•
At the Limits of (Trans)Gender:
Jesus, Mary, and the Angels
in the Visionary Sermons of
Juana de la Cruz (1481 – 1534)
Jessica A. Boon
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
After the 1492 Reconquest of Muslim Granada and expulsion of the Jews
from the Iberian peninsula, the leaders of Castile exhibited an unprecedented
and unexpected openness to Christian innovation. In the same decades that
saw the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition as a powerful bureaucratic
tool to police heresy, especially “judaizing” (converts from Judaism reverting
to their original practices), the Christian reforms instituted by Queen Isabel
and King Fernando made available to New and Old Christians alike a much
greater variety of practices and texts than had been accessible previously in
the kingdom of Castile.1 For example, at the behest of the “Most Catholic”
monarchs and their reform-minded Archbishop and Cardinal Francisco de
Cisneros, multiple classic works by Latin church fathers as well as mystical
and spiritual texts by authors such as Ludolph of Saxony, Catherine of Siena,
and Angela of Foligno were commissioned for translation. In addition, Castilians began composing a range of new devotional works, from catechisms
to Passion-centered meditation treatises to mystical texts, which enjoyed
great popularity until the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books placed limitations
on access to religious works in the vernacular.2 In other words, the early
decades of the sixteenth century in Castile were characterized by the widespread repression of non-Christian traditions and, inversely, a remarkable
proliferation of Christian spiritual practices.
Perhaps the most unusual example of religious innovation in this
complex era was the support given by Cardinal Cisneros to Mother Juana de
la Cruz (1481 – 1534), who led her small tertiary house outside of Madrid in
its conversion to a Clarissan convent.3 Starting in 1508 and continuing for
thirteen years, Juana gave public “sermones” while in ecstatic trance, during which Christ’s voice was reported to issue from her inert body for hours
at a time, commenting on ideas ranging from the fall of Adam and Eve to
the Crucifixion and the Immaculate Conception.4 Thus, for a number of
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48:2, May 2018
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years, a congregation of nuns, local ecclesiastics, military leaders, and even
Emperor Charles V regularly viewed an apparently unconscious nun speaking in a low-register voice and using the first person to retell the biblical
narrative and expand on theological doctrine.5 To add to the impact of these
visionary sermons, the sermons included wildly dramatic descriptions of the
events taking place in heaven on key days in the liturgical calendar. Rebeca
Sanmartín Bastida has categorized both Juana and her direct contemporary, the visionary María de Santo Domingo, as creating a kind of “trance
theater” [teatro del trance].6 Juana did not participate in the theatrical episodes, unlike María; instead, Jesus spoke through her concerning episodes
in which Christ, Mary, the angels, and the saints enacted the festive version
of heaven that many late medieval Christians imagined — eating, drinking, playing games, dancing — with the novel addition of elaborate allegorical pageants ( figuras) intended to present and reinforce theological and
moral precepts.7
Ecclesiastical support for a woman preacher presenting innovative
theology in public during the early decades of the Inquisition is even more
surprising since Juana’s “semi-autobiography” claims that she experienced
a sex change before birth and indicates that she had bodily signs of gender ambiguity, including an Adam’s apple. The appearance of secondary sex
characteristics of both types seems at first reading to indicate either androgyny or hermaphroditism, which in the sixteenth century evoked on the one
hand the monstrously incomplete (neither male nor female) or, on the other,
absolute plenitude (both male and female).8 The principal scholars of Juana’s
work have all analyzed Juana’s gender ambiguity as formative for her theology. Ronald Surtz suggests that Juana’s androgyne experience led her to
consistently emphasize the feminine aspects of male authority figures such
as Jesus or St. Francis.9 María del Mar Graña Cid, in a carefully argued and
extensive article on the “femininity” of Jesus in Juana’s writing, proposes
that Juana’s repeated “mixing of genders” [mezcla de géneros] served a protofeminist purpose of “making visible the feminine” in Christianity.10 It may
have been possible for a visionary to exert a kind of androgynous authority
based on medieval assumptions that the soul itself was androgynous; that is,
spiritual authority could quite logically be lived out in androgynous corporeality, as the body would then match the soul.11
However, I argue in this article that “androgyny” and “mixing of
genders,” while important aspects of Juana’s gender presentation, are not
sufficient explanations for her lived experience, nor fully representative of
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out her work.12 Careful attention to Juana’s visionary sermons, particularly
the allegorical pageants and heavenly feasts that Jesus describes through the
rapt Juana, indicates that gender play was at the heart of the festive events
attributed to the denizens of heaven, and that much of the gender complexity that can be extrapolated about Juana’s own life is reproduced as central
to the nature of Jesus, Mary, and even the angels. Rather than attempt to fix
a gender identity for Juana herself, a problematic approach given the paucity
of documentation for her life (and a problematic question that depends on
theories of gender identity as stable rather than processual), I examine how
Juana’s gender continuum patterned her visions of heaven and deeply influenced her theology.13
Given the extraordinary variety of gender experience and presentation found in Juana’s descriptions of her own life and the life of heaven, the
contemporary expansion of gender terminology is a useful tool with which
to track the parallels between Juana’s self-understanding and her exploration
of saintly, angelic, and divine nature. Although Juana identified publicly
as a nun and therefore as female, such rubrics as “trans” or “intersex,” for
example, can help parse the nuances of the distinctive narratives on which
Juana rests her authority.14 In turn, the precision of contemporary terminology can aid in identifying certain subcategories within the gender performances attributed at various moments to all the denizens of heaven in
Juana’s visions, such that consideration of “trans,” “bigender,” or “genderqueer” representations of Jesus, Mary, and the angels permits connections
between episodes in different sermons that together shed light on Juana’s
theological interventions.15
In the first half of this article, I consider the autobiographical details
of Juana’s nonbinary gender in light of Renaissance scientific understandings of gender, sex, and fetal development, as well as medieval and early
modern mystical expressions that depend on regendering the devotee or the
divine. This cultural context helps isolate what was unique to Juana’s case,
and therefore which details might be elucidated through contemporary terminology from trans studies and queer theory. In the second half, I explore
the ramifications of Juana’s embrace of a gender continuum for her theology.
I will turn first to angelology, for Juana explores not only the materiality of
angels who feast, dance, and fight, but also their role as feminized males or
even as a third gender in heaven. Most importantly, the specifics of Juana’s
gender are echoed in a celestial episode that takes place between Mary and
the angels in which Mary blends angelic secondary sex characteristics with
her own. This example, I suggest, paves the way for considering other types
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of unusual gendered interactions between Jesus and the saints throughout
Juana’s visionary sermons, helping to parse some of the most astonishing
pronouncements she makes concerning gender and sexuality in heaven.
Key moments in Juana’s gender experience
Little is known about Juana’s life history beyond the bare outlines: she was
born into a family of modest means, joined the religious house (beaterio)
María de la Cruz in Cubas (outside Toledo) around age fifteen to avoid an
arranged marriage, and was appointed abbess once the beaterio was incorporated into the Clarissan order in 1509.16 She had begun her sermons the
year before her election as abbess, and several amanuenses transcribed what
was claimed as a liturgical year’s worth of sermons in a manuscript, El libro
del conorte, conserved in manuscript form until its first print publication in
1999. Juana received letters of support from Cardinal Cisneros for her exercise of forms of authority rarely granted to women, including the right to
appoint the convent’s chaplain herself.17 Although at one point her authority
was challenged by her assistant superior in a dispute over nepotism and mismanagement of funds, her accuser recanted and Juana was restored to her
position as abbess, a post she held until her death in 1534.
Beyond the few archival documents that support the information
given above, there are two primary sources for information about her life
history. Juana’s semi-autobiography, Vida y fin, was supposedly dictated by
Juana, but was clearly terminated by others since it ends with her death and
miraculous preservation as a corpse. A conventual book of records, Libro
de la casa, from the late sixteenth century repeats a number of the miracles
and visions from the semi-autobiography, adds others, and conserves a play
based on her Annunciation sermon.18 All three manuscripts attributed to
Juana — the lengthy sermon collection, the semi-autobiography, and the
book of records — are collaborative documents, transcribed in part or full
by other nuns, one of whom, María Evangelista, putatively received the gift
of literacy as a miracle to aid her in this task.19 Juana’s seventy-two sermons
were also redacted by the confessor to the convent in two different manuscripts, and marginal annotations survive from several generations of readers. These are the principal, and fascinating, documents by which to access
Juana’s claims to authority and innovative theology.
The Vida y fin begins with two crucial episodes concerning Juana’s
gender and authority to be abbess. First, the semi-autobiography presents a
birth miracle meant to establish that her role as abbess was ordained for her
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by God at the behest of the Virgin Mary. In Juana’s account, Mary had asked
God to restore a failing Marian beatario to prominence; God responded by
changing the gender of the fetus in the womb of Juana’s mother, so that the
fetus would be born in the correct gender in order to enter the convent and
lead it out of its decline:
And the all-powerful God responded very lovingly [to Mary]:
“My mother, [there is] at this moment a male that I have begun to
make, in whom I wanted to put a great part of my grace . . . and
for love of you, Lady, I will change him into woman [to accomplish] this work that you ask [of me] . . . and the blessed Juana de
la Cruz was at that moment in the womb of her mother starting
to be made male, [and God] made her woman as [an] all-powerful
[God] could and can do. And his Divine Majesty did not want
to take away the knot that she had in her throat so that it would
be a testament to the miracle. And when [God] changed her
into a woman she did not yet have the spirit of life, and the powerful God protected her from the dangers that other creatures
often have happen to them in the wombs of their mothers. (Vida y
fin, fol. 2v)20
Juana’s prominent Adam’s apple is adduced as a sign that this gender change
was “made” by God; Surtz describes it as an “emblem of a divinely determined androgyny.”21 This episode, coming as it does at the beginning of
Juana’s semi-autobiography, confirms female authority in heaven by depicting Mary as an interlocutor with God, but also reinforces Juana’s authority by demonstrating that the abbess’s rank, and concomitantly her public
sermons, were a result of God’s intentional intervention.
A mere two chapters after this remarkable miracle of regendering, Juana continues on to another episode of gender variation, this time
according to the cultural construction of gender beyond just its bodily basis.
Juana recounts her decision to flee her childhood home in male clothing in
order to reach the convent of Santa María de Cubas in safety and enter as a
novitiate. This sequence evokes various medieval hagiographic accounts of
cross-dressing female saints who usually resorted to male clothing in order
to maintain a vow of abstinence rather than enter an arranged marriage,
as well as the secular “portraits of women” books popular in the early sixteenth century around Europe that often presented cross-dressing women
as “virile, courageous, and magnanimous.”22 Notably, this episode was also
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included in the first biography of Mother Juana, written and revised by an
influential Franciscan, Antonio de Daza, in the early seventeenth century.23
As described in the Vida y fin, Juana changed back into female clothing
as soon as she arrived at the convent, sheltering next to its towering walls
while she put on her dress. When she walked up to the door in her “proper”
apparel, the Marian image on the door of the convent welcomed her with
a direct salutation, saying, “Congratulations, welcome to my house. Enter
in happily, as you were raised for this.”24 This initial moment of direct contact between Juana and Mary — when the Marian image affirmed Juana’s
entrance into the religious house after changing costume — likewise confirmed that Juana’s choice to take on or put off societal gender markers was
an acceptable spiritual tactic if restoring Mary’s convent was the result.25
According to her semi-autobiography, then, Juana comfortably
inhabited multiple gender dynamics, ranging from being transgendered as a
fetus while retaining a male secondary sex characteristic, to cross-dressing,
to voice register changes when Jesus gave sermons through her enraptured
body, all of which experiences she claimed to be authorized by the Virgin
Mary and enabled by God. These gender dynamics were central to the construction of Juana’s authority in her Marian convent — she was born female
to be its abbess — while also giving Juana a platform from which she could
preach, or rather by which Jesus could speak through her.
