Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris (GHIP); Justine Audebrand (GHIP), Valentine Ferreira (Centre Roland Mousnier – Sorbonne Univ.), and Margot Laprade (Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris – Univ. Caen-Normandie) (Web)

Time: 28.-29.01.2027
Venue: GHIP, Paris
Proposals by: 01.07.2026

In 589, in Poitiers, nuns who had rebelled against their abbess brought a serious accusation against her: she was allegedly hiding within the cloister “a man who, dressed in women’s clothing, passed himself off as a woman, even though it was clearly evident that he was a man and that he was assiduously in the service of the abbess herself.” An investigation was conducted: the man claimed not to know the abbess and, moreover, to be unable of performing any manly acts (dixit se nihil opus posse virile agere). At the insistence of Chrodielde, leader of the rebels, Reoval, the monastery’s chief physician, was summoned; he confirmed that he had removed the man’s testicles when he was a child suffering from a groin ailment. The current abbess, he added, knew nothing of this: her honor is intact, and the rebellious nuns then sought other accusations. The narrative is particularly clear: the eunuch of Poitiers is not really regarded as a man because, being unable to engage in active, procreative sexual relations, he must dress as a woman and is no longer a threat to the monastic enclosure. His existence challenges the categories of masculinity and the male body: can one be a man when inhabiting a castrated or incomplete body? What reconfigurations of gender identities do mutilations and, more broadly, the failings of the male body, give rise to?
This is the question that the conference “Failing Male Bodies: Body, Gender, and Masculinities in the Medieval West (4th-15th Centuries)” intends to address. By focusing on the Latin West and its peripheries – since the topic has already been extensively covered for Byzantium2 – we will examine continuities and ruptures, as well as the circulation of models of masculinity between Late Antiquity and the late Middle Ages. Read more and source … (Web)

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