"Why do you want your only one to die, who as you know, loves you with soul and body, who sighs for you every hour at every moment, like a hungry little bird... as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly... you are the only woman I have chosen according to my heart."
-12th century woman lamants her seperation from another woman
"In 1405 a French woman called Laurence appealed against a conviction for Lesbianism, insisting that her partner, Jehanne, had been the instigator of the crime"
Westminster Wisdom
http://gracchii.blogspot.ca/2008/05/med ... bians.html
Abstract: In the late 15th century, a monumental brass was laid in the church at Etchingham (East Sussex) to the memory of two never-married women, Elizabeth Etchingham, who died in 1452, and Agnes Oxenbridge, who died in 1480. This article investigates the possible social meanings of their brass, with a particular eye to Alan Bray’s recent interpretations of other funeral monuments dedicated to same-sex couples.
Lying in the south aisle instead of the
chancel, it remembers not a male heir but a daughter, and an unmarried one at that:
in the early 1480s, a brass was laid in the church in memory of Sir William’s greatgranddaughter
(or possibly, great-great-granddaughter) Elizabeth Etchingham who
had died in 1452. The brass joined her in perpetuity with another unmarried daughter
of another east Sussex dynasty, Agnes Oxenbridge who died in 1480. In 2003, Alan Bray argued in his
posthumously published The Friend that Europeans have long celebrated intense,
same-sex friendships and that the Christian church has long accommodated these
friends in rituals that both bound them together in life and buried them together
in death. Bray, who wrote about the history of homosexuality before it
was fashionable to do so, was at pains to stress in The Friend that these monuments
celebrate emotional intimacy and friendship, not necessarily sexually expressed love. We have no evidence that
Elizabeth Etchingham or Agnes Oxenbridge ever married, and their brass memorial
gives us two good reasons to suppose they never did. Husbands are almost always
specifi ed on women’s grave inscriptions, but none were noted here; similarly, the
depictions of the women — Elizabeth Etchingham with long fl owing hair and both
with uncovered heads — bear the then-conventional signs of unmarried status. Peter Coss has explored how the
development of joint effi gies from the late-13th-century represents ‘a celebration of
marriage’,53 and certainly such joint designs had come by the 15th century to symbolise
the marital relationship as it was then ideally conceived — a union sanctifi ed
by God, supported by families, and marked by fi delity and common purpose. In
this context, the joint effi gies of Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge could
not but have evoked a close relationship; like a husband and wife, they were shown
sharing a monument in perpetuity. But their relationship was emphasised in other
aspects, too, for they were also shown facing each other, moving towards each other,
and looking directly into each other’s eyes.Because the shift to semi-profi le fi gures had only just begun — and fitfully so — by1480, the designers of the Etchingham-Oxenbridge brass had many choices about how
to arrange Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge on their joint memorial.
They could have portrayed both women faced to the front in what was still the most
common effi gial pose; they could have portrayed one faced front and the other in
deferential turn; they could have shown both in profi le, praying towards a cross, altar,
or other object placed between them. They chose to show both women turned with
equal force towards the other, in a pose that evoked the newly stylish and intimate
turn of marital brasses.Perhaps, as I have particularly
suggested here, Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge shared such an
intense — and possibly ‘lesbian-like’ — relationship in their twenties that Agnes
sought joint burial and joint commemoration when she died almost three decades
later.71 But it is also possible that Agnes Oxenbridge began to serve in the Etchingham
household as an adolescent, never left it, and was buried alongside a child for whom
she had once fondly cared. And perhaps other circumstances drew these two women
together, either as con temporaries, with Agnes Oxenbridge surviving Elizabeth Etchingham
by twenty-eight years, or as a trans-generational pair, with Agnes Oxenbridge
both older and longer-lived than Elizabeth Etchingham.
By Judith M. Bennett
Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Vol. 161 (2008)
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~judithb/documen ... rBrass.pdf
11 Jan 2013, 12:05 am