It is notable that the last of these dynamics, speaking as Jesus, produced the highest claim to authority in her time, that is, public preaching
by a woman. In her era in Italy and Spain, some women known as “living
saints” were granted a certain public authority for prophetic preaching, yet
Juana is unique for claiming to channel Jesus over the course of thirteen
years.26 As a claim, it has strong parallels with a variety of religions from
around the world in which women regularly seek out “spirit possession.” In
these religions, women often channel male divinities or spirits and speak
with low voices, achieving a level of male authority while embodying the
divinity in the form of a female.27 Medieval Christians, however, faced the
conundrum as to whether such an experience should be categorized as an
enraptured experience given by God, or possession by a demon; evidently,
Juana’s audience, not to mention the Inquisition, would have rejected her
visions had they believed her to be possessed.28 Since Juana’s case might
seem to evoke a broad category in the study of religion yet her fellow Castilians would have considered such a term highly suspect, it is thus essential to probe carefully how such a nonbinary set of gendered claims to
channel the divine would have been evaluated and recognized by Juana’s
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audience in sixteenth-century Castile, in particular the unique claim to
gender transformation in the womb that left a mark of the original gender
on Juana’s body.
“Born this way”: Contextualizing Juana’s gender
in premodern medicine and culture
To aid us in understanding Juana’s authority as a woman preacher voicing
a male divine, I turn to two crucial contexts: medical and cultural understandings of gender variance in Renaissance Castile, and the ways in which
medieval and Renaissance mystical authors used gender-fluid language to
express direct contact with the divine. Careful attention to how Juana both
correlates with — yet inverts — her era’s most common forms of “gender
transformations” both secular and sacred will serve not simply to mark her
as a distinctive case study, but also to highlight certain questions concerning
gender and sexuality that then pervade her visions.29
First, it is worth considering what a change of sex in the womb
would have meant according to the reigning medical constructs of the era,
for Juana’s prenatal transformation is not the case of a miraculous change in
DNA from XY to XX.30 For that matter, it differs from cases of hermaphroditism and changes in gender at the age of puberty (through the testicles
dropping) that were rare but periodically assessed by theologians and Inquisitorial courts in the medieval and early modern era.31 Instead, fetal development as it was understood not only by medieval doctors but more generally
in cultural assumptions is a critical source for understanding how Juana’s
fellow religious might have understood her birth miracle, that is, how Juana
was “born this way.”32
Medieval physicians and scientists followed Galenic humoral theory, defining all living creatures as combinations balanced between certain
amounts of cold and heat, dryness and moisture. In this medical theory, all
human fetuses began as collection of fluids which, if properly heated, would
form (or harden) within forty-five days into a male, at which point the soul
would be joined to the body. Otherwise the body would remain more moist
and cool, only being organized into a female between fifty-five and eighty
days after conception.33 As Joan Cadden has noted:
Heat . . . was the most fundamental physical difference between
the sexes. . . . It is their greater heat that allows men to make their
nutritive superfluities into hair and beards. . . . Indeed, from the
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very beginning, males are warmer than females, which is one of
the reasons male embryos grow more quickly in the womb.34
In addition, certain aspects of the environment were assumed to contribute
to gendering the fetus, including where in the uterus it developed (the right
side is warmer, aiding digestion that nourishes males), and the quantity
and quality of male sperm (stronger sperm heats the fetus more quickly).35
In other words, pace Simone de Beauvoir, in the Middle Ages being female
(cool/moist) was the baseline; being male was something one becomes with
sufficient heat.36
As we saw in the dialogue quoted above between God and Mary,
God promised to intervene in Juana’s mother’s womb where a male was
being “made” before the process was finalized and the “spirit of life” was
added, that is, before the soul was joined to the body at forty-five days. The
medical result of this divine decision would have been to undo the heating
sequence and return the fetus to a cooler, more fluid, and disorganized state.
And in fact, as a mark of the miracle, God intentionally left intact a male
secondary sex characteristic, yet it is of note that the marker was a “knot in
the throat” rather than a beard, which according to humoral theory would
have disappeared with the reduction of heat in the womb.37 In fact, Juana’s
masculine-of-center gender presentation, while clearly unusual enough
to require justification for her Adam’s apple in the first folios of her semiautobiography, distinguishes her from other medieval examples of women
with masculine traits, such as bearded female saints like Wilgefortis or Santa
Librada, whose hagiographies describe the miraculous growth of beards that
served to preserve their vows of virginity at the advent of arranged marriages.38 In this birth miracle, Juana claims a unique origin for her life as a
female with a male Adam’s apple, an origin which ultimately goes beyond
the “gender mixing” terminology proposed by Graña Cid to a complete
“gender reversal.” Indeed, this birth miracle could usefully be considered
a “divinely ordained sexual reassignment surgery,” one more holistic than
twenty-first century surgical interventions, for this alteration would not only
have affected her genitals but indeed qualitatively shifted Juana’s entire body
into a cooler, fluid formation that would impact her for the rest of her days.39
To consider this gender reversal more carefully, in premodern thinking, not only did an overall combination of heat/dryness or cold/moisture
pertain to whether a fetus remained female or turned male, but all persons
throughout their lives fell within a range of variations in exactly how hot/
dry or cold/moist they were.40 These variations affected overall personality
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and character: Women who were midrange rather than extremely cold or
moist exhibited more masculine characteristics, ranging from higher intelligence to secondary sex characteristics such as facial hair.41 It is true that
nonfemininity was considered unattractive, and indeed, in the case of overly
hairy women, hilarious or monstrous, and Hispanists have explored various
instances of what queer theorist Halberstam terms “female masculinity” and
Renaissance Castilians termed “mujer varonil” found in Inquisition casefiles
and sixteenth-century literature.42 However, in this era, a less overtly feminine gender presentation was not primarily a choice that could be critiqued
for nonconformity but rather was an innate characteristic based on humoral
balance from the fetal stage throughout life, often associated with the astrological sign the woman was born under or the weather patterns in her home
region, south or north.43 In other words, during Juana’s era, gender identity,
secondary sex characteristics, and intellect all fit under the rubric of nature,
not nurture.44
While scholars have generally used this birth miracle to designate
Juana as androgynous, I suggest that the gender-reversing miracle in which
she is “unmade” from male into female but retains a visible male secondary
sex characteristic produced what could be either termed a “trans” or “intersex” body.45 When intersex was introduced as a term in the early twentieth
century, it was basically synonymous with the premodern understanding of
hermaphroditism. Now, however, intersex is applied to many cases beyond
the medieval definition of dual genitalia, including the question of ambiguous genitalia that, starting in the mid-twentieth century in the West, were
operated on surgically in order to produce genitalia that conformed to one
or another binary gender. Intersex also can refer to nonvisible bodily sources
that might produce ambiguous genitalia, such as nonresponsiveness to certain hormones or a genotype of XXY.46 In the case of Juana, the reorganization of her body from hot and dry to moist and cool in the womb could
evoke some of these contemporary medical aspects of intersex, while the
presence of a secondary sex characteristic of the initial gender might produce
the ambiguity that has led to controversial surgical interventions to assign
gender to intersex persons.
Turning to the term “transgender,” some contemporary theorists
distinguish between transgender as those who seek surgical reassignment
and intersex as those with ambiguous genitalia who reject having their sex
chosen for them by the medical establishment after birth.47 However, many
theorists use “trans” as a term for a far wider range of individuals than simply those who seek surgical reassignment, and in my view it is the most capaBoon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 269
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cious rubric to express Juana’s experience of gender change while retaining a
trace of the initial gender.48 For example, Gayle Salamon proposes a definition of “transgenderism or transsexuality” as “a region of being in which the
subject is not quite unitary and not quite the combination of two different
things. . . . It can be thought by itself, yet has been unnameable.”49 A nun
whose original gender was tailored by God in order to achieve a particular
devotional end and whose miraculous transformation is marked on her body
through a mixing of secondary sex characteristics is surely neither unitary
nor fully combined. Nor, however, is she simply androgynous.
Mystical transgendering
It is clear that Juana’s leadership, due to rather than despite her masculine
attributes and deep preaching voice, would have registered on a gender continuum that, while not lauded, was at least recognizable in Renaissance
Spain. Another critical context for Juana’s authority is the way in which
medieval and Renaissance Christians made use of a functional rather than
biological understanding of gender in their mystical and spiritual texts. Marian Rothstein has recently proposed “functional gender” as a useful term for
the oft-analyzed medieval tendency to describe gender as a constellation of
qualities in which any given individual can participate more or less fully:
Functional gendering may ascribe qualities to a given person
generally associated with, or as in the case of nursing [lactating],
seemingly physically grounded in, a body with the opposite sex.
Again, such gendering is not embodied, and its classification is
neither totalizing nor permanent.50
The cultural understanding of gender as functional rather than innate in
the Middle Ages opened up the possibility of a gender continuum in mystical and visionary texts, particularly in relation to the active/passive binary
assigned to men/women. Many scholars have analyzed the frequency with
which medieval mystics resorted to a kind of “mystical transgendering,”
in which they voiced their experience of the divine through language that
situates the mystic, and sometimes even God, in a different gender.
For example, the abbot and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux posited himself under the guise of the feminine, waiting passively for God to
actively pursue contact with him.51 Inversely, Hadewijch of Antwerp and
other female Beguines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wrote
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prose and poetry imagining themselves as knights ardently pursuing the
attention of God, their lady love.52 Hispanist Anne J. Cruz has identified
this mystical transgendering as an important strand of Golden Age Spanish
mysticism in the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, tracing its
source to the medieval Italian mystic Angela of Foligno, whose Memoriale
was translated into Spanish at the behest of Cisneros in 1510, early in Juana’s
career.53 The justification for these mystical gender dynamics is that individuals in their quotidian life are too dependent on limited categories of human
thinking and imagining — only by inverting those categories most crucial
to identity could the mystic get beyond the framework of daily life and be
open to an encounter with a divine infinitely more grand than any human
could imagine.
The flexibility of gender in relation to the divine, then, was not
only extensively supported throughout medieval Europe, but was specifically
available in Juana’s era. I argue, however, that a strategy of linguistic transgendering as a mystical method to move outside normal categories of life
and thought in order to be more open to divine interaction is qualitatively
different from a divine male taking over the voice of a nun who displayed
secondary sex characteristics of both genders. Likewise, the questions that
arise as a result of Juana’s gender experience are different from a woman
mystic poetically taking on the role of a knight or naming God as a lady
of the court, and in fact these questions point to the need for a dramatic
rethinking of our common conceptions of gender dynamics, based on Juana
as a case study.
To wit, if Jesus takes over Juana’s voice while she is unconscious,
how bodily an experience is this, and what sort of binary or nonbinary
gender experience is at work? Is Jesus making Juana male, as indicated by
the low register voice? Is a female body the vessel for the male divine, or
is the divine at this moment female? Is the audience “seeing God” in an
unconscious female, or only hearing Jesus? And what about the fact that
we only have records of these sermons because several female amanuenses
were designated as her scribes (since Juana spoke but did not write during
her sermons)? Is Jesus female by being written by women? Further, as discussed above, the principal amanuensis, María Evangelista, was reportedly
illiterate until miraculously given the power to write, specifically in order
to transcribe these sermons which were later organized by a male Franciscan advisor or priest to the convent. If the male divine has empowered an
illiterate woman to write down the male divine’s speech uttered through
the masculine-of-center nun’s low voice, what kind of gendering is at work
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here? Indeed, what can one ultimately say about an author whose gender
expression not only transgresses binaries but relies on a collectivity of female
scribes and male editors to effectively channel a male divine — a “mystical
assemblage,” as it were?54
I present the above in the form of questions to indicate the radical
repositioning concerning definitions of gender that can occur when Juana’s
biography is probed. However, rather than attempting to define Juana herself
as a particular gender, in this article I am interested in using what one might
call her “gender continuum performance” (pace Butler) as a cue for considering the gender performance not of other humans, but of the divine. In short,
the twelve hundred pages of El libro del conorte are filled with glorious heavenly festivities that indicate that Juana herself was far more fascinated with
divine nature as manifestly and diversely gendered than with probing her
own identity. Given how rooted the topoi of classical theology (Christology,
definitions of sin, anthropology) are in notions of gender and sexuality, the
fact that Juana seems to have problematized gender binaries in her own life
would have had considerable implications for her theological proposals.
