Come out and be known as your truer self

I’m a couple days late for Coming Out Day, but I know you always enjoy my reflective writing.

People have been asking me lately when I’m going to give a presentation about historical swordswomen again. And… I wasn’t really planning to. But I think it’s probably time to reexamine that choice.

There are a lot of reasons I haven’t felt excited about going back to it. When I was working on updating and expanding it, a bunch of stressful stuff was going on in my life, including a lot of tension and frustration with someone who was working on the project with me. Going back to the subject feels too much like going back to all of that, to the extent that I’ve never put it on my Lectures and Recordings page.

But the reason that comes into my mind first is, that’s not what I want to be famous for. I don’t want to be remembered as the woman who works on woman stuff. Historical swordfighting is a very male-dominated space, and I’ve been navigating that my entire adult life, trying to find the right amount of “remind the men that people who aren’t men exist and are different” and trying not to worry about “they won’t take me (or maybe any woman) seriously if I’m not man enough.”

So… I have this presentation I don’t want to be famous for, but it’s already something people remember about me and, more importantly, want more of. Which I guess means I have an opportunity to reshape their perception.

And it’s information that needs to be put out into the world again, because for the love of kittens, “cool non-man swordfighters” does not begin and end with La Maupin and basically none of those meme pictures are actually of her anyway. And also her story usually has wacky exaggerated genderfuckery fingerprints all over it, like some 18th or 19th century person said “aha, a story with non-mainstream gender and sexuality! Allow me to impose some of my ideas about gender onto it to make sure you notice gender things are happening but also reassure you that women are ladylike and attracted to men!” Like the bit where she stabs a guy in a duel but then tenderly nurses him back to health before having sex with him. Or the thing where her early serious relationship with a woman is only discussed as the framing for why she set the convent on fire and is otherwise elided to a couple sentences.

I guess I have more to say about this topic.

So.

The world needs me to share more information about individual non-men fighters, and probably also broader categories of non-men who were doing combat and defense stuff, and point out that a lot of the gender division ideas we modern folk have about the medieval era were given to us by the historians of intervening centuries.

And I need to find ways to do that– all of that– without feeling like I’m compromising my own priorities for presenting my identity to others.

I think the first step to making it manageable is to separate it into two topics, because I think it would be difficult and also unhelpful to simultaneously cover “binary gender has been imposed onto history in weird ways” and “gender and sexuality are not binary.” Taken separately, I think each of those topics fits better with the current Darth Kendra brand than the old presentation does.

I suspect a lot of you are now wondering, Darth Kendra, what do you want to be famous for? Because, you’re right, I shouldn’t define myself by what I don’t want. And I think if I have to boil it all down to one single idea, that idea is READ ALL THE MANUSCRIPTS. I don’t want to be remembered as the person with all the ladies in armor pictures, or the merfolk pictures, or even as the Florius translator– I want all of those to be taken together to create a big picture of “Darth Kendra will read everything unstoppably when she’s on the trail of something interesting, and then (sooner or later) share the journey and also the discovery at the end.”

While I’m talking about ways I intend to be more out and true, I’m resolving to put more stickers on my HEMA gear. I think– I’m trying to believe– that using my gear to celebrate some things I love, and thus share a little more of my truer self with everyone I fight, will make me stronger and healthier. Even– or, no, especially– if some of those things are definitely not manly, like glitter pastel cottagecore and fluffy cats sitting by rainy windows.

Swordsquatch 2019 slides and images

Miniature from page 97r, Bibliothèque municipale d’Arras MS 845 (Roman de la Rose)

I’ve got lots to write up about women in armor, both from the last few weeks of research leading up to Swordsquatch and from conversations at and after ‘Squatch. This whole project has been even better received than I could have imagined, and I’m excited to dig into the details with all of you!

In the interest of expedience, this installment will have a lot fewer words than usual, but it does have nearly a hundred and fifty pictures. Here’s a PDF of the slides from my presentation:

LadiesInPlating_KBrown_Squatch2019Download

You can see the images used in the presentation (with tags, high res versions, and source links) at my image tagging site under the label swordsquatch_2019.

Links about swordswomen you should know about

I’ve included links to Amazon listings for each book to keep things relatively consistent, but check your favorite book sources; many of these are available from public or academic libraries.

