Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures.

• Author: Sharlet, Jocelyn
• Position: Book review

Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. By SAHAR AMER. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2008. Pp. xii + 252. $55.

Crossing Borders argues that the interpretation of lesbian relationships in medieval French literature can be enriched by reading these texts together with the textual and cultural interactions between medieval French and Arabic literature. The book is groundbreaking in three related ways. First, because of the national language institutional structures within which scholars here and abroad are trained, this is one of very few books to integrate two literary traditions, one of which is Arabic, using primary sources in the original languages. Second, it is one of very few books to address the literary portrayal of homoerotic relationships in the premodern Muslim world. Third, the book proposes that the concept of intertextuality across cultural boundaries be expanded to include intercultural relations, not just as background but as an integral part of interpretation.

The book is very well written, and offers the texts used for close reading in the original and in English, in parallel text in the case of French. The issue of the influence of these Arabic texts on these French texts, or the directionality of these exchanges, will not be persuasive for every reader. Researchers who work on Arabic will think of issues and sources that might be addressed in future work. However, what matters most is the interpretation of the material. In this regard, reading the two groups of texts together is interesting and useful both in terms of addressing homoerotic relationships and in terms of thinking about how medieval writers juxtaposed different perspectives on relationships.

Chapter one provides an introduction to the sources on female homoerotic relationships in both languages and the scholarship on them. In chapter two, the author treats a French narrative poem about social hierarchy. The Book of Manners, juxtaposing it with two monographic works on erotic life in Arabic, and in chapter three, she offers several versions of the romance Yde and Olive with the romance of Qamar al-Zaman and Princess Budur from The 1001 Nights. The presentations in chapters two and three focus primarily on intertextuality. The author reads the romance The Kite (as in the bird) in chapter four in light of the medieval Christian-Muslim trade in luxury goods, and compares it with a related episode from Qamar al-Zaman, and in chapter five, she reads The Kite against the background of the medieval Arabic literary portrayal of elegance (zarf), especially as concerns slave girls and singing slave girls. The readings in chapters four and five focus on intertextuality and intercultural relations. While two chapters deal mainly with intertextual relations and two with intercultural relations, the methodology and the themes discussed unify the analysis. It may seem strange to consider the same text twice with different intertexts. However, this approach is effective in bringing out different perspectives on the texts without overwhelming readers (most of whom are thoroughly familiar with only one of the cultures) with one longer and more complicated reading.

The author explains that reading texts from different cultures together enables us to pick up nuances in each tradition that remain hidden when texts from one culture are read alone or in isolation from their multicultural context of production. While reading these French texts with these Arabic texts is persuasive and productive, and that is the most important thing, it is difficult to document the actual movement of texts and influence, especially in the case of a relatively less stable text such as The 1001 Nights, of military imagery for love that is so widespread in Arabic, or of the multifaceted social practices concerned with elegance or slave girls. If these Arabic texts and practices influenced...