THE SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM IS A YOUNG QUEER WOMAN

Or she is now

Since I spend a lot of time driving, I listen to quite a lot of audiobooks. At the moment I am listening to a ‘performance’ of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.

It’s rather wonderful.

By that I mean two things. The performance itself is superb - a great range of British actors, capturing the different characters of the narrators and giving just enough dramatic pizzazz to their tales, without going over the top. It is still recognisably an audiobook, and not a full-blown radio play.

But I also mean that the Decameron is wonderful. It’s funny and sexy; by turns ribald and subtle. Boccaccio knew what he was doing, and he did it very well. There is something for everyone: shaggy dog stories; blokeish pub yarns; little homilies; meandering romances; preposterous quests; neat little anecdotes with witty punchlines.

Listening to it is a reminder that the Middle Ages were by no means an time of relentless benighted bigotry - there was as much and as little of that as there is in any age, our own included.

And indeed, speaking of our own age, some of the stories land uncommonly well in 2024. A good example of this is Day 2, Story 3 - a tale narrated by the character Pampinea. This concerns a young Italian moneylender based in England who gets in serious financial trouble and for *reasons* has to travel back to Italy.

Along the way he falls in with another young fellow, who is on his way to Rome to have his election as an abbot confirmed. The two of them end up in bed, fondling one another, and Boccaccio strings this gay romance out for a surprisingly long time, before he reveals that the abbot is in fact a somewhat androgynous young woman: and not any androgynous young woman.

S/he is in fact the daughter of the King of England.

Absolute score for the young moneylender! He starts off broke and bi-curious. As things turn out (I’m skipping a lot of plot here) he ends up marrying to a sexy, agreeably open-minded woman, and later becoming the King of Scots.

Now, as I was listening to this story, I found myself thinking that there was no better advertisement for the academic vogue of ‘queering the Middle Ages’. By that, I mean one scarcely needs to go out of one’s way to queer the Middle Ages. Leave them to their own devices and the Middle Ages will queer themselves.

That being said, if one’s goal is the relentless march of cultural progress, the Middle Ages can always be hurried along. Which brings me from Boccaccio’s Decameron to a (roughly) contemporary body of stories: the English outlaw legends of Robin Hood.

According to reports in various newspapers today, a new BBC series of Sherwood - a Robin Hood adjacent drama - is to feature the Sheriff of Nottingham depicted as ‘young, queer and female’.

Why? Well, that is a very good question.