1. Shroud

The question of how much to preserve of the original text, and how much to change, involves balancing “authenticity” with the transmission of meaning.Footnote ⁸ At the same time, there is a wealth of contextual information that would have been obvious to medieval, but not modern, audiences. I therefore begin my development process for historical stories thinking about the knowledge audiences might bring to the performances and the qualities of the texts I hope to share. Sometimes, an entire story structure might baffle an audience. The Old French La Chanson d’Yde et Olive is part of a large cycle, with each chanson de geste based on a generation of Huon de Bordeaux’s family. Huon of Bordeaux covers the adventures of a knight from Charlemagne’s court who, after accidentally killing Charlemagne’s heir, is given a series of impossible tasks with Crusading overtones. He is helped in this by the fairy Oberon, and most of the adventures include fighting, maiming, or killing Charlemagne’s enemies and kissing the princess Esclarmonde, who converts to Christianity from Islam in order to marry Huon. Medievalist audiences might know this background. But what would non-specialists need to know about the cycle’s prior tales to understand the narrative expectations at work in Yde and Olive? And what does it mean to have what registers for modern audiences as a trans-lesbian pairing in an otherwise heteronormative lineage story? Without telling all the Huon stories, I wanted to give a sense of the heavy weight of this dynastic storytelling on the protagonists: on Yde and Olive, but also on their fathers, Florent and Oton.

Unlike other dynastic cycles, where women’s stories are secondary to men’s, the Huon sequels pay attention to the matrilineal line.Footnote ⁹ Esclarmonde (Huon’s wife), Clarisse (daughter), and Yde (granddaughter) display increasing agency. Yde’s mother Clarisse escapes a kidnapper, disguising herself as a man. When she and her beloved Florent are imprisoned, she breaks down the wall of her cell to free him. While an audience would not need to know the entire Huon cycle, I felt Yde’s parents worth attention. They are heroic protagonists in their story, but in Yde and Olive their “happy ending” is destroyed. Clarisse dies, and Florent’s grief manifests in incestuous feelings for his daughter.Footnote ¹⁰ It is a brutal start to Yde’s story. I therefore tried to give my audiences an idea, not just of how exciting Clarisse was, but also how gutting her death and Florent’s turn to tyranny might have been for medieval audiences.

Rather than introducing Florent at the height of his power—as a knight, hero, or king—my adaptation therefore introduced him at the point he is most alone, standing outside the birthing chamber, worried for the woman he loves:

Stressing Florent’s lack of space to grieve, and his focus on his wife’s shroud, I wanted to give audiences unfamiliar with the Huon cycle a sense of what his relationship had been, while pushing against what Vishnuvajjala calls “a background of patriarchal or masculinist medievalisms […] or structures of thinking.”Footnote ¹² I also wanted to critique the poor way men’s mental health is still treated, and the intergenerational damage persistent expectations of stoicism and silence around male grief does. Yde and Olive’s Florent is both agent and victim of those structures. While I did not tell Clarisse et Florent, I included enough to suggest what it might feel like to read the texts concurrently and watch Florent’s transition from beloved hero in his wife’s story to the villain of his daughter’s.

2. Girdle

Historical and literary context can also help creative practitioners resist medievalist stereotypes. My adaptation is indebted to scholars including, foremost, translator Mounawar Abbouchi; Diane Watt, Anna Klosowska and Angela Jane Weisl, who informed my interpretation, as well as decades of work in women’s history, which developed the adaptation’s political and material worlds.Footnote ¹³ Historical context explains a story’s ideology and helps audiences understand what is at stake for the characters (such as the authority of a medieval king or an understanding of medieval angelology). It also provides material details that help stories come to life (such as the kinds of spiced wine drunk at weddings, or what it feels like to wear armour in the hot sun).

I also used contextual research to resist the “girl-bossification” of modern, mainstream medievalism. Yde and Olive is the kind of story which tends to fall victim to this trope. It has a female knight who breaks cultural norms, resists her father, and outperforms men. It’s easy to see why such figures are so attractive in mainstream medievalism: they are boundary-breaking, dynamic, and adventurous.Footnote ¹⁴ But there is a darker side to them. They imply the only way for a woman to be considered “strong,” or worthy of notice, is when she behaves like a man. This plays into what Edwards and Vernon describe as medievalist preconceptions of a male, militaristic Middle Ages:

I also felt this was the wrong story for Yde. Rather than seeing her military career as an aristocratic (male) calling, Yde makes decisions with desperation and pragmatism, living with fear of exposure. Moreover, there are many types of female courage in this story, and only one involves wielding a sword. This courage begins with Yde’s mother Clarisse, who loses her life in childbirth. Then there is Olive’s bravery, who declares her loyalty when she learns Yde’s secret, and stands by her in court. These women’s public and private bravery contrasts with the disappointing cowardice of the powerful male authorities: Florent and Oton, who, while seemingly a loving father, caves to court peer pressure and orders his daughter and Yde be burnt.Footnote ¹⁶

