Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Greta LaFleur et al., "Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern" (Cornell UP, 2021)
Description: Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska's edited volume Transhistorical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021)  explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives--literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts--that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have...