Having proposed the categories trans and intersex in order to parse
the miracles and episodes presented as justification in the Vida y fin for
Juana’s role as abbess and visionary preacher, the rest of my discussion takes
Juana’s gender variance as a cue to consider how such terms as trans, intersex, genderqueer, and bigender can help assess the gender fluidity found in
the divine and in heaven in Conorte.55 To start with a perhaps unexpected
topic, throughout the medieval period, angelology had been an important theological topic affording theologians a way to fix more precisely the
boundary between human and divine. In my view, Juana subverts this tradition of boundary-making through angelology by identifying slippage within
the gender expression usually attributed to angels, a slippage that ultimately
parallels and indeed vindicates the extraordinary episodes of nonbinary gender within her own life.
Radicalizing the gender of angels and Mary
The theorist and historian of early modern mysticism Michel de Certeau
notes that the figure of “The angel . . . bypasse[d] at once the difference of
time (the past and the future), of species (the bestial and the celestial), and of
sex (he is bisexual, androgynous).”56 De Certeau drew many of his insights
from the Spanish mystics who published during the half century after
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point to the personages of Jesus (fully human, fully divine) and Mary (fully
human, assumed body and soul into heaven) that enables theological reflection on the genderqueer nature of heaven.
Angels were important intercessory figures in the Middle Ages, as
was Mary, Juana’s principal champion.57 Juana’s own mysticism was interwoven with interactions with angels, following in the footsteps of other premodern mystics and spiritual leaders, as well as Castilian Franciscans who
led the reform movement of the fifteenth century.58 In addition to receiving
apparitions of Mary and voicing Jesus, Juana regularly interacted with her
guardian angel Laruel (or Laurel).59 Laruel is a crucial figure in the semiautobiography and the conventual record book: according to them, Juana
first preached at Laruel’s behest, and received certain teachings and visions
directly from Laruel, not Mary or Jesus.60 Although Laruel does not appear
by name in the sermons collected in Conorte, angels take leading roles: they
appear in every single sermon, often in groups, whether participating with
the saints and beatified in the heavenly pageants, or distinguished by rank
according to Pseudo-Dionysius’s classic hierarchy.61
Angels as intercessors were of great interest in theological speculation — how could an angel appear to, engage with, or act on behalf of
humans? Scholastics such as Aquinas and Bonaventure (titled the Angelic
and Seraphic Doctors, respectively) pondered the many ramifications of
angelic nature, including both their corporeality generally speaking and
their gender more specifically. So too did one of the popular books of medieval Catalan spirituality circulating in translation in medieval Castile and
then printed shortly after the introduction of the printing press, Francesc
Eiximenis’s lengthy Book of the Holy Angels (Libro de los santos angeles).62
Bonaventure, Eiximenis, and others concluded that angels, created at the
first moment when heaven, matter, and time appeared, were noncorporeal
beings.63 They therefore existed in space only because it was a proper ordering of creation for them to do so, not because of their intrinsic nature.64
Once angelic incorporeality was assumed, scholars began probing the possibility that, although incorporeal, angels were nevertheless material.65 For
our purposes it is important to note that Bonaventure (and therefore the
Franciscan tradition of which Juana was a part) advocated hylemorphism,
arguing that “angels are made of both form and some kind of [spiritual]
matter.”66 Eiximenis, for example, suggested that angels “make” bones,
nerves, etc., by condensing air. The condensed air when mixed with other
elements (fire, water, earth) then provides various “accidental” forms, such as
color of wings, gender, and age.67
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Of considerable interest to our theme, most medieval Christians
imagined angels in (problematic) relation to a binary gender scheme. The
Bible had described angels as male, and many medieval Christians followed
this lead; for example, boys were cast in the parts of angels in an Easter
play in Segovia, Spain in the early sixteenth century.68 Medieval artists were
more ambiguous on this point, however, in an echo of the “mixing of genders” attributed to Juana by one scholar. Altarpieces tended to represent
angels as male with small, feminized facial features, such as small chins, and
with colorful wings, yet angels were also often clothed in highly masculine
warrior raiment.69 These representations would have been familiar to Juana’s
audience: as we see in figure 1, the altarpiece commissioned in the 1440s for
the Old Cathedral in Salamanca features images of angels of indeterminate
gender ministering to Jesus. Finally, medieval theologians considered angels
the ideal of beauty, a point often associated with women on a human level
but idealized in relation to the category of feminized male angels.70
I argue that Juana’s sermons provide a dramatic forum for assessing these theological issues about angelic corporeality. In one sermon, she
affirms directly that angels do not have bones or flesh, but do have wings,
thus indicating that wings are the crucial marker of what it is to be an angel
(Conorte no. 57, 1231).71 Juana’s angels in fact seem to be corporeal on some
level, as they are described as kissing each other on the cheek or chest, even
daring to kiss Jesus directly on the mouth (no. 9, 461).72 A corollary medieval question concerning corporeality was whether angels could eat; Juana
proposes that they do, repeatedly, at the feasts described in every sermon,
whether from the munificent platters set out on groaning tables or Eucharistically taking food directly from Jesus’s wounds (e.g., no. 21, 740; no. 27,
283; see also fig. 1).73 Juana’s representation of angels gorging themselves and
fortifying themselves with strong liquor before dancing and kissing, which
from a contemporary viewpoint might seem to be an inordinately sexualized
view of heaven, would according to medieval angelology have been within
the range of acceptable angelic behavior despite the fact that Juana’s representation of angelic behavior is far more carnivalesque than was typical.74
Given Juana’s focus on angelic bodies in physicalized relation to one
another and to Jesus, it is not surprising that she further explores a gender
continuum as part of her representations of angelic interactions. In one case,
she incorporates angels into a gendered schema such that they might even be
classified as a “third gender,” a term medievalists normally reserve for chaste
monks, eunuchs, or women who transcend their societal gender roles.75 In
the final sermon of Conorte, Juana ruminates on a third gender in heaven
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Figure 1.
Delli Brothers, main altarpiece (1445) in the Old Cathedral,
Salamanca. Detail of ambiguously gendered angels ministering
to Jesus. Author photo.
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 275
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rather than earth: she proposes that males are a symbol for God the Father,
females for Jesus, and angels for the Holy Spirit. According to her, these
celestial interactions between male, female, and angel in fact pattern the
Triune God: “Man and woman and angel can never stop living and being
permanently forever . . . in heaven, all three yoked together . . . in one love
and yoke (union) and charity (love) and will, praising . . . God three and
one . . . who created them alive and similar to him” (no. 72, 1457).76 In
Juana’s creation narrative, angelic nature plus two human genders create a
tripartite image of a tripartite divine, and thus are in permanent association
with each other.
Juana dramatically extends her interest in angelic materiality and
angelic gender through considering their defining characteristic, wings, in
a provocative scene in sermon 57. Here she returns to the more traditional
gendering of angels as male but transgresses binary gender assumptions in
order to posit the existence of trans or intersex figures in the heavenly world.
The sermon, entitled “The Angels Went before Jesus,” begins with Jesus and
Mary flying through heaven together, a tender mother-and-son scene that
the angels abruptly interrupt to ask Jesus to give them access to Mary in
order to adore her during her feast day (no. 57, 1232).77 When Jesus refuses
their request, the angels initiate an extended fight with the devils over the
souls held in hell (knowing that they cannot win on their own) in the hopes
of forcing Jesus to send Mary to help them out (1233).78 After the battle
between the angels and demons rages on for numerous years, God the Father
turns to Jesus, reprimands him for his selfishness in not sharing Mary when
asked, and orders him to release Mary so that she can intervene (1237).79
Mary arrives at the fight scene by flying from heaven with angel’s wings,
and it is here that the genderqueer nature of the afterlife becomes apparent.80 When Mary arrives, the souls in hell see her wings and assume she is
an angel: “they saw her coming flying, in the guise of a resplendent angel”
(1238).81 Following the typical medieval assumption that angels are male,
the souls call out to her saying “sir” [Señor]. Mary has to clarify to them that
she is a woman: “Don’t call me Sir, I am a woman and not an angel, and the
Mother of God” (1238).82 When the souls ask how, as a human, she could
have angelic wings, Mary responds that she is an “Angelina” [little female
angel], thus complicating any clear distinction between angel and human,
much less placing the angels on one side of a binary gender system.83
In other words, in this extensive episode in sermon 57, a female
saint, the mother of God, insists on her femaleness despite displaying the
secondary sex characteristics, the wings, of angelic beings who were often
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represented as feminized males or, in Juana’s sermon 72, as a third gender, in
order to perform the function usually reserved for the divine, the salvation
of souls that the angels cannot accomplish on their own.84 In this sermon’s
account of the drama of heaven and hell, the angels and Mary are apparently gendered more strongly along binary lines than in the previous sermon
discussed, but in such a manner that the physical markings of one side of
the binary can be added and taken off by a member of the other side of the
binary. This results in a trans or intersex figure, the Virgin Mary, who transcends the capacities normally ascribed to one gender— and even to human
nature, such as taking on Jesus’s salvific role. Medieval traditions concerning
Mary’s dormition and assumption posited her as unique among humans as
the only one assumed body and soul into heaven at her death, yet here she
seems unique in heaven for the ability to utilize the secondary sex characteristics of a heavenly being that by definition does not fall within dual genders. In Juana’s sermon, this expansive gender continuum becomes a tool to
permit a human to enact a divine role. Interestingly, however, the apparent
mutability of Mary’s body does not seem to raise concern for Juana’s audience, as it was transcribed in the manuscript without additional justification.
Caroline Walker Bynum has repeatedly emphasized in her scholarship that change in material substance, including bodies, was a central
concern in the Middle Ages into the early modern era, as substantial change
or partible bodies at once evoked the hope of salvation and the fear of degeneration.85 In Juana’s genderqueer heaven, it is notable that the additive body
parts expand gender and aid in salvation, rather than causing distress. In
fact, Juana’s portrayal of Mary as putting on and taking off a secondary sex
characteristic echoes the idea of bodily extension found in Merleau-Ponty’s
theory of embodied phenomenology, drawn on in turn by Salamon in her
trans theory, in which objects such as a walking stick or a tie can help create
or extend the gender of a body.86 Contemporary theorists generally consider
biological primary sex characteristics to be immutable yet unseen, while secondary sex characteristics are often more visible, and in combination with
clothing choices and other “accessories,” make gender legible to others.87
Mary’s adding or removing an angelic sex characteristic as one might a pair
of suspenders or a gender-specific riding costume plays with how gender is
socially constructed (and, I would argue, challenges some of the differences
identified by twenty-first-century activists between cross-dressing and trans).
Crucially, this episode of Mary as “Angelina” echoes Juana’s own
transgender miracle. According to Juana’s semi-autobiography, Mary’s
request inspired the divine gender change in the womb, while Mary’s authorBoon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 277
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ity confirmed the validity of the cross-dressed flight to the convent. In this
sermon, Mary saves the day for the angels and the souls they are rescuing
from hell in a manner that might seem more likely to be attributed to Jesus,
and she does so by putting on the trappings of be-winged angelic masculinity. For that matter, Mary’s role in saving souls through the acquisition of
secondary sex characteristics of another (or third) gender might have served
to justify another of Juana’s claims in her semi-autobiography, that she had
directly interceded for souls in purgatory by taking on their suffering in
her body.88 While Juana’s description does not involve flying down into the
depths of purgatory as Mary had to hell, there are extraordinary similarities
between “Señor” Mary’s saving power and Juana’s ability to use her female
body with its male Adam’s apple on behalf of souls in pain.