I therefore began and ended my story in a space where female courage and skill were routinely practiced. Unlike battlefields, birthing chambers appear less frequently in modern medievalism. I researched the work, sounds and smells of medieval childbirth to centre Clarisse and her birthing companions, including birth practices and medicine as well as the role of prayer and talismans.Footnote ¹⁷ The 1500s Wellcome girdle bears the names of saints associated with childbirth, but also the physical testimony of the women it served in the vaginal fluid surviving on it.Footnote ¹⁸ I used this girdle in my story as an object signifying both the danger and hope of childbirth:

Quoting the girdle’s claim of delivery in battle and childbirth, I aimed to make Clarisse’s giving birth equivalent to the heroic acts she’d performed in her earlier story. In doing so, I aimed to engage in the restorative work Edwards and Vernon advocate, and “return critically to historical archives with an eye toward details that have been missed and perspectives that are missing.”Footnote ²⁰ Framing my adaptation with the corageous labour of Clarissa and her midwives, and later of Olive, I aimed to highlight the commonplace bravery of medieval (and modern) birth work, stressing their equivalence with the knightly bravery chansons de geste conventionally reward. This was not aimed at diminishing the courage of Yde’s military career, but to show the consistency of courage between Yde, Clarissa and Olive.

Feminist and queer creative work encourages us to read texts from perspectives not privileged by their original narrators. Adrienne Rich claims this helps us “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.”Footnote ²¹ I therefore end my Yde and Olive by looping back to the beginning. My story opened in a female space: the birthing room which encloses Clarisse but shuts out Florent. Given Yde’s ambiguous gender at the end, I close by repeating the birthing scene, but this time with Olive giving birth and Yde working with the midwives, “both parents labouring together.” In this choice, I hoped to suggest the redemptive possibilities that occur when we think outside binaries, allowing Yde and Olive’s queer relationship to provide a deeper mutual support than their parents had.

3. Swaddling/Binding

The strip of holy vellum which tries, and fails, to save Clarisse’s life challenged me to think about Yde’s narrative as a story of clothing, with her growth marked by textile and text. I introduced strips of linen used, first by the nurses to swaddle baby Yde and later, by Yde to bind her chest to maintain her performance of masculinity in the Roman court: “Because their fashions were close fitting, Yde returned to the woven strips of her infancy. Binding helped her feel strong. Made her look straight.” This created a deliberate moment of queer touch: linking Yde’s medieval swaddling with the “binding” practices adopted by transmasculine and nonbinary people today as gender-affirming garments. What was curious about Yde and Olive was how many opportunities the original text offered to suggest moments of affinity between medieval and modern queer identities.Footnote ²² Yde and Olive deals with themes including gender, female desire, and changing sex, which, in our current political climate, are a focus for debate and persecution from cultural, governmental, medical, and legal authorities. This show’s development happened across 2021 and 2025, during which the environment became increasingly hostile for queer and gender non-confirming people. I therefore wanted to make sure my adaptation provided a point of historical affirmation where, so often, queer identities appear in medieval texts in states of persecution or erasure.

Unlike other proto-trans stories (such as the Roman de Silence’s frankly depressing ending), Yde and Olive conclude with an affirming Angel.Footnote ²³ At the point of crisis, Yde is outed when ordered to take a public bath in front of the court. This moment is particularly traumatic when viewed in the context of more modern trans narratives, where, Traci Abbot argues, “transition narratives are often reduced to the sensationalist state of a trans character’s genitals, with dramatic tension constructed around this focal point.”Footnote ²⁴ However, in the medieval story, the threatened stripping is not carried out. When Yde begs for mercy, the court demands Yde and Olive be burnt. Surprisingly, an Angel appears in their defence. This is a rare medieval example of a divine being defending and sanctioning a queer couple in ways that appear unexpectedly affirming today. In telling this moment, I therefore kept the words of the Angel as close as possible to Abbouchi’s translation of the Old French:

The words are crucially ambiguous. They could be read as confirmation that a sex-change miracle has happened—evidenced, perhaps, in the fact that Yde and Olive later have a son.Footnote ²⁶ However, nobody checks after the Angel’s declaration, so their speech might equally register as a rebuttal of gender essentialism, or a condemnation of the violent exposure threatened by Oton’s court. Having these exposing enquiries condemned by an Angel–one whose words are part of an “authentic” medieval source and not (only) a piece of activist solidarity on the modern teller’s part—is particularly empowering at a time when gender nonconforming people are being challenged in public bathrooms.

