I arrived at the Folger with the intention of studying the Macro Plays, a collection of three 15th century morality plays. I was interested in these plays in particular relation to the present moralisation of trans being, being hacked at from multiple directions in our political reality. In this logic, the othered body is offered up as canvas for other ‘othered’ fears, per the terror of the moral order’s demise.
From this starting point, informed by more contemporary texts on the construction of early modern sex categories (Derek Neale’s The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (2008), Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack’s Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (2003)), I made an improvised route through the Vault collections of the Folger. My interest in sex-based constructions of morality led me to cut a course by way of early modern texts like Hic mulier: or, The man-woman, A christall glasse for christian women and Eunuchism display’d. I became interested in how desire and sex were inscribed through religious paradigms like those of sainthood, and, elsewhere, how trans life was accounted for in the early modern period. On this point, I was happy to read the legitimisation in Eunuchism display’d of those who are “eunuchs by temperament” (what I thought to be an enlightening distinction from a biological sex-based definition).
John Trundle, 1620. Folger STC 13374.
Charles Ancillon, 1718. HQ449.A5 Cage.
Because so much of sex-based behaviour was bound up in religious teachings in the early modern period, I began to think about how feminisation, and the permissibility of its transgression, operated from the standpoint of early modern Christianity and where this might diverge with Islam. I turned my focus towards the region of the Levant – of personal interest as a diasporic Cypriot subject myself – as a context of religious bi-communalism, conversion, and political upheaval. Thinking first through the island of Cyprus, which underwent its own transition from Christianity to Islam in the early modern period under the Ottoman occupation – the root of its present bi-communal population – for which The true report of all the successe of Famagosta…a citie in Cyprus made an entertaining read) I then moved to reading on the Copts, Egypt’s large Christian community. On the way, I encountered Good newes to christendome, an account of two friars having witnessed a vision of religious conversion in the skies over the tomb of Muhammad at Mecca, then recounting it to the fellow resident of an inn in which they had been staying.
All of these inputs shaped the development of a fiction project I brought with me to the Folger, for now titled “The one (fem.)”. This writing explores desire for the [trans]feminine and its historicity organised around the Mediterranean. The idiosyncratic voices I encountered in the Folger materials, often bridging concepts of the divine with the mundane rote of the everyday in inventive ways, found their way into my writing as I began to imagine a body interpolated between these two planes. One such figure who appears in “The one (fem.)”, St Marie of Aegypt, a saint who appears in Coptic texts, in emaciation resulting from her banishment to the desert, exemplifies that her gendered conversion was proximate to her religious conversion (thanks to Kris Massengale for this). In her case, as in the voices of “The one (fem.)”, conversion is a consequence of power as much as individual desire.
The following extract is taken from a chapter in “The one (fem.)”, in which I write of feminine partitioning as proximate to religious relics. It is partly inspired by T.G. Wilfong’s Women of Jeme (2002), which details the lives of women in a Coptic village and speaks of how women are frequently referred to in the historical record as bodily fragments rather than being addressed as a whole. My twin theses, over the two months spent at the Library, became thus: that there is always violence called into being by desire, and, separately, that desire, either for one’s own change, or for the body under change, try as morality might to restrict it, can never actually be wrong; can it?
