Female Knights in Shining Armor - The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 25

Female Knights in Shining Armor The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 25 with Heather Rose Jones

Does your heart thrill to the clash of swords, the gleam of sunlight on a polished helm, and the snap of silken banners in the breeze at a tournament field? And then the helmet is removed by the victorious knight to reveal a fair face and a tumble of flowing locks and the crowd gasps to know a woman is champion? Well this podcast is for you.

In this episode we talk about:

• Joan of Arc and what wearing armor meant symbolically for her
• The 12th century Spanish “Order of the Hatchet”, an order of woman knights
• The gang of ladies who showed up at a 14th century tournament in Berwick in men’s clothing
• A 13th century German tale of women holding a tournament when their men were off at war
• The French romance of Yde and Olive and how a woman knight won the hand of a king’s daughter in marriage
• The Romance of Silence, which includes an exceedingly modern-sounding debate between personifications of Nature and Nurture for they loyalty of a girl raised as a boy
• Amazon knights in Renaissance epic poems such as Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queene, who attracted the love of fair ladies

This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here:

• Jeanne d’Arc
• Knighton, Henry and G. H. Martin (trans.). 1995. Knighton’s Chronicle 1337-1396. Clarendon Press, Oxford. ISBN 0-19-820-503-1
• Westphal-Wihl, Sarah. 1989. “The Ladies’ Tournament: Marriage, Sex, and Honor in Thirteenth-Century Germany” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14/2: 371-398
• Yde and Olive
• Silence
• Amazons

Other sources

• Order of the Hatchet
• Donoghue, Emma. 2010. Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. ISBN 978-0-307-27094-8

A transcript of this podcast is available here.

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)