Attention to the role of angels in Juana’s allegorical pageants thus
helps to identify a continuum between female humanity, angelic feminized
masculinity, and the divine that must direct our attention to a continuum,
rather than an abyss, between purely human and purely divine.89 Not only
does this move affirm that gender fluidity is possible in the afterlife, but it
also provocatively proposes that, if Mary could do it, other humans might be
able to travel along the grayscale and transcend their own human nature to
become a wee bit angelic, that is, “angelin@s” or “angelinx.”90
Jesus: Reshaping the gender binary
While Juana’s spiritual authority within her convent was predicated on her
regular interaction with the Virgin Mary, her authority to preach sermons
was based on the general belief that it was not she who was speaking, but
rather Jesus through her. It is thus particularly intriguing that it is Juana’s
presentation of Jesus (or Jesus’s self-presentation through the voice of the
rapt Juana) in which the gender fluidity at the heart of Juana’s celestial court
is most evident. While Graña Cid has focused in particular on the “femininity of Jesus” in Juana’s sermons, some of Graña Cid’s argument is based on
contemporary essentialized views that associate discussions of beauty and
delicacy with the female gender.91 However, medieval theologians associated beauty and delicacy with the idealized body whether male or female,
and, as we saw above, classified beauty as a central characteristic of angelic
nature, not of human bodies.92 I provide here the episodes that, although
reviewed by Graña Cid in support of her discussion of Juana’s intervention
in the fifteenth-century “Querella de las mujeres,” can also point beyond the
“revindication” of women to a more general queering of gender.93
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One of the first indications that Juana’s Jesus might be particularly
concerned with questions of gender occurs in sermon 3 on the episode of
his circumcision. Here, Jesus argues that baptism supersedes circumcision
because it is more egalitarian since both men and women undergo it. He follows this by an unexpected assertion, which may well be an evocation of the
“Querella de las mujeres” debate: Jesus wants equality for women, which he
proved by being born male but of a woman only, thus privileging each gender in a separate way (no. 3, 305). While Jesus’s protofeminist comment at
first glance appears simply to be about his parentage, not his gender, we find
in sermon 6 on the Flight to Egypt a strong connection between his unique
parentage and his gender identity.
In this sermon, the angels in heaven present an allegorical pageant
concerning the biblical episode of the “holy innocents,” when Herod ordered
all male children the age of Jesus killed in order to eliminate him as a potential political threat.94 The pageant features a disconcerting scene in which
slaughtered babies dance in a ring; the dead infants point to their wounds
whenever they execute a dance move directly in front of Jesus.95 In each case,
Jesus responds that he too had been wounded and killed in just the same
way, spilling his blood to save his people. Among the dancing babies are
some who are female, which Jesus explains by asserting that some girls who
had been dressed like boys had been killed by mistake by Herod’s soldiers.
This evocation of historical tomboys serves a crucial purpose, as it allows
Jesus to say that he shed his blood to save women as well as men. Speaking
directly to the dead girls, Jesus states:
Enjoy yourselves and be merry with me, my sisters, for if you
died for me, I also died for you, and I love you greatly and I am
fond of you. And I am also a girl like you all, because I’m the son of
woman. (no. 6, 401, my emphasis)96
This astonishing statement — Jesus asserting his gender as female, based on
the unique circumstances of his conception — would have had considerable
ramifications in Castile in particular, given that in the late fifteenth century
conversos (converts from Judaism) were believed to promote the heretical
belief that God was both male and female.97 On the other hand, the gendering of Jesus as female while alive would have provided some justification
for Jesus’s choice of Juana as his voice.98
However, I suggest that this brief claim may have been heard by
Juana’s contemporaries as Jesus commenting on contemporaneous medicoBoon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 279
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theological debates: how exactly Jesus could have been born of a woman
without the participation of a man was in fact the subject of much speculation by medieval theologians trained in medical theory, that is, natural
theology. These debates revolved around the role of Mary’s menstrual blood
in generating Jesus. According to Aristotle, the mother’s menstrual blood
provided the fetal body and the male sperm animated it, giving it form. Yet
in the case of Jesus’s conception, in which there was no male semen, some
theologians suggested that the form came from Mary as well, which would
have made her both father and mother of the child.99 Juana’s view poses the
logical inverse of such questions — if the mother provides the form as well as
the matter, the child would end up with a female form.
In addition to the medico-theological context, it is likely that Jesus’s
claim that he is a girl would have evoked the minor but continuing medieval
theological discourse on Jesus as mother found in works ranging from Bernard of Clairvaux through Julian of Norwich, especially since Juana herself
espouses it.100 In Juana’s sermon 72, in which she proposes angels as a third
gender, Jesus declares, “I who am your true and benevolent and pious and
deeply attached mother, I taught you a law [that was] most firm and strong
and good” (Conorte no. 72, 1472).101 Elsewhere Juana plays with this idea, for
Jesus calls himself “Our Lady Jesus Christ” [Nuestro Señora Jesucristo], and
the text is careful to insist that it was Jesus himself who provided this dualgender nomenclature. In this case, Jesus uses this title to discuss his role in
the Trinity as that aspect of divinity which is “more tender and delicate than
all the angels and celestial creatures” (no. 16, 579).102 However, Jesus’s assertion to the dead dancing female babies that he is a girl because he was “born
of a woman” draws on a different context for the consideration of gender
than that found in the pan-European discourse of Jesus as mother, because
it does not refer to an infinite divinity fulfilling the feminine side of a set of
gender binaries. Rather, if Jesus is a girl because he was born of a woman,
then his claim roots his gender in his human life, not his divine nature, as
Graña Cid has also noted.103
It would seem that in this scenario Juana is more intrigued by the
soteriological consequences of Jesus as a girl than by determining a medical
origin for Jesus’s gender despite having only one human parent or by Jesus’s
feminine actions within the Trinity. If, in Juana’s vision, Jesus asserts in the
same breath that he not only died for the salvation of the massacred girls
but is a girl just like them, then the implication is that for salvation to be
extended to women, Jesus had to be a woman. The Council of Chalcedon in
451 had established the orthodox definition of Jesus’s nature as fully human,
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fully divine; through Juana, Jesus clarifies that “fully human” means fully
male, fully female.104
Given this assertion in sermon 6, there is no vocabulary from the
Renaissance that can effectively express Jesus’s announcement of his salvific
female gender, for Juana is not presenting Jesus as a hermaphrodite with
dual genitalia, nor is Jesus claiming androgyny. Contemporary trans studies,
however, does provide a palette of terms that can more closely approximate
these visionary claims. One scholar notes that
genderqueer, genderless, and bigender are newer terms that are
used to describe a gender identity of individuals who do not conform to the traditional gender binary . . . and reject being associated with either gender. . . . [T]hey . . . create . . . a self-identified
gender identity that, too often, may not fit with conventional
ways of gender identity conceptualization.105
I suggest that among these contemporary terms, “bigender” is a particularly
useful option to apply to this scenario, because it signals how Jesus describes
himself as providing salvation in gendered ways — male to save males, female
to save females — even while not inhabiting “one” gender only.
This theological possibility of a bigender Jesus significantly complicates and enriches what can be said about gender in Juana’s sermons, for here
is a case of a putatively male savior who not only professes a female identity
in order to redeem women but also is speaking through the enraptured or
unconscious body of a woman whose female gender and mix of secondary sex characteristics were divinely mandated, not naturally developed. Not
surprisingly, the bigender Jesus of Juana’s sermons explains biblical narratives and describes heavenly feasts and pageants in a wide range of scenarios
during which gender binaries are constantly being broken down and gender
continuums introduced. However, despite this fluidity around gender itself,
the gendered interactions in Juana’s view of heaven were often insistently
heterosexual, though, as we will see below, hardly heteronormative in any
contemporary sense of the term.
Gender-fluid humanity and divinity
In her studies of queer theology, Marcella Althaus-Reid claims that Christian
theology depends on “the presence of a sexual religious imaginary” which
has too often focused entirely on regulating nonnormative sexuality.106 She
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further names the “omnisexuality of God,” and calls for theologians to be
attentive to the “hermeneutical lessons . . . drawn from the metaphor of the
orgy.”107 Althaus-Reid’s enthusiastic smorgasbord of all possible sexualities
and genders for God is evocative, particularly when considering an author
such as Juana who describes eternal feasts with saints in heaven who periodically dance, kiss, and, at various points, sit on marriage beds (talamos)
in all sorts of gender pairings (e.g., Conorte no. 64, 1325 – 26). Given Juana’s
reliance on a “gender continuum performance” in heaven, I conclude with a
brief exploration of the necessarily related question of sexuality, since such a
continuum has implications for the frequent scenarios during the heavenly
feasts of physical or romantic interaction between the saints, the beatified,
and a bigender Jesus.108
In a sermon on baptism, Juana explains the ritual of making three
crosses with oil on the infant’s body as the Father receiving the newly baptized as “sons,” Jesus receiving them as “wives,” and the Holy Spirit receiving them as “friends,” specifically “female friends” [amigas].109 Thus souls
are male in relation to God, but female in relation to Jesus and the Holy
Spirit. Yet if souls are wives of Jesus, this image also introduces sexuality into
our gender narrative. Nuns were understood throughout the medieval era as
“brides of Christ,” and recent work exposes how this term was periodically
applied to monks as well.110 In Juana’s sermons, this trope is all the more
intriguing when taken into conjunction with understanding Jesus as bigender, that he himself was born female to make salvation available to women.
The souls of the newly baptized, at once sons of God and female friends
of the Holy Spirit, are married to a bigender Jesus, a point which carries
important implication for how sanctified souls such as the saints relate to
the Trinity once in heaven. If all the saints have experienced different gender
positions in relation to God while alive as a result of their baptisms, it is not
surprising that those variations occur in the afterlife, as well. Throughout
Juana’s sermons, Jesus repeatedly kisses, fondles, dances with, sits on the lap
of, and goes into marriage-beds with saints of both genders, but those saints
are differently gendered depending on whether they are relating to God as
sons, Jesus as wives, or the Holy Spirit as female friends.111
Elsewhere in Conorte, in a novel rendition of Saint Francis as a bride
of Christ in sermon 58, Jesus provocatively requests that Francis bare his
chest before asking for his hand in marriage.112 Francis responds not only by
displaying his “nipples” [tetas] but also by affirming he will be a submissive
wife, possibly reenvisioning his breasts as secondary characteristics of the
female rather than the male gender:
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And the Lord said that when Saint Francis ascended in front of
him, that he called him, saying, “Come here, my seraphic friend
and my sub-lieutenant, show me your nipples.” And that he
responded, saying with much joy, “Here are my nipples, Lord,
may those that I have with me be the nipples of my desires.” . . .
[And the Lord said,] “Tell me, friend Francis, if you would like to
be my wife and if you would like to unite and join with me.” And
Saint Francis responded to him, “Yes, my Lord God, with good
will would I be subject and obedient to all which you would want
and order, just as does the wife who is subject and obedient to her
husband. And with good will will I join with you, just as the wife
joins with her spouse. (no. 58, 1245).113
Jesus then pierces Francis with the stigmata, causing him to faint, in a clear
evocation of sexual penetration, as Surtz has pointed out.114 Yet Francis
does not remain female in relation to Jesus, or even his wife. In the next
lines, Jesus calls Francis his “male friend” [amigo] and then Jesus asks to
be his “son-in-law” [yerno]. Jesus notes that his marriage to Francis had
actually occurred long ago when the mendicant order was established and
the reenactment in heaven during this sermon would allow Jesus to then
marry the entire Franciscan order, both male and female.115 I argue that
in this scenario, Francis’s own gender fluidity reifies the heterosexuality of
marriage, yet his transition from wife to father-in-law implies he himself is
bigender, just as the polygamist Jesus is.116 Thus Jesus’s bigender experience
is not unique to him (and therefore potentially only a divine way of being
human), but rather is a possible — saintly — human experience.
