which cannot be easily summarised here). While many authors, translators, scribes and artists working with these saints were keen to impose cisness and erase trans readings — by changing pronouns, erasing masculine names from manuscripts or depicting saints as nuns rather than monks — this erasure was never fully successful. Even in the most transphobic rewritings and depictions, our presenters usually found some evidence of slippage, suggesting that the authors and artists were, on some level, aware that treating these saints as ‘actually women the whole time’ simply does not work. Additionally, from Ethiopia to Italy to Iceland, we found many traditions that treated the saints’ monastic trans masculinity as a matter of fact rather than something that needed to be explained away.

It was not lost on any of us that this conference took place only a month after the Equality and Human Rights Commission had issued some guidance that essentially comes down to segregating trans people from public life: According to the guidance, it can supposedly be lawful to exclude trans people from all single-sex facilities. This meant that, at a conference covering a millennium of continuous presence of trans monks in ‘single sex facilities’ – i.e. monasteries –, many of our presenters could not be sure that there was any bathroom that they were technically allowed to use. While our small conference certainly doesn’t have the same reach as the EHRC, not to mention the global network of transphobic activists, we still hope that it has contributed to a counter-narrative that aids the fight for trans rights.

This conference was co-sponsored by the Past & Present Society, the Hagiography Society, the German Historical Institute, and the German Research Foundation (DFG).