An Herbal Triptych: Queer Intimacies and the Vegetal Middle Ages
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Medieval European and Islamic scientific and literary representations of plant life reveal queer intimacies with vegetation that suffuse pre-modern conceptions of embodiment, environment, and behavior. Taking the form of a medieval herbal, a book that describes and categorizes plant life based on its medicinal, toxic, or culinary properties, our essay is framed around three medieval plant curiosities: agnus castus, the mandrake, and the aphrodisiac. Through this herbal triptych we show the intimate co-creation of gender expressions and sexual behavior between medieval plants and people in asexual, transgender, and queer modes. By putting medieval conceptions of nature into conversation with current discourse in queer ecologies, our essay turns away from modern taxonomies to embrace premodern queer environs that help us rethink categories of gender, sexual