With scenarios such as these, this case study of Juana’s sermons
serves to support and even go beyond the general medieval discourse identified by Rabia Gregory as rejecting the fixity of male and female gender roles
in the trope of marrying Jesus:
The bride and Christ’s unfixed, nondualistic gender and identities
are emphatically not heteronormative, but, as shall become clear
in subsequent chapters, the modern concept of “queer” is not synonymous with the complex theological meanings medieval and
early modern Christians found in the spouses’ unstable genders.117
I would suggest instead that queer and trans theory, while not useful in
identifying exact parallels between medieval and contemporary identities,
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can provide precise terminology to help sift through the “complex theological meanings . . . in the spouses’ unstable genders” in which, at least in
this instance, bigender is revealed as a norm of human and divine nature.
Ultimately, in El libro del conorte, the celestial bodily performances that
transgress gender normativity do not simply provide authority for Juana to
communicate theology as an uneducated woman, much less a woman with
divinely ordained male secondary sex characteristics and thus potentially
masculine-of-center. Juana’s life and sermons in fact propose a new mystical language of bigender, genderqueer, trans, and intersex, culminating
in a gender performance continuum that transgresses and transmutes all
boundaries between heaven and earth.
Indeed, Juana formulates a remarkable Renaissance theological
imperative to consider how gender dimorphism profoundly limits theological language concerning Jesus’s nature, angelic nature, and human nature, a
limitation that, it turns out, has not always been a prerequisite in the Catholic religious imaginary. Since Juana counted not only the nuns of her convent
but archbishops and royalty among her audience, the heavenly gender panorama that Juana articulated was one that had popular appeal. Yet Juana’s
portrait of gender fluidity, bigender experience, and sexuality in heaven was
not only aspirational — an idealized afterlife — but was also a justification for
her nonbinary gender presentation as a popular female preacher who voiced
the male divine in early sixteenth-century Castile.
•
Notes
1
This article forms a part of “The Emergence of Spiritual Female Authority,” a
research project funded by MINECO/FEDER (Ref. FFI2015-63625-C2-2-P, 2016 –
2019) and directed by Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida. Portions of this article were presented at the American Academy of Religion in 2012 and the International Medieval Congress in 2015. My thanks to Emily Francomano for her invitation to expand
this work in a public talk at Georgetown in 2015, and to Sarah J. Bloesch, Gregory
Hutcheson, Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, Ronald E. Surtz, and the anonymous JMEMS
reviewers for incisive comments on earlier drafts.
For discussion of the distinctive nature of Castilian devotion in the high and later
Middle Ages in comparison to the rest of Europe, particularly the late entry of Passion devotion and the heightened concern with inter-religious interaction, see among
others Cynthia Robinson, Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2013); and Felipe Pereda, Las imágenes de la discor-
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3
4
5
dia: Política y poética de la imagen sagrada en la España del 400 (Madrid: Marcel Pons,
2007).
For a recent overview of this transition period in Castilian Christianity under Isabel
and Fernando, see Daniel de Pablo Maroto, Espiritualidad española del siglo XVI, vol.
1, Los Reyes Católicos (Madrid: Editorial de Espiritualidad, 2012), 46 – 57, 71 – 100.
The most recent overview in English of Juana’s biography and sermons is Jessica A.
Boon, “Introduction,” in Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481 – 1534: Visionary Sermons,
ed. Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz, trans. Surtz and Nora Weinerth (Toronto:
Iter Academic Press; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
2016), 1 – 33.
A liturgical year’s worth of these sermons were recorded by scribes and collected in
manuscript form, remaining unpublished until 1999. The surviving manuscripts of El
libro del conorte (hereafter Conorte) include Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio,
El Escorial, MS J-II-18 (early 1520s); and a second copy, Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Congregazione Riti, MS 3074. All quotations are from Juana de la Cruz, El Conhorte:
Sermones de una mujer; La Santa Juana (1481 – 1534), ed. Inocente García de Andrés,
2 vols. (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1999). Further citations refer to
this work as Conorte according to the title used in the Escorial manuscript, citing sermon number followed by volume and page numbers. Six of the seventy-two sermons
were recently translated in Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481 – 1534: Visionary Sermons, ed.
and trans. Boon, Surtz, and Weinerth. The other writings attributed to Juana include
her semi-autobiography, Vida y fin de la bienabenturada virgen sancta Juana de la Cruz
(Escorial MS K-III-13, ca. 1525 – 50), hereafter Vida y fin (cited by folios refs.), recently
transcribed in María Luengo Bálbas, “Sor Juana de la Cruz: Vida y obra de una
visionaria del siglo XVI” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2016),
appendix; and a conventual book of records, Libro de la casa y monasterio de Nuestra
Señora de la Cruz (Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, MS 9661, late sixteenth century),
hereafter Libro de la casa, recently transcribed by María Victoria Curto on the visionarias.es website in the “Vida impresa” section of “Catálogo de santas vivas,” at
catalogodesantasvivas.visionarias.es/index.php/Juana_de_la_Cruz#LIBRO_DE_LA
_CASA_Y_MONASTERIO_DE_SANTA_MAR.C3.8DA_DE_LA_CRUZ. All
translations from Juana’s works are my own unless from Surtz and Weinerth in
Visionary Sermons, cited by page number.
The first page of the manuscript of Juana’s sermons asserts: “Here begins the book
called Conorte, which was made through the voice of the Holy Spirit who spoke
through a woman religious as she was enraptured in contemplation. This speech
was made in the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is he who enlightens our
hearts and is wont to speak in parables and similes” [Comienza el libro que es llamado Conhorte, el cual es hecho por boca del Espíritu Santo que hablaba en una religiosa elevada en contemplación, la cual habla se hacía en persona de Nuestro Señor
Jesucristo, el cual es el que alumbra los corazones y acostumbra a hablar en figuras]
(Conorte, prologue, 1:227; Visionary Sermons, 35). The next paragraphs offer the book
for correction by devout Christians, and affirm that Juana herself had seen the pageants described through her by Jesus. Her semi-autobiography explains how long the
raptures lasted and who was in attendance (Vida y fin, fols. 27v – 28r).
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 285
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8
9
10
11
Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo
Domingo en su contexto europeo (Santander, Sp.: Propileo, 2012), 271 – 89, at 284.
Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History, 2nd ed. (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), 78: “The popular medieval image of heaven included
an urban and courtly leisured class preoccupied with splendor, from beautiful clothes
to magnificent architecture to splendid festivities. Worldly splendor was enhanced,
glorified, and made permanent.”
In a recent study, The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of
Gender (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Marian Rothstein proposes to distinguish these two terms: “[T]he androgyne . . . for the purpose of this study . . . never
puts the laws of nature into question. Rather than being monstrous, insufficient,
indecisive, or excessive [as was the hermaphrodite], the combined form denoted by the
word androgyne . . . is a figure of the completion, perfection, or plenitude, of originary
and ultimate human possibilities and strengths” (2 – 3). Rothstein recognizes that the
terms themselves were synonymous at the time; she intentionally creates an anachronistic distinction between the two to more properly label and analyze the two distinct
sets of associations connected to the synonyms.
Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary
World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481 – 1534) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 7, 51. Mary Baldridge also uses this term, elevating “spiritual androgyny” to a rubric for four case studies, including Juana; see Spiritual Androgyny: The
Creation of a New Orthodoxy by Medieval Christian Women (San Juan, Puerto Rico:
Penelope Academic Press, 2012).
María del Mar Graña Cid, “La feminidad de Jesucristo y sus implicaciones eclesiales en la predicación mística de Juana de la Cruz (Sobre la Prerreforma y la Querella de las Mujeres en Castilla),” Estudios Eclesiásticos 84, no. 330 (2009): 477 – 513, at
490, 503. For the protofeminism of the “querella de las mujeres” in late medieval Castile, see Susana Molina Domínguez, Conventos de monjas franciscanas en Madrid en la
Baja Edad Media, vol. 5, La querella de las mujeres y las fundaciones religiosas femeninas
(Madrid: Almudayna, 2011).
My thanks to Barbara Mujica for bringing this theory of the soul to my attention.
Philosophically speaking, inheritors of the Platonic tradition understood the soul to
be genderless, while inheritors of the Aristotelian tradition understood souls to match
the gender of the bodies, with female souls having a less rational soul than those of
males. Augustine, followed by later theologians, ultimately rejected the idea that
a soul had a gender, as that would imply a soul possessing “sexual characteristics.”
Elizabeth Robertson, “Souls That Matter: The Gendering of the Soul in Piers Plowman,” in Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D.
Kirk, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 165 – 86, at 168.
On the other hand, Bynum describes Aquinas as arguing that the “The blueprint of
all we are — our shape and size, our gender and intellectual capacity, our status and
merit — may be carried in soul, but it is realized in body. Without bodily expression,
there is no human being (homo), no person, no self.” Caroline Walker Bynum, The
Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200 – 1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 269. In late medieval Spain, the presumption of the androgynous
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14
15
16
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18
soul may have been explicitly theorized due to its articulation by Catherine of Siena,
whose work was translated into Castilian during Juana’s lifetime, and in commentary
on the theory of androgynous souls by later early modern figures such as Maria de
Zayas in Spain and Sor Juana Iñes de la Cruz in Mexico. Karen Scott, “St. Catherine
of Siena, ‘Apostola,’ ” Church History 61, no. 1 (1992): 34 – 46, at 45; Mercedes Maroto
Camino, “Spindles for Swords: The Re/Dis-Covery of María de Zayas’ Presence,”
Hispanic Review 62, no. 4 (1994): 519 – 36, at 525; and Susan M. McKenna, “Rational
Thought and Female Poetics in Sor Juana’s ‘Primero sueño’: The Circumvention of
Two Traditions,” Hispanic Review 68, no. 1 (2000): 37 – 52, at 48.
The first and still principal collection to apply queer theory to medieval and early
modern Spanish studies is Josiah Blackmore and Gregory H. Hutcheson, eds., Queer
Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). There has been no application of trans
theory to medieval Iberian studies, to my knowledge, though work on nonbinary
gender does exist for early modern Spain (i.e., after mid-16th century). For example, a
recent book on hermaphroditism addresses the medical discussions concerning nonbinary genitalia. It takes as its point of departure the views of the medical establishment, the Inquisition, and theologians interested in demonology from 1540 onwards.
Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García, Sex, Identity, and Hermaphrodites in Iberia, 1500 – 1800 (London: Routledge, 2016). See also the important work of
François Soyer, Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal (Leiden: Brill,
2012).
Among many scholars who argue for processual notions of gender, see Marcella
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 52.
I will therefore use female pronouns for Juana throughout this article. Note that
“trans” and “intersex” are not synonymous, but as we will see below, each is applicable
to part of Juana’s claimed life experiences. Another term that is proposed in contemporary Christian feminist work is “omnigender,” representing a gender continuum
beyond binaries or transition between sides of a binary, even approaching a unisex
model. See Virginia Ramsay Mollenkott, Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach
(Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001), who was, notably, a Milton specialist before (and
while) she was a feminist theologian.
For a brief overview of these rapidly shifting terms such as “genderqueer” and “bigender” in queer and trans theory, see Varunee Faii Sangganjanavanich, “Trans Identities,” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Nancy A.
Naples (Malden, Mass.: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 1 – 3.
For a brief biography, see Surtz, Guitar of God, 1 – 7. An annotated bibliography of
scholarship on Juana first published in 2014 and updated in 2017 can be found in Jessica A. Boon, “Mother Juana de la Cruz,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and
Reformation, ed. Margaret L. King (New York: Oxford University Press), doi.org
/10.1093/OBO/9780195399301-0197.
This privilege had also been granted to the abbess of Las Huelgas, a significant Cistercian convent in Burgos, Spain (Surtz, Guitar of God, 4 – 5).