The original text was also helpful in navigating Yde’s identity. Yde and Olive is remarkably fluid in its use of pronouns. It uses female pronouns when the narrator describes Yde, or Yde is looking at herself, and masculine when others talk to or of her.Footnote ²⁷ I adopted the same strategy in my performance. However, I was also aware of this character’s potential as an affirming point of connection for lesbian, trans and nonbinary people, and did not want to close those possibilities down. I therefore added elements which enhanced the original text’s sense of Yde’s genderfluidity, for example, not giving baby Yde binary pronouns until the point of baptism, which is also the point Yde is swaddled:

Showing the baby’s indifference to their pronouns, I aimed to introduce the fluidity present in the rest of the text, while hinting that Yde’s ambiguous angelic “change” is a return to their state at the beginning. This motif of clothing and identity reoccurred in the other clothing I introduced to represent Yde’s growth, including Yde’s scavenged mercenary armour, the knight’s armour awarded in Rome, and the wool tunic I had Yde buy on escaping home:

Noting Abbouchi and Watt’s observations that clothing not only alters how Yde is perceived, but also alters Yde’s values and body, clothing became a major part of my character development, even appearing on the show’s publicity artwork.Footnote ²⁸ It also became a key point of Yde’s vulnerability, as Yde fears discovery, but finds unexpected kindness and love when the secret is revealed.

4. Feather

So why does this work matter? For me, it matters because of the audiences I tell it to. My adaptation is aimed at two groups: those it is about, and those it is not about. Most importantly, it aims to give a sense of history for today’s LGBTQ* people, who are often told their identities and experiences are “modern” phenomena, or a phase, and therefore less valid. Audiences create parallels between stories and their own experiences whether the storyteller intends it or not. This is evidenced by the changes in audience responses before and after the 16 April 2025 Supreme Court ruling concerning how the terms “man,” “woman” and “sex” should be interpreted in the 2010 Equality Act (and whose ramifications for trans participation in society are currently being felt through the UK’s community bodies from Girlguiding to the Women’s Institute).Footnote ²⁹ Before the ruling, audience feedback said the story generated a sense of “belonging across time.”Footnote ³⁰ Since the ruling, I have had trans and nonbinary people come to me in tears, touched that one, albeit unusual, medieval text appeared to understand what, it seems, today’s authorities cannot.

Second, this story is for everyone, but especially cis, heterosexual people, who come for the medieval history, but find current debates around gender confusing, or awkward, and don’t have a space to ask questions without fear of getting things “wrong.” The ability of performance storytelling to generate empathy for others has long been researched.Footnote ³¹ To explore experiences we hold in common with Yde, I give everyone a paper feather, asking them to write on it the piece of clothing they feel most comfortable, powerful or fully themselves in (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Storytelling feathers at Wolverhampton Literature Festival (Photo: Aidan Byrne).

During the show, I hang the feathers on lines that become the Angel’s “wings.” This has generated an archive of feather-stories which reflect the show’s diverse audiences and the situations in which they saw it (Figure 2).Footnote ³² The feathers are left up at the end so people can read each other’s contributions. Joy in wearing gender-affirming clothes is not experienced solely by trans or nonbinary people: see the suit that makes you feel powerful at conferences, or the chainmail necklace that makes me feel masculine, feminine and medievalist all at once. Likewise, everyone has felt clothing dysphoria, even if they have not recognised it as such. That shirt whose third button just will not stop gaping, or the haircut that made you feel too masculine or feminine.Footnote ³³ Sharing these personal experiences, I hoped to generate what Vishnuvajjala calls “embodied medievalism”: a compassionate vulnerability evoked through identification with another.Footnote ³⁴ In a story where clothing is integral to how Yde is perceived, I wanted the story’s redemptive ending to be made of these collective memories. It also meant the audience personally summoned the Angel and Yde’s salvation.Footnote ³⁵

Figure 2.

Storytelling Feathers (Photo: Daisy Black).

Audience feedback suggests this is working. One question I ask is, “was there anything you found surprising?” The fact the story’s happy ending was the most mentioned surprising thing says a lot about perceptions of the medieval period, but also about modern storytelling, where film, TV and theatre media were until recently in thrall to the “bury your gays” trope. People also hadn’t expected medieval stories to depict gender and sexual diversity. Others noted a sense of continuity: “It proves there’s nothing new under the sun if people were writing about this 1000 years ago.” Emotions, including “queer joy” were mentioned across all demographics. There are also comments suggesting audiences have a critical understanding of the way we perceive the medieval past via the lens of modern values: “People have a warped, modern-influenced view of medieval gender, sexuality and acceptance of it. This shows our perception may not be accurate.” While the story’s feminist elements were among the most frequently mentioned, several felt these were missing in more common storytelling repertoires: “It is important to tell these stories, when some trad tales have a big focus on male characters.” Another felt the show was “putting LGBTQ+ relationships back into our common story”: a comment which hinted at an understanding of historiographical and canonical exclusions of LGBTQ* narratives and histories but also recognised these medieval stories as an important part of today’s “common,” shared story heritage. There is clearly a thirst for acts of feminist creative medievalism underpinned by historical research, and the expanding of medievalist repertoires to include more diverse histories beyond the canons regularly represented. My experience with Yde and Olive as well as my other shows suggests performance storytelling is a small, but effective way of doing this work.