Testing more illumination-style drawing with this!
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Yde et Olive is a french narrative poem written in the thirteenth century. It’s a section of a larger cycle of poems that are sequels to the legend of Huon de Bordeaux, and may have been an adaptation of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, though that isn’t known for certain. It hasn’t been studied much in English, but there’s a great translation by Mounawar Abbouchi here, along with analysis and in-depth translation discussion! It tells the story of Yde, the daughter of a king who disguises herself as a man to escape from her father and becomes a renowned knight before gaining the favor of a king and marrying his daughter, Olive. In a very unusual twist for this type of story, when Yde confesses the secret of her identity to Olive, Olive brushes her concerns off and vows that they will be happily married regardless of Yde’s biological gender. Like in the story of Iphis and Ianthe, their secret is found out and Yde is transformed into a man by divine intervention before he can be prosecuted for his transgression of gender.
it’s not an unusual story in itself (a young woman disguising herself as a man, doing brave deeds, and being transformed into a man so she can marry a woman in love with her is a familiar formula!), but its handling of Yde’s gender is striking, both in Olive’s blithe acceptance and in the combination of feminine and masculine language used to refer to Yde throughout. Stories of same-sex romance that end in transformations like this are often written off as heteronormative and of-their-time, and while obviously that’s a necessary lens to apply given the religious and social context Yde et Olive was written in, I don’t think that’s the end-all-be-all of what this story can be. The transformation allows this, a story from the 1200s, to contain both a sympathetically portrayed story of sapphic romance and a wonderful, nuanced tale of a transmasculine character who grows into himself through the story. Yes, this is applying a modern lens to it; we don’t know what the author of Yde et Olive intended when they wrote it and these aren’t terms they would have had or used. But regardless, in a time when being trans is day-to-day becoming more and more difficult in many parts of the world, I think it’s comforting to find glimpses of joy in stories from the past.