This play has been discussed numerous times in scholarship on Juana, including RonBoon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 287
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ald E. Surtz, “El libro del conorte” (1509) and the Early Castilian Theater (Barcelona:
Puvill, 1982); and recently in Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, “La puesta en escena de la
historia sagrada a comienzos del siglo XVI: La batalla de los Ángeles en la dramaturgia visionaria de Juana de la Cruz,” Renaessanceforum (forthcoming).
19 Evangelista’s miraculous literacy is attested to in witness documents collected in the
seventeenth-century petition for beatification. Archivo Vaticano, C. de Ritos, MS
3.072 – 3.076, quoted in Inocente García Andrés, “Introduction,” in El Conhorte, ed.
García Andrés, 24.
20 “Y el poderoso Dios le respondió con mucho amor: ‘Madre mía, un varón tengo
empeçado a hazer en esta ora en el qual querría poner mucha parte de mi graçia . . . y
por amor de vos señora yo le tornaré mujer para esa obra que vos pedís. . . . y la bienabenturada Juana de la Cruz estaba entonçes en el vientre de su madre empezada a
façer varón, tornola muger como pudo y puede haçer como todopoderoso. Y no quiso
su Divina Magestad deshazerle una nuez que tenía en la garganta porque fuese testigo del milagro y quando la tornó muger aún no tenía spíritu de vida y, guardándola
el poderoso Dios de los peligros que a otras criaturas les suelen acaezer en el vientre de
sus madres.’ ” My transcription and translation, checked against the transcription in
the doctoral thesis by Luengo Bálbas, “Sor Juana,” 2:3 – 4.
21 Surtz, Guitar of God, 7. I will problematize “androgyny” as an appropriate term
below.
22 Vern L. Bullough, “Cross Dressing and Gender Role Change in the Middle Ages,”
in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (New
York: Taylor and Francis, 2000), 223 – 42; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: CrossDressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997), 213 – 17; and Rothstein,
Androgyne, 100. While cross-dressing was understood as a strategy, being “manly”
was not necessarily authoritative. For example, Soyer suggests that the ascription of
manliness to Queen Isabel was a rejection of her (lesser) female qualities, i.e., a form
of misogyny rather than an elevation of indeterminate gender roles (Ambiguous Gender, 18).
23 The revised edition of the biography is Antonio Daza, Historia, vida y milagros, éxtasis, y revelaciones de la bienaventurada virgen Sor Juana de la Cruz (Madrid, 1613);
translated by Francis Bell as The Historie, Life, and Miracles, Extasies and Revelations
of the blessed virgin, sister Ioane, of the Crosse, of the Third Order of Ovr Holy Father S.
Francis (St. Omer, 1625), repr. as The Historie . . . of the Blessed Virgin, Sister Joane
(Ilkley, West Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1977). Daza’s narrative captured the attention
of dramatists such as Tirso de Molina, who composed a trilogy of plays about Juana’s
life and sermons; see Tirso de Molina, La Santa Juana, trilogía hagiográfica, 1613 – 14,
ed. Agustín de Campo (Madrid: Editorial Castilla, 1948). For a consideration of
Juana as a dramatic persona in Tirso’s plays and in her own writings, see Blanca
Oteiza, ed., La santa Juana y el mundo de lo sagrado (New York: IGAS/IDEA, 2016).
24 “Ennorabuena seays venida hija a esta mi casa entra en ella alegremente pues para
ella fuystes criada” (Vida y fin, fol. 12r). For the rest of Juana’s life, Mary continued to
intervene miraculously by means of other speaking images, apparitions, and responses
to Marian devotions, first to affirm Juana’s rapid rise through the ranks to abbess and
then to aid her in her leadership. See Jessica A. Boon, “Mother Juana de la Cruz: Mar288 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 48.2 / 2018
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ian Visions and Female Preaching,” in A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, ed.
Hilaire Kallendorf (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 127 – 48, at 138–42.
25 It is worth noting that Graña Cid characterizes the various episodes in Juana’s sermons of women saints dressing as men and male saints with feminine aspects as collectively androgynous, rather than using more specific terms such as “cross-dressing”
or “transgendering” (“Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 507).
26 María de Santo Domingo was her immediate contemporary as a living saint in Castile. María de Santo Domingo, The Book of Prayer of Sor Maria of Santo Domingo: A
Study and Translation, trans. Mary E. Giles (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). For the Italian context for this phenomenon, see Gabriella Zarri, “Places and Gestures of Women’s Preaching in Quattro- and Cinquecento Italy,” in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200 – 1500, ed. Katherine L. Jansen and
Miri Rubin (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2010), 177 – 93.
27 Susan Starr Sered, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 183 – 85. Sered catalogues a trend toward
women claiming spirit possession and men claiming “ecstatic flights of the soul” or
shamanism (186). Since Juana was taken over by Jesus but saw the heavenly episodes
Jesus was describing, she fulfills both sides of this binary as she does others. There
are various studies of female trance speakers in modern Christian history; see, for
example, Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001).
28 As Newman points out, “Preaching thus emerges as yet another way female demoniacs might imitate saints, the initiative and supernatural knowledge of the (male) spirit
in each case overriding gender taboos.” Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit:
Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century
Author(s),” Speculum 73, no. 3 (1998): 733 – 70, at 754.
29 For the term “gender transformations,” see Lewis Wallace, “Bearded Woman, Female
Christ: Gendered Transformations in the Legends and Cult of Saint Wilgefortis,”
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30, no. 1 (2014): 43 – 63, at 50.
30 Some medieval miracle narratives relate a change in gender at baptism after prayer for
a son, but none of which I am aware describe God intervening in fetal development.
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
31 In premodern medical thinking about hermaphroditism, it was logically possible that,
although normally male genitalia emerged in the heat of the womb between twentyseven and forty-five days after conception, unusually high amounts of heat generated
in childhood through excessive exercise might well bring about testicular descent at
puberty. Occasional scandals about women who passed as men were justified or punished in court based on medical evidence concerning external genitalia, including
various famous Spanish cases such as Eleno/a de Cespedes in the sixteenth century
and Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun, in the seventeenth century. For both
figures, see Sherry Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (Nashville, Tenn.: Nashville University Press, 2011), 68 – 89; for Inquisition cases dealing with a gender continuum, see Soyer, Ambiguous Gender; for a broader context for Eleno/a, see Patricia
Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 34. In the Middle Ages, there had also been significant
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 289
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theological reflection on the subject, less concerned with how cases of hermaphroditism might cause external genitalia to alter and more concerned with establishing
a singular gender identity in order to determine what the “proper” opposite-gender
pairing would be. In the twelfth century, Peter the Chanter was insistent that a hermaphodite’s relative heat be determined in order to assign a gender, as sexual “alternation is a sign of sodomy.” Quoted in Miri Rubin, “The Person in the Form: Medieval
Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’ ” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri
Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 100 – 22, at 104. In other
words, being a hermaphrodite was not a sin, but sex with the same gender was.
32 “Born This Way” is the title of a Lady Gaga song released in 2011.
33 Most theologians combined medical theories from Galen, Aristotle, and Avicenna
with Augustine’s timeline for development: the fetus is a milky mass for six days,
blood for nine, turning into flesh for thirteen, and its members formed for the next
eighteen. See M. Anthony Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception: A Study of the “De formatione corporis humani in utero” (London: Athlone Press,
1975), 167; and a more recent discussion in Maaike Van der Lugt, Le ver, le démon,
et la vierge: Les theories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 2004), 399. This sequence of fetal development was also included in a popular gynecological tract; see Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of
Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ “De Secretis Mulierum” with Commentaries (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1992), 79.
34 Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 171.
35 Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception, 174 – 75; Van der Lugt,
Le ver, le démon, et la vierge, 408 – 9.
36 The sole exception is Jesus, created fully formed — and fully male — in Mary’s womb
at the moment of the Annunciation, at least according to the majority of scholastic
theologians. For discussion and charts visualizing the range of views on this topic, see
Van der Lugt, Le ver, le démon, et la vierge, 398 – 414.
37 Cadden notes that beards are the principal sign of masculinity, as they are composed
of the “residu[e] of the nutritive and generative processes” expelled from the body by
heat (Meanings of Sex Difference, 182 – 83).
38 For Wilgefortis, see Wallace, “Bearded Woman, Female Christ,” 43 – 63. Wallace proposes “gender crossing” as a term for changes attributed to gender and “gender blending” for “the simultaneity of features in one symbol that are gendered masculine and
feminine, as in an image or statue” (44). Given that Juana experienced a sex change
but retained a secondary sex characteristic of the original, the “gender blending” here
is literal rather than symbolic.
39 Thanks to Megan Goodwin for the phrase. Personal communication, March 15,
2015. Very recently, the phrase “gender affirming surgery” has replaced “genderreassignment surgery” as the preferred term, but Juana’s case seems to me to merit the
older terminology. For that matter, the natural effects of the miracle, that is, reorganization of Juana’s body as more cool and moist and the impact of that humoral balance
throughout her life, are perhaps comparable to the effect of contemporary hormone
treatments over time.
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40 Slightly confusingly, scholars call this a “caloric model of sexuality,” although it seems
more accurate to call it a caloric model of gender. Simons, The Sex of Men, 129, citing
Stephen Greenblatt for the term “caloric.”
41 Sherry Velasco, “Hairy Women on Display in Textual and Visual Culture in Early
Modern Spain,” South Atlantic Review 72, no. 1 (2007): 62 – 75, at 65 – 66.
42 For premodern Castilian examples that mock hirsute women, see Jean Dangler, Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005), 85; Velasco, “Hairy Women,” 62 – 75; and Adrienne Laskier Martín, An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2008), 88 – 92. Queer theorists of the Middle Ages have reclaimed
“monstrous,” as have disability theorists. See various essays in Bettina Bildhauer and
Robert Mills, eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2003); and David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). For
contemporary theory on female masculinity, see Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Female
Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), and for a review of Hispanist studies of sex and gender through 2009, including the category of “mujer varonil,” see Edward Behrend-Martinez, “Making Sense of the History of Sex and Gender
in Early Modern Spain,” History Compass 7, no. 5 (2009): 1303 – 16.
43 See, among others, Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?,” in
Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and
Felice Lischitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 34 – 51, at 38,
44. Indeed, medical experts recommended some types of men seek masculine women
in order to provide a balance of temperaments in their marriages. Velasco, “Hairy
Women,” 70; and Dangler, Making Difference, 95.
44 The medical views began to change in the eighteenth century; see Soyer, Ambiguous
Gender, 26.
45 Juana’s fetal body was “unmade” in the sense that in Aristotelian and Galenic theory
male was considered the ideal body heated to perfection, while the female body was
incomplete (and indeed, undercooked).
46 Iain Morland, “Intersex,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1 – 2 (2014):
111 – 12. For careful analysis of the history of surgical intervetions to “rectify” intersex
presentation, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
47 See, for example, Abby L. Wilkerson, “Normate Sex and Its Discontents,” in Sex and
Disability, ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2012), 183 – 207, at 193.
48 Note that some advocate the term “trans*” instead of “trans,” as they consider the
asterisk to be helpful in indicating a range of identities including genderqueer and
intersex. Its origin is in the Internet search function in which typing a partial word
followed by an asterisk brings up a range of endings for that word. Avery Tompkins,
“Asterisk,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1 – 2 (2014): 27 – 28.
49 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 65. Others who expand the definition include
Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York:
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 291
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Routledge, 1994); and Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004),
1 – 16.
50 Rothstein, Androgyne, 32. The term “functional gender” sums up what many scholars
have noted about medieval gender categories versus medieval gender physiology; see,
for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the
High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 204 – 9. For analysis of this concept in Juana, see Graña Cid,
“Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 511.
51 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 115 – 18.
52 Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion
and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 137 – 67.
53 Anne J. Cruz, “Transgendering the Mystical Voice: Angela de Foligno, San Juan,
Santa Teresa, Luisa de Carvajal,” in Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches
to Early Modern Spanish Literatures, ed. Barbara Simerka and Christopher B. Weimer
(Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 127 – 41.
