The King’s Womb and the Queen’s Semen? Debunking Essentialist Views of Fertility in Early Medieval Royal Inaugurations
LGBT+ History Month 2021 guest article by Florence Scott
In this article I will confront gender-essentialist assumptions about early medieval inauguration ceremonies in historical scholarship, arguing instead that textual analysis reveals that these ceremonies queered distinctions between men and women, and between sex and gender.
The marriage of Judith, the adolescent daughter of Charles the Bald, to the middle-aged King Æthelwulf of Wessex on the 1st October 856, marks the earliest known inauguration of an English queen. The Ordo for this ceremony — that is, the document that outlines the liturgical prayers spoken on this occasion — survives to us in a sixteenth-century copy. Judith’s Ordo was composed by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, and was partially based on an English Ordo for a king’s inauguration. From Judith’s Ordo we know that Judith was both crowned and anointed as queen in the same ceremony in which she was married to king Æthelwulf.
In 1979 the historian Michael Enright, in his analysis of the Ordo for Queen Judith’s marriage and inauguration, described Judith’s anointing as a ‘fertility charm’, and the queen’s inauguration ceremony as having ‘the magico-religious purpose of making her fertile’. For Enright, ‘martial vigor was the most important and respected male characteristic for many long centuries. Fecundity was the corresponding primary female characteristic’.
Enright’s argument is that the purpose of these ceremonies was fundamentally different for men and women based on their biology, which relies on the assumption that in early medieval European society it was believed that men were good at fighting while women had a biological role of reproduction.
This view of fertility is essentialist. ‘Gender essentialism’ is the belief that males and females are born with different natures which are determined biologically. This belief, which conflates sex and gender, is at the root of much queerphobic, transphobic and anti-intersex rhetoric, because these identities blur binary distinctions of sex and undermine gendered assumptions about what it is to be born male or female. Gender essentialism is often the basis for misogynistic rhetoric, as it is used to argue that women are biologically suited to performing roles such as childcare or housekeeping, and thus should be socially confined to those roles.
It is often assumed that people in history had essentialist views and that the idea of blurring the categories of male and female, and man and woman, is a modern phenomenon. It might be assumed that early medieval English society had a rigid understanding of sex and gender, and that inauguration ceremonies would reflect this. From Enright’s assessment, we might assume that the ceremony for the anointing and crowning of a king would emphasise manly valour while the ceremony for a queen would emphasise womanly fertility. But is this view, which has been repeated in scholarship since its publication, evident in the source material itself? Let’s analyse the evidence.
To assess the accuracy of Enright’s argument, I began by highlighting all the references to fertility in the Judith Ordo. At first glance, there were many such references, and the ‘fertility rite’ interpretation seemed convincing. The source can be fairly neatly split into two sections, the marriage rite and the inauguration rite. As might be expected, several of the references to fertility were in the marriage rite portion. However, all of these prayers asking God to make the couple ‘beget offspring’ relate to both the bride and groom. In the marriage rite, though fertility is emphasised, it’s not a distinctly female attribute, but something the bride and groom with achieve together.
Once the marriage portion is removed, we are left with an inauguration rite that still contains many references to fertility. However, this part is almost wholly based on the English inauguration Ordo for a king. Though we might expect, if the ceremonies of kings and queens had different purposes based on whether they were male or female, they would have completely different liturgy, Judith was crowned and anointed on almost identical terms to English kings — presumably including her husband king Æthelwulf.
We have phrases like ‘may her land be filled with the fruits of the increase of heaven’, which sound like they could be about a woman’s pregnancy, except for the fact that they’re borrowed from a text about the king. One particular reference stands out — ‘fill her with the blessings of the breasts and the womb’. This surely confirms Enright’s theory that queens were anointed to make them fertile, because fertility is the primary female trait? Well, no! This phrase is also borrowed from the king’s ceremony! Indeed, the coronation of early English medieval kings included a phrase about blessing his breasts and womb. The source of this phrase is biblical, and the context relates to men — Jacob blesses his sons on these terms in Genesis. Where we might assume that both biblical theology and medieval conceptions of kingship have a rigid and essentialist conception of sex, this is challenged by a phrase that instils men with a form of fertility that refers to organs that are considered ‘female’.
After we have removed all references to fertility that refer equally to both the bride and groom, or that are lifted from the king’s text, we are left with just two. The clincher, and the really interesting bit, is that both of these references are to Judith’s ‘semen’. That’s right, the queen’s semen. The king’s text reads ‘the people serve you and the tribes adore you’, but the queen’s reads ‘the people might serve her and her semen, and that, to your honour, the tribes may adore her and her semen’. The other occurrence of ‘semen’ is just after the blessing of the ‘breasts and the womb’, where the king’s text reads ‘may the blessings of the ancient fathers be comforts to you’ but queen Judith’s has ‘may the blessings of the ancient fathers be comforts to her, and to her semen, as you promised to your servant Abraham and his seed forever’. Here, as well as having figurative ‘semen’, Judith is being compared to a male figure, Abraham.
In essence, we have a prayer in the queen’s inauguration which refers to the queen’s womb and breasts, and then to her semen. The womb and breast part was borrowed from the king’s ceremony, but the part about semen was written for the queen. What is happening?
Well, Judith was a Carolingian. The references to semen and Abraham link Judith with common Carolingian dynastic rhetoric. The Latin ‘semen’ can be translated to ‘seed’, though the connotations are certainly of a male form of fertility. They bring Judith into the context of both ancestry and progeny — the seed she carries and will hopefully pass on is that of her ancestors, her father Charles the Bald, and her illustrious great grandfather Charlemagne.
My conclusion here is that Judith’s inauguration ceremony cannot be read as being about female fertility if it is looked at thoroughly, with its relationship to the king’s text being taken into account. Far from revealing a contrast between female fertility and male valour, what we see are distinctions of both sex and gender being deliberately blurred. Male models of fertility are applied to a queen while sex characteristics that we might expect to be categorised as female, a womb and breasts, are part of male biblical model applied to a king.
While some assume sources in the past uphold rigid essentialist ideas, I think Judith’s Ordo reflects the danger of making assumptions about the past based on what are actually our modern ideas of sex and gender as binary and essential. The liturgy for Judith’s inauguration, and the king’s ceremony on which it is based, are examples of sources where elite figure in society are upheld as models of Christian rulership, and where these elite rulers are given figurative models of this rulership that blur expectations of both gender and sex. The king’s body, a man’s body, is given a ‘womb and breasts’ in a positive comparison to Jacob’s sons. The queen is given ‘semen’ to exalt her and her dynasty. Fertility (and thus dynastic success) is an essential element of both kingship and queenship — it not gendered feminine.
Enright assumed that relatively modern understandings of men and women as biologically distinct and binary categories would be reflected in the past; a close analysis of the source material has demonstrated that this was not the case. It is imperative that we reveal ideas in the past that celebrate bodies, even figurative ones, that are not by modern standards normative. By viewing historical sources through a queer lens we can uncover ideal gendered models that are not essentialist, which may have been obscured by normative scholarship. It is imperative that queer, trans, non-binary and intersex people are able to see themselves reflected in history.
By Florence Scott, PhD Student at the University of Leeds
(Twitter: @FlorenceofDeira)