"baby croissant for life. "

"Cannot explain how obsessed with this text I am. What if you were about to get burned alive by a king for dressing up as a man and *almost* having lesbian sex with your girlboss wife, and then an angel came down, gave you sex reassignment surgery, assigned you he/she pronouns, and said you were going to have a kid with your wife and the kid should be named Croissant? This is what 1200s Old French poem Yde et Olive is about. do you think I kid? I could never laugh about something so serious.

The plot of Yde and Olive is exactly as described above. Yde is a fascinating character from the beginning; in an echo of a not-uncommon trope from this period, she flees to avoid sexual assault by her father. She dresses as a man in order to serve in the army of King Oton, where Olive, the king’s daughter, falls for her. The only time Yde touches upon her past in her own narration, she ascribes an interesting motivation to her leaving: Shame. Speaking to her father in apostrophe, she says “I fled your land / to escape the shame of your mortal sin� (109).

Possibly the most compelling element of this text is the intimate love between Yde and Olive. Their relationship’s genuine kindness and expressions of queer care stands in sharp contrast to any other relationship within the novel, most of which are defined by unequal power often abused. When the two avoid having sex, the narrator tells the reader, “no cries of battle were heard that night,� contrasting their intimacy to the masculinizing force of a cry of battle. When finally faced with the truth of Yde’s gender, Olive responds withan incredibly loving line that I can never get out of my head: “For you are safe in loyalty. / I will face my destiny together with you.�

The change of gender is a fascinating one: All we know about the physical transformation is that Yde can and will conceive (Croissant) with Olive. Even after Yde’s so-called transformation into a man, the angel still describes her to Oton using the feminine version of her name in its final line about her; even after becoming a man incarnate in body, she still carries the feminine version of her name. This transformation is not an uncomplex transformation from man into woman; in describing him with both feminine and masculine terms, the angel makes him into a man and a woman.

In case it wasn't clear, I love this text and find it incredibly compelling. It's worth reading and further analyzing if you get the shot. If I wrote an eight-page and about 30% of a fifteen-page paper about this text, no I didn't.

| | | | | |"