“
AND us? We gave off no signs at all, no signs of life at all, we were not alive at all, just relics of a body once alive, the waters that led us down there, deposited in the cave behind the metal sea-stained grille, in the wet dark space where the water had trapped us, waiting for a storm surge to take us out to sea, we were miscellaneous, an array of features, we were only a bundle of hairpieces eyes and fingers, our itemisation a product too of distances, of the distance between ourself and the other part, the other whole, a small detached something floating in the top layer of the port’s scum, a cloud of yellow oil suspended over a grey deoxygenated sea, a shapeless shape, like the devolution of a saint, in the case of its partitioning, like a tributary reliquary, fashioned for single body parts, such as two fingers stolen from the half burnt corpse of a Małga or Małgosia or a Małgorzata atop a pyre, denoted by two upstanding silver fingers affixed atop the case, splayed apart as if in a peace sign cast in sterling, doubling the image of itself, or a leg, amputated from the sickbed of a Dawid or Daniil or Daoud in a monastic precursor to a hospital, become a browned leg bone atop a purple padded bed, visible to onlookers through a wall of thin glass panels built into the box’s marquetry casement, a smaller enamelled bone inlaid into the wood above the glass denoting the bone through its own iconography, in all these dupes and fey imitations and simps and duplifications what was clear was the devotional nature of being a fragment, the absolute holiness of being just a part, like the femmes treated as constituent pieces without sum, when the car headlights would shine through the slit of the drain in the curving coastal road and onto the wall above us and briefly illuminate ourselves, for one another / There
was your own husband, the bell-maker, gone out into the desert of his own accord, you thought it would be the last you would hear of his urge, that being drunk was sufficient indulgence for this flight of fancy, that he would never actually realise it, but it turned out that he could not let it go, an idea born of intoxication for once had actually turned out to be an unveiling of his need, his pregnant inclination towards his own unshackling, as if I was a chain, as if I didn’t have enough to deal with, and you had to reach out to your least favourite official, the desert priest, since only he could be the conduit for prayers and wishes, since only in his isolation could tell god, the man who was not meant to have earthly belongings but somehow had a grip on all the goings on of the community, but at that point you’d try anything, you wrote to him to ask him to bring home your husband, instead of spinning out there in the sand with the heretics, in total devotion to his own mysteries, and still he remained out there at length, what about bell-making, you thought, I thought you liked that job, don’t you miss it, you were so good at it, B, there was a time I counted myself among the luckiest people in town because I got to be party to your craft, I got to live in the house from which the sweet and sepulchral tones would arise, the house with the illusion of endless depth by virtue of its sonic emanations, the resonant bells hanging above each doorway, excesses born from the moulds of his workshop, but now he was gone all that privilege had dissipated like it was nothing, it was even something to be ashamed of, the mere thought you’d at one point thought yourself lucky, because there was no such thing as luck because everything squared off in the end
If you will not lie in your words, yet I pray you lie still in your beds
To make our superficial reading the sweeter by industrious experience, taught us the way to conceive, that all Countries might be national to a wise man.
WHEN I went up into the desert everyone expected me to explain myself but of course I could not,
what is the meaning of this? The authoritative members of my family asked, and shook his outstretched hands at me as if at a caged animal,
I could not give a satisfactory answer for I knew only that I was enchanted by the breakaway group and had to find out where they were encamped,
they sat at home crying over their failed child, probably,
just a desire to be weird and wrong,
it was not possible for her to allow affirmation into any argument,
she always had to make you feel as if you were getting the losing end
Here is my testimony,
I wound up the river, I was following some track, some scent some taste perhaps, I even started to believe I was an animal… my own lack of explanation warranted a search party the first night, and a caravan once they had found me, until they realised I would not relent,
Only then a paid chaperone stayed with me, three days until he too grew bored, disinterested by my pursuit; they’d fucked it, my chaperone was not attracted to me, therefore he could not feign interest in my pursuit.
Was my decision an unforeseen outcome who can say, but it did feel right; if He had blessed the known regions of which I knew, then He would also have blessed the nether regions of which I knew not, this I concluded, and that was where the dissenting went because that was where they could be free, and as He was I was to be, to emulate He to be more like Himself,
Cause I realised I couldn’t go on cause my reputation was killing me, not the acts I did to others, nor my impropriety, no, they didn’t bother me at all, nor the chastised and work-worn ravages to my physical beauty, only the issue of me having a reputation to be responsible for in the first place, one tied to a moral high-ground, some unusually sunny hill, a place I did not care to visit,
I did not care for my self nor the vagaries of my reception. I cared only for the Goodness of my heart, the blood beating through my organs and skin, because I was hurt I realised I needed to care, I had to care for my pain, I wanted to tell them all this in such a way that it would pierce them, but it was no longer the time for words, believing. Cause I could not go on living with this pain, so I went into the desert, to alleviate myself of this suffering, a sincere and original pain, pain at being part of this collusion, pain being the kompromat, to alleviate myself by placing myself at the mercy of a greater pain that would cleanse me,
Cause I was already hurt, there was no option but to exacerbate it first. Which meant being absent, which mean submitting to random actions,
So I was following them, yes, the heretics, but if they did not give me what I needed I would not care any the less for my own motivations, cause I didn’t believe anyone could give me anything, anyway,
Cause they hadn’t, cause my pain was my own,
So I went in with the intention to be bare, it is this the first law I liked, it is this how all saints are made and come into being and the truth of all saintly pain.
Excerpt from “The one (fem.)”, work in progress, Billy Morgan, 2026.
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