54 The relevance of Deleuze and Guattari on assemblage to this type of collective mystical authorship was brought to my attention by Michael Knight, “Muhammed’s Body:
Prophetic Assemblages and the Baraka Machine” (Ph.D. diss., University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016), 44 – 45, citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). Christine Marie Libby, “Mystic Assemblages and the Translation of
Affect” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2016), has recently proposed a variant of this
term for the study of medieval women’s mysticism.
55 I should note here that my article thus goes against the grain of the majority of theological work using queer theory to address Christology. Contemporary theologians
who foreground sexuality and gender seem in the main interested in recuperating a
female Christ, an androgynous Christ (Rosemary Radford Ruether), or a transvestite Christ (Eleanor MacLoughlin) in order to undercut the presumption that a male
Christ figure authorizes only a male priesthood. For discussion, see Karen Trimble
Alliaume, “Disturbingly Catholic: Thinking the Inordinate Body,” in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, ed. Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 93 – 119, at 99 – 101, 109 – 13. My concern is
the inverse — what does the visionary’s trans experience lead her to propose concerning the gendered nature of Christ, or, for that matter, concerning the nature of angels,
of Jesus, of Mary? Queer theologians who do complicate the gender experience and
sexuality of Jesus and Mary include Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology; and Robert E.
Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007).
56 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume 2: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015), 180.
57 Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, “The Cult of Angels in Late FifteenthCentury England: An Hours of the Guardian Angel Presented to Queen Elizabeth
Woodville,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith
and Jane H. M. Taylor (London: British Library Press, 1997), 230 – 64, at 233.
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Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Bridget of Sweden are perhaps
the best-known female mystics who had angelic visitations, while Giralomo Savonarola would have been the most influential in Juana’s time period. An Italian contemporary of Juana, Jacopa de’ Rondinelli, specifically cited her guardian angel as
the source of her visions. Tamar Herzig, Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in
Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32 – 33. On the peninsula, the Franciscan Lope de Salazar recorded an angelic vision in the fifteenth century. Lope de Salazar, “La Revelación a Lope de Salazar,” trans. Juan Miguel Valero
Moreno, Estudios Humanísticos: Filología 32 (2010): 105 – 39.
59 The name is transcribed as “Laurel” in Vida y fin and “Laruel” in the later Libro de la
casa. I use Laruel, following the choice of Ronald E. Surtz, the first to bring Juana to
scholarly attention. Although to my knowledge neither name appears as a standard
guardian angel appellation before Juana’s era, Laruel tells Juana that previously he
had been appointed guardian angel to such luminaries as King David and Pope Gregory the Great (Libro de la casa, fol. 25r). Guardian angels were popular in Spain in the
late fifteenth century and had their own feast days. Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, “Cult
of Angels,” 232. For further information see Gabriel Llompart, “El Angel Custodio
en la Corona de Aragon en la Baja Edad Media (fiesta, teatro, iconografia),” in Fiestas
y liturgia: Actas del coloquio celebrado en la Casa de Velázquez 12-14-1985, ed. Alfonso
Esteban and Jean-Pierre Étienvre (Pamplona: Casa de Velázquez, 1988), 249 – 70.
60 Libro de la casa, fol. 20v.
61 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “The Celestial Hierarchy,” in Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite: The Complete Works, ed. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987),
143 – 92. This important treatise on angelology for the Middle Ages received numerous commentaries throughout the era; for an overview, see Meredith J. Gill, Angels
and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 18. The nine orders of angels are extensively discussed in the
Catalan Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis’s influential treatise circulating in at least four
Castilian translations throughout the late Middle Ages. Francesc Eiximenis, Libro de
los santos angeles (Burgos, Sp., 1490), part II. Further citations are to part, chapter, and
folio numbers.
62 All university theology students studied angelology because it appeared at the beginning of book 2 of Lombard’s Sentences. David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73. For information on the popularity of Eiximenis’s treatise across the Iberian peninsula and in Europe, see David J.
Viera, “The Presence of Francesc Eiximenis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Castilian Literature,” Hispanófila 57 (1976): 1 – 5, at 2 – 3; and Robinson, Imagining The
Passion.
63 Eiximenis, Libro de los santos angeles, pt. II, chap. 2, fol. 1r: “Angel es natura y substancia spiritual no corporal, racional, y intellectual.” Note that angelology was particularly popular with Franciscans, including Bonaventure and Eiximenis, both due
to the famous vision of the seraph that appeared to Francis and their understanding of
mendicancy as modeled on angelic contemplation and asexuality. Gill, Angels and the
Order of Heaven, 25.
64 Keck, Angels and Angelology, 23, 110; Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven, 2. EixiBoon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 293
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menis points out that if legions of demons can enter a demoniac, they do not have
bodies as we understand them, but nevertheless angels can appear as though corporeal when having a body would serve a mechanical or material purpose. Eiximenis,
Libro de los santos angeles, pt. I, chap. 5, fol. 3r.
65 Here are the stakes of the argument: “For Aquinas, matter is equivalent to corporeality; he considers matter as it is already in existence in the world. For Bonaventure,
matter is a metaphysical construct that is equivalent to indeterminate potency, something capable of being either spiritual (if joined to a spiritual form) or corporeal (if
joined to a corporeal form), whereas for Aquinas ‘matter’ is always corporeal” (Keck,
Angels and Angelology, 99).
66 Bonaventure, as quoted in Keck, Angels and Angelology, 32.
67 Eiximenis, Libro de los santos angeles, pt. I, chap. 6, fol. 3v. The Italian philosopher
Ficino likewise considered angelic form to be compressed air; see Bruce Gordon,
“The Renaissance Angel,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Peter Marshall
and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41 – 63, at
49. In addition to Eiximenis’s extensive commentary on angelic bodies, that angels
could assume a human body was part of common lore. For example, it was cited in
the highly popular overview of Christian beliefs published just after the Reconquest:
Pedro Jiménez de Prejano, Lucero de la vida cristiana (Burgos, Sp., 1495), chap. 37, fol.
35v.
68 Richard B. Donovan, The Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain (Toronto: Institute of
Medieval Studies, 1958), 60.
69 Keck, Angels and Angelology, 30. Note that angels with feminized facial features provide a near inverse of a nun with a masculine throat. This ascription of feminized
masculinity to angels was not universal in the Renaissance, as Botticelli portrayed
angels as female (see Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven, 49). For clothing and colorful wings, see Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, “Cult of Angels,” 257 n. 19, citing Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De natura rerum, who in turn cited Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy. For discussion of wings, particularly the medieval tendency to portray
angelic wings as colorful rather than the modern insistence on plain white, see Sandra Gorgievski, Face to Face with Angels (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company,
2010), 6.
70 A few decades before Juana, Lope de Salazar describes his guardian angel as “vn ángel
claro, hermoso, cuyo jesto en hermosura s’estrema; su senblante, cuerpo y cara muj
gentil” (“Revelación,” 105).
71 On this point, see also Eiximenis, Libro de los santos angeles, pt. I, chap. 6, fol. 3v.
72 Interestingly, in a 1504 text on heaven, the glorified saints can kiss each other, but
quite specifically the angels cannot. Celso Maffei, Delitiosa explicatio de sensibilibus
deliciis paradisi (Verona, 1504), cited in McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, 136.
73 Franciscan scholastics had emphasized that while angels are nourished, they cannot
actually eat; instances when they appear to eat are not false since angels by nature
cannot deceive, but instead the appearance must serve some revelatory rather than
literal purpose (Keck, Angels and Angelology, 33). For medieval Spain specifically, see
Eiximenis, Libro de los santos angeles, pt. I, chap. 6, fol. 3v; pt. I, chap. 5, fol. 3r.
74 Eiximenis, for example, when writing about the duties of angels in the heavens, pro294 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 48.2 / 2018
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vides a more contemplative set of scenes, in which the angels are simply praying to,
loving, and glorifying God, even when talking amongst themselves (Libro de los santos
angeles, pt. V, chap. 3, fol. 67r and chap. 11, fol. 71r).
75 For discussion of the term “third gender” for medieval contexts, see Murray, “One
Flesh,” 34 – 51.
76 “El hombre y la mujer y el angel nunca pueden dejar de vivir y ser permanecientes
para siempre . . . en el cielo, ayuntados todos tres . . . en un amor y ayuntamiento y
caridad y voluntad, loando . . . a Dios Trino y Uno . . . que los crió vivientes y semejantes a él.” For further discussion of this passage in terms of its definition of human
nature, see Angela Muñoz Fernández, “Las mujeres como ‘criaturas permanecientes’:
Género y diferencia sexual a la luz de las narrativas de la creación en la obra de Juana
de la Cruz (1481 – 1534),” in Letras en la celda: Cultura escrita de los conventos femeninos en la España moderna, ed. Nieves Baranda Leturio and María Carmen Marín Pina
(Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014), 207 – 20, at 215.
77 Mary was often considered the mistress or leader of the angels. Keck, Angels and
Angelology, 40, citing Bonaventure. Several scholars have suggested that the emotions
of angels are an important entry into understanding medieval affect; see Keck, 105 – 9;
and Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven, 8.
78 This pageant seems to be a logical extension of descriptions of demons and angels
fighting over a soul just after death (Keck, Angels and Angelology, 205), but I know of
no other visionary report of an extensive battle between angels and demons after the
initial fall of Lucifer yet before the Last Judgment. For discussion of medieval representation of warring angels, see Gorgievski, Face to Face with Angels, 40 – 41, 44 – 45,
though the emphasis is on Archangel Michael. For analysis of the ongoing battles
between demons and angels in Juana’s sermons and the Annunciation play in Libro de
la casa, see Sanmartín Bastida, “La puesta en escena.”
79 Angels were certainly understood as tools to carry out God’s wrath against sinning
humans, as described at length in Eiximenis, Libro de los santos angeles, pt. IV, chap.
50, fols. 56v – 57v. Rather than rescuing souls entirely, angelic intervention in purgatory and hell usually reduced the amount of pain inflicted, reduced the time it
endured, or sought out prayers by living humans on the behalf of damned souls. See
Libro de los santos angeles, pt. IV, chap. 52, fol. 58r; Keck, Angels and Angelology, 206.
80 This episode is mentioned briefly in Graña Cid, “Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 508, but
under the category of androgyny, not transgender, intersex, or even genderqueer. Note
that Mary also claims in this paragraph that she has arrived as a great “medicinebearer and healer of wounds” to save souls [medicinadora y sanadora de llagas]
(Conorte, no. 57, 1238), a metaphor deployed in medieval texts to describe Mary
as a miracle-worker but also to evoke Christ the physician or surgeon as healer of
wounded souls. Useful literature on this topic, though focused on medieval England
rather than Castile, includes Virginia Langum, “ ‘The Wounded Surgeon’: Devotion,
Compassion, and Metaphor in Medieval England,” in Wounds and Wound Repair in
Medieval Culture, ed. Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 269 – 90,
at 277; and Diane Watt, “Mary the Physician: Women, Religion, and Medicine in
the Middle Ages,” in Medicine, Religion, and Gender in Medieval Culture, ed. Naoë
Kukita Yoshikawa (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 27 – 44.
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 295
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82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
“[L]a vieron venir volando, así como angel resplandeciente.”
“[N]o me llaméis Señor, que mujer soy que no angel, y soy la Madre de Dios.”
In an intriguing parallel, Savonarola’s vision of the nine hierarchies of angels with
Mary above them all uses the male pronoun for the angels but describes Mary as
manly. Girolamo Savonarola, “The Compendium of Revelations,” in Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore,
The Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press,
1979), 192 – 275, at 265.
