“In puellam hermaphroditam” (which I translate as “About the Bi-Sexed Girl”) is a seven-line poem, composed in North Africa in the early sixth century. It is preserved in one manuscript, made in Italy in the early ninth century. In the seventeenth century, the French philologist Claude Saumaise and others in his circle became fascinated by the entire verse collection, filling the pages of the then-700 year old manuscript with their suggestions, explanations, and proposed “corrections.” The “Bi-Sexed Girl” was first printed in Amsterdam in the mid-eighteenth century. In that first edition and in all subsequent editions—as well as all translations and scholarship growing from them—the poem’s first line is given as “Monstrum feminei bimembre sexus” [variously translated as “two-membered monster of the female sex,” “double-organed monsterwoman,” and “strange mixture of the female gender”]. This opening line has been taken as key evidence of medieval condemnations of lesbian sex, bisexual women, and/or intersex people. There’s just one problem. “Monstrum” is not what the manuscript says.

This talk traces the braided fate of “About the Bi-Sexed Girl” across the centuries, illuminating the twining threads of changing editorial “best practices”; debates about the rights of LGBTQIA+ people to exist free from persecution; and branching media technologies: from manuscripts, to print editions, photographic facsimiles, microfilm, and digitization. Ultimately, I use these newly—and importantly, now digitally—accessible remediations of this short poem to reflect on issues of access, political power, and positionality in queer and trans textual editing. 

Bio:

Bridget Whearty (she/her), Associate Professor of English at SUNY Binghamton, works at the intersection of literary, medieval, manuscript, and information studies. She is the author of Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford University Press, 2022). Whearty is also the creator of the Caswell Test (#CaswellTest), which draws on the work of Michelle Caswell to challenge humanities scholars writing about “the archive” to engage more rigorously and accurately with the work of real archivists and librarians. She is co-PI, with Masha Raskolnikov, of the nascent digital project and OER “Always Here: a Queer+Trans Global Medieval Sourcebook.”