Books about swordswomen

• Joanna of Flanders: The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel translated by Nigel Bryant
• Caterina Sforza: The Tigress of Forli by Elizabeth Lev
• Catalina de Erauso: Coded Encounters, ed. Cevallos-Candau et al.
  • Note: While often (like here) listed as a woman and credited using a feminine name, Erauso is better described as a trans man, even though he used the sensational gender-nonconformity narrative to cultivate celebrity and legal clemency during his own lifetime.
• Julie d’Aubigny, la Maupin: Women in Men’s Guise by O. P. Gilbert
• Chevalière d’Eon: Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman by Gary Kates

Books by swordswomen

• Caterina Sforza: Gli Experimenti, translated by Gigi Coulson (bonus: awesome lecture about Sforza’s alchemy)
• Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, translated by Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch
• Catalina de Erauso: Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite translated by Michele and Gabriel Stepto
• Chevalière d’Eon: The Maiden of Tonnerre, translated by Gary Kates

1320s Dress: Possible patterns

Today’s installment of 1320s dress research is a collection of online tutorials, free patterns (printable, scalable, cutting diagrams with measurements, et c), draping instructions/advice, reconstructed garments with dressmaking diaries (in-process photos and notes about lessons learned) or research information, commercial patterns, and a couple of shops offering ready-made options.  All about 14th century cotehardies, cottes, kirtles, and other terms for long-skirted dresses fitted in the torso.

For Walpurgis, I think it will be right to have a fitted dress underneath, and a less fitted surcoat, but most of these cover suitable variations on the shape or silhouette of the dress, close enough that the exact fittedness should be easy to adjust.  I’ll (probably, sometime) do up a separate post noting what details the Walpurgis dress should have based on the source material.

No pictures today; there’s a bajillion links, and pictures are fussy.

1320s dress

And now, something else completely different: in which I research a costume that isn’t for me.  (Update: I’m not sure the images linked to bigger versions before; I believe I have now fixed that.)

Royal Armouries MS I.33, also called the Walpurgis Fechtbuch, is the oldest extant European treatise on combat.  The thing that really makes it memorable, however, is the page shown here, in which a woman, called Walpurgis (on the left in both pairs), is learning swordfighting from the priest who seems to be the master of the book.

So… if one wanted to dress like Walpurgis, where to begin?

The manuscript is from Germany in the 1320s.  Unfortunately, that’s far enough back that it’s not as easy to focus on a specific decade, but in this case I’ve already got a leg up in having a specific image to start from, rather than a person or event.  So I can say off the bat, based on Walpurgis’s shoulders and sleeves being different colors, that I need to find out about long-sleeved underdresses (cottes) and sleeveless but not sideless surcoats (or surcottes).  They’ll have full-length skirts; Walpurgis is sporting a lovely calf-length look because, like the priest, she has tucked her skirts up into her belt to keep them away from her feet.  (Fun fact: tucking robes up for swordfighting may be why Robin Hood’s clerical friend was called Friar Tuck.)

So.  I know what she’s wearing, but it would be nice to have more pictures, especially showing the torso area where all the complicated sewing will happen.  And anyway, look at that priest’s arms; would you trust this artist on fine details of fashion?

As it happens, I’m in luck: there is a manuscript from the first quarter of the 14th century which is about German writers of love songs.

The Codex Manesse has lots of pictures, many featuring women in sleeveless surcoats and long-sleeved dresses of contrasting colors.  Here’s one of a woman with similar fashion sense to Walpurgis: she’s added a headdress that is actually a fillet or gebende and not at all called a “pie-crust hat”, but she has the same sleeveless overdress and long, curly hair.

There are a bunch of examples of this style in the Codex, showing the fashion in different postures, in motion, and so on. There is also some variation in the arm-hole size in the sleeveless surcoats.

Also let’s just look at a lot of pages because this has to be the most adorable medieval manuscript ever.  Sure, war bunnies on snails are cute, but… look at these couples! (Click through for more pages, and a selection of reconstructed dresses and useful links.)

La Maupin

And now for something completely different…

My unexpected project this winter has been a new-from-the-ground-up Swordswomen Through the Ages combat and history presentation.  The idea was to pair biographies of women we know got in sword fights with combat appropriate to their time, place, and social milieu.  We chose Caterina Sforza (the Tigress of Forli), Catalina de Erauso (the Lieutenant Nun), and La Maupin (that hellion contralto), later adding the less-well-attested Walpurgis of the Walpurgis Fechtbuch after concluding that Nadezhda Durova (the Cavalry Maiden) was really exciting but we didn’t have time to develop mounted saber combat or hussar uniforms.

I researched and wrote some of the material, and I’m now pleased to bring to you: a short biography of La Maupin, whose real first name is unknown, which makes her hard to talk about casually.