The most important function, arguably, of angels was as “psychopomps,” i.e., those
charged with transporting souls to heaven. While the archangel Michael was most
often associated with this role, it did fall to all angels in general. Keck, Angels and
Angelology, 44; Richard F. Johnson, Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English
Legend (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), 27, 87, 91. Mary’s role in this
scene may refer to a medieval Carmelite belief that Mary descends into purgatory
on Saturdays to save souls, supported by a mythical “Sabbatine bull” issued by Pope
John XXII in 1322, deemed heretical in 1617. Joaquín Zambrano González, “Animas
benditas del Purgatorio: Culto, cofradías y manifestaciones artísticas en la provincia
de Granada,” in El mundo de los difuntos: Culto, cofradías, y tradiciones, ed. Francisco
Javier Campos y Fernández de Sevilla, 2 vols. (El Escorial, Sp.: R.C.U. Escorial-Mª
Cristina, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2014), 2:1071 – 88, at 1075; and Joseph Hilgers,
“Sabbatine Privilege,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13 (New York: Robert
Appleton Company, 1912), available at New Advent, www.newadvent.org/cathen
/13289b.htm.
Her most recent discussion of the paradox that matter is both desirable and terrifying
in its capacity for change is found in Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality:
An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 24 – 25,
285.
Salamon, Assuming a Body, 151: “My body schema might be so fluid as to include the
feather in my hat or the stick I hold. Whatever apparatus I take up and use with or
as my body becomes my body” (original emphasis). For Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of
bodily extension through a blind man’s walking-stick, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002), 164 – 66.
Primary sex characteristics were evidently not immutable in the Inquisition cases concerning hermaphrodites cited above, who developed external genitalia at puberty. For
a broad definition of secondary sex characteristics that includes a variety of “bodily
indicators” such as haircuts or dieting, see Butler, Undoing Gender, 87.
Vida y fin, fols. 99v – 102v; discussed in Surtz, Guitar of God, 38 – 41; Boon, “Introduction,” 26 – 27.
For an argument for a gender continuum between Mary and Jesus, therefore between
human and divine, that draws on a different set of sermons in Juana’s Conorte, see Jessica A. Boon, “Christ at Heavenly Play: Christology through Mary’s Eyes in the Sermons of Juana de la Cruz (1481 – 1534),” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 102, no. 1
(2011): 243 – 66.
This is an homage to the feminist tradition of using the term “latin@s” to avoid the
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92
93
94
95
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99
gendering required by “latinos” or “latinas,” though recently it has been replaced by
“latinx” in order to include genderqueer persons.
Graña Cid, “Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 494 – 95, 501. It is worth remembering that,
although since Caroline Walker Bynum’s early work the “feminization of Jesus” has
been a standard scholarly category, the term “feminization” is entirely anachronistic
to medieval terminology (Jesus as Mother, 110 – 69). I argue in turn that terms such as
“bigender” can, if used with care and specificity, allow us to unpack what is, at least
according to Juana’s visions, a densely woven and apparently highly sexualized set of
interactions in the afterlife.
Keck, Angels and Angelology, 68 – 70; Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven, 27.
In addition to Graña Cid’s article, “Feminidad de Jesucristo,” Pablo Maroto situates
Juana in relation to the “dispute over women” in this era. Daniel de Pablo Maroto,
“La ‘Santa Juana,’ mística franciscana del siglo XVI español: Significación histórica,”
Revista de espiritualidad 60, no. 241 (2001): 577 – 601.
A contemporary of Juana, the Italian laywoman mystic Lucia Brocadelli, also had a
vision of this scene. See discussion in Herzig, Savonarola’s Women, 181.
Angelic ring dancing was a common Christian belief by the fourth century, applying
the idea of the heavenly realms dancing in a circle found in Plotinus among others to
angelic movement. See Françoise Syson Carter, “Celestial Dance: A Search for Perfection,” Dance Research 5, no. 2 (1987): 3 – 17, at 5, 9. The Hispanist Mary Giles has suggested that the dancing in Juana’s heavenly pageants should be considered liturgical.
Mary E. Giles, “Spanish Visionary Women and the Paradox of Performance,” in Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary
A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 273 – 97,
at 281. For comparison, the nearly contemporaneous popular Italian preacher and
apocalyptic prophet Girolamo Savonarola had a vision of heaven that includes many
infants singing and holding flowers; the holy innocents hold red flowers to symbolize
their wounds, rather than having real marks on their bodies. Savonarola, “Compendium,” 249 – 50.
“Gozáos y alegráos conmigo, mis hermanas, que si vosotras morísteis por mí, también
morí yo por vosotras, y mucho os amo y os quiero. Y también soy niña como vosotras,
pues soy hijo de mujer.” Graña Cid mentions this episode in “Feminidad de Jesucristo,”
499.
Geraldine McKendrick, “The Franciscan Order in Castile, c. 1440 – c. 1560” (Ph.D.
thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1987), 159. Note that this accusation actually evokes
Kabbalistic discussions of divine androgyny or the existence of both male and female
within the Sefirotic emanations of God.
For Juana’s use of Jesus as mother, see Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, La comida visionaria: Formas de alimentación en el discurso carismático femenino del siglo XVI (London: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2015), 42 – 94. For discussion of
women as “God’s mouthpiece” in several Mediterranean cases, including Juana, see
Baldridge, Spiritual Androgyny, 96 – 109.
This is a theory posited by Roland de Crémone (thirteenth century); see Van der
Lugt, Le ver, le démon, et la vierge, 420. Note that various Castilian theologians and
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 297
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102
103
104
105
106
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108
109
authors of spiritul guides debated a related question concerning what type of matter Mary contributed to Jesus’s body — was he formed from her menstrual blood, or a
pure form of blood particular to her? For details, see Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal,
Las çinco figuratas paradoxas, ed. Carmen Parrilla (Alcalá de Henares, Sp.: Univerisdad de Alcalá, 1998), First Paradox, chap. 24, p. 96; Juan López de Salamanca, Libro
de las historias de Nuestra Señora (1460s), ed. Arturo Jiménez Moreno (San Millán de
la Cogolla, Sp.: Cilengua, 2009), pt. II, chap. 4, p. 304; and Prejano, Lucero, chap. 5,
fol. 9r – v.
For discussion of this trope, see the seminal work, Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 110 – 69.
Julian of Norwich is best known for her mystical formulation of God and Jesus as
mother, but there is no evidence Julian’s Showings were known in medieval Castile.
“Yo que soy tu verdadera y benigna y piadosa y entrañal madre, te enseñé una ley la
más firme y fuerte y buena.” For brief discussion of Juana’s views on Jesus as mother,
see Baldridge, Spiritual Androgyny, 95 – 96.
The full passage reads “Nuestro Señora Jesucristo – dijo él mismo — como de parte del
Padre celestial, esto es, cuanto a la divinidad, era el más tierno y delicado de todos los
Ángeles y criaturas celestiales.” Graña Cid mentions only the title of “Our Lady Jesus
Christ”; see “Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 498; and María del Mar Graña Cid, “¿Una
memoria femenina de escritura espiritual? La recepción de las místicas medievales en
el convento de Santa María de la Cruz de Cubas,” in Letras en la celda: Cultura escrita
de los conventos femeninos en la España moderna, ed. Nieves Baranda Leturio and
María Carmen Marín Pina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014), 189 – 206, at 195.
Graña Cid mentions that after Jesus’s resurrection, he seems to re-masculinize, i.e.,
his femininity is crucial on earth but not in heaven (“Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 501).
Some medieval alchemists viewed Jesus as the “ultimate hermaphrodite, a unity
of contrary parts — the human and the divine, the male and the female”; see Leah
DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern
Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 193 – 218, at 209. This is however different from Jesus as a girl, linked with the language of sacrifice and salvation.
Sangganjanavanich, “Trans Identities,” 2.
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 61.
Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (New York: Routledge, 2003), 32, 53.
Althaus-Reid discusses the image of the “bi/Christ,” which she uses rather misleadingly for an intersex Christ (Indecent Theology, 112 – 18). See also Robert E. Goss,
“Marcella Althaus-Reid’s ‘Obscenity no. 1: Bi/Christ’: Expanding Christ’s Wardrobe
of Dresses,” Feminist Theology 11, no. 2 (2003): 157 – 66.
While little medievalist scholarship exists on sexuality in heaven, see the discussion
of Dante’s erotic love for Beatrice in F. Regina Psaki, “The Sexual Body in Dante’s
Celestial Paradise,” in Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages, ed. Jan Swango Emerson
and Hugh Feiss (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 47 – 62.
Juana is generally very careful to include both genders when she is referencing a collective, repeating the long form of “santos y santas, amigos y amigas,” etc. Graña Cid,
“Feminidad de Jesucristo,” 504; Angela Muñoz Fernández, “Del masculino genérico
al desdoblamiento de voces: Estrategias léxicas en el Conorte de Juana de la Cruz
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111
112
113
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115
(1481 – 1534),” in Impulsando la historia desde la historia de las mujeres: La estela de Cristina Segura, ed. Pilar Díaz Sánchez, Gloria Franco Rubio, and María Jesús Fuente
Pérez (Huelva, Sp.: Universidad de Huelva, 2012), 261 – 68. Juana’s choice of “amigas”
here is thus intentionally limiting the category to the female gender.
Note that this image contradicts both medieval understandings of Matthew 22:30
that there will be no marriage in the afterlife and the association of this asexual state
with angels in particular (Keck, Angels and Angelology, 117). However, Andreas Capellanus did describe bridal beds in his heaven of secular love in his twelfth-century The
Art of Courtly Love (McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, 95).
These various forms of gender-bending in fact militate against any use of contemporary terminology such as homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality, if all humans
and God Godself slide so easily through a gender continuum. I should note that the
terms “skolioromantic” and “skoliosexual” have recently been proposed for those
attracted to nongender-binary individuals. The terminology has appeared in multiple
blogs dating back to at least 2013, for example, in Inda Lauryn’s For Harriet, at www
.forharriet.com/2015/03/a-beginners-guide-to-understanding.html#axzz3UN5wqrPV.
The source of the term may be from the posting on Tumblr “Sexual Attraction,” at
25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mby9cspeJd1rgjunyo1_1280.png.
Several scholars argue strongly for understanding marriage to Jesus as a literal and
legal concept that pervaded European culture. For women’s legal marriage to Jesus,
see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010), 32 – 43. Recent work has unveiled
that the term “bride of Christ” was not limited in medieval Europe to nuns, but was
used at times by religious men and understood physically, not spiritually. Rabia Gregory, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture
and Religious Reform (New York: Routledge, 2016).
“Y dijo el Señor, que como san Francisco subió delante de él, que le llamó diciéndole: — Ven acá, mi amigo seráfico y alférez mío, muéstrame tus tetas. Y que él le
respondió diciendo con mucho gozo: — Mis tetas, Señor, helas aquí, que estos que
aquí traigo conmigo fueron las tetas de mis deseos. . . . [Y el Señor dijo] — Dime,
amigo Francisco, si quieres ser mi mujer y si te quieres unir y ayuntar conmigo. Y
san Francisco le respondió: — Sí, Señor Dios mío, de buena voluntad estaré yo sujeto
y obediente a todo lo que tú quisieres y mandares, así como hace la mujer que está
sujeta y obediente a su marido. Y de buena voluntad me ayuntaré contigo, así como
la esposa se ayunta con el esposo.” My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for discussion of the translation of tetas as “nipples,” whereas senos or pechos would translate as
“breasts.” Baldridge, Spiritual Androgyny, 148, discusses this scene as an androgynization of Francis.
Conorte no. 58, 1246. For further analysis of this scene, see Surtz, Guitar of God,
45 – 50.
This is a transmutation made all the more complicated by the fact that some Franciscan authors described Jesus not as Francis’s spouse but as his mother. See Sara
Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval
Christianity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), 143. Francis would then
Boon / At the Limits of (Trans)Gender 299
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effectively be father-in-law to his mother, a particularly unusual form of alternative
kinship affiliation.
116 One wonders, since Juana does not specify, if Jesus saves women as a woman and men
as a man, if he also marries women as a man and men as a woman, and if so, whether
Jesus as bigender preserves or complicates heteronormativity.
117 Gregory, Marrying Jesus, 6, 17.
300 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 48.2 / 2018
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Jessica A. Boon