2 - What Comes Unnaturally: Unspeakable Acts

Summary

The case of ‘Johannes Rykener, se Elianoram nominans’ was tried in 1395. The verdicts are still being written. It was an unusual case with all the right (or wrong) ingredients for a ripping yarn – sex, money, cross-dressing, nuns – but even for all that, those involved might scarcely have believed the celebrity it would achieve six centuries later. The defendant was caught with one John Britby in Sopers Lane and is accused of committing a crime that the recording clerk, in a suggestively reticent turn of phrase, refers to as ‘illud vitium detestibile, nephandum et ignominiosum’ (that detestable, unspeakable and ignominious vice). At the time, he was dressed in women's clothes and calling himself Eleanor. Besides the encounter in question, Rykener states that he had sex as a woman with an Essex rector, three Oxford scholars, four Franciscans, one Carmelite, three chaplains and many priests; additionally, as a man, ‘with many nuns and […] many women both married and otherwise’. As the case wears on, the need to record the unmentionable sin eventually effects the textual metastasis that yields ‘illo vitium antedictum’ (the aforementioned [unmentionable] vice). Even in 1932, in an edition of late-fourteenth-century Pleas and Memoranda that specifies names, locations and other particulars for almost every other contemporary case, the entry for 1 February 1395 reads only (but tantalisingly), ‘Examination of two men charged with immorality, of whom one implicated several persons, male and female, in religious orders.’ Consequently, the case was very little known until the mid-1990s, when it was rediscovered and its tangled language and arresting mix of frankness and ambiguity brought to critical attention by Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd.

The Rykener case has remained a mainstay of medieval, queer and gender studies ever since, and as such I will not dwell on it here; it does, however, introduce some key issues. Firstly, it makes very pointed mention of the unspeakable act or vice and, moreover, the phenomenon of the aforementioned unmentionable act. This is one that Carolyn Dinshaw notes ‘neatly exemplifies Foucault's point about sexuality in general as it developed out of premodernity: the sexual act here is defined as unspeakable, yet it is spoken of voluminously’.