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Take, for instance, “The Man of Law’s Tale,” the fifth of the Canterbury Tales (1400) by courtier and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer. It tells how Custance, daughter of a Christian Roman emperor and bride of the sultan of Syria, is cast adrift in a boat through her mother-in-law’s machinations. Shipwrecked on the Northumberland coast, Custance immediately arouses the protective passion of Dame Hermengyld, the constable’s wife: “Hermengyld loved hire as hir lyf.” … But a knight whom Custance has rejected is jealous of the women’s closeness; he sneaks into the room where they are sleeping together and slits Hermyngyld’s throat, leaving the bloody knife beside Custance to frame her for murder. The people are not fooled by this circumstantial evidence, since they have witnessed the women’s relationship with their own eyes: “For they han seyn hir evere so vertuous, / And lovyng Hermendyld right as hir lyf.” (For they have seen Custance be virtuous all the time, and love Hermengyld as her life.) The people’s suspicion is confirmed by divine intervention: as the knight tells his lies in court, his eyeballs suddenly drop out of his head. This is an excellent example, perhaps the earliest in English, of how a mutual passion between women can be not just an ornamental extra, but what moves the story along.
Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature by Emma Donoghue
(or: How All the Authors You’ve Ever Heard of Wrote Lesbian Love Stories and No One Told You)
(Source: fuckyeahlesbianliterature)
