Cypriot ‘wedding bowl’

Public Access Description:

This bowl was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

When V&A director Leigh Ashton wrote that this bowl depicted a ‘hermaphrodite’ – as mentioned in the ‘Object History Note’ above – he was referring not to a person who would now be described as intersex, but to a story told by the character of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. According to Plato, the earliest humans were round, with two heads, four legs and four arms: some looked like two men joined together, some like two women, and some were half-male, half-female. Fearing their power, Zeus bisected the humans, dooming them to roam the earth searching for their other half. This explained humans’ capacity for romantic attraction, and also provided an explanation for homosexuality and heterosexuality: it is possible that Ashton’s own experience as a gay man might have made this story more memorable to him.

In fact, what this bowl shows is not an androgyne – or a ‘hermaphrodite’ – but a wedding ritual imported from the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. The ears of wheat held by the couple symbolise fertility.

The most famous example of the garment-sharing ritual shown on the bowl is not an opposite-sex wedding, but a bonding ceremony between two men. In 1098, Toros, the Armenian ruler of Edessa, adopted Baldwin of Boulogne as his co-ruler and heir. Chronicle accounts state that the two men donned the same wide shirt and rubbed their bare chests against each other. Although Toros and Baldwin are not known to have had a romantic or sexual relationship, this episode demonstrates that the garment-sharing ceremony was applicable regardless of the gender of the participants; and it is important to note that Toros and Baldwin’s bonding ritual would have, at the very least, carried associations of marriage. It is also worth noting here that, while the figures on the bowl are most likely to be a man and a woman, their clothing and hair are gender-neutral according to contemporary norms, and this is not unique among wedding bowls. At least two other Cypriot ceramic vessels of a similar period show two men sharing the same cloak with only one pair of feet emerging from beneath it, indicating political unity, friendship, brotherhood or romantic relation.

Curatorial comment:

This bowl was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. This project aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam (University of Plymouth).

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, research on this object revealed the following:

Although Ashton appears to perceive the terms as synonyms, the concept of the hermaphrodite was treated differently in medieval and early modern Europe from Plato’s androgynes. The former was the monstrous subject of medical speculation; the latter was used as a metaphor for romantic or spiritual union. This function of the androgyne story became increasingly popular during the early modern period, and formed the basis of an emblem of the perfect marriage (a two-headed figure like the one on this bowl) in Barthelemy Aneau’s popular 1552 emblem-book Picta Poesis (Poetic Imagination). That said, the hermaphrodite and androgyne were recognised as connected concepts: George Sandys, in his 1626 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, uses the story of Plato’s androgynes to explain the metamorphosis of the beautiful boy Hermaphroditus, who merged with the nymph Salmacis after she begged the gods to let them never part.

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology, the androgyne story provided a conceptual basis for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s and Magnus Hirschfeld’s theory that homosexual people represented a ‘third sex’. Interestingly, however, while the androgynes in Plato’s story split apart to form heterosexual humans – men looking for their female ‘other half’, or vice versa – in Ulrichs and Hirschfeld’s formulation the meaning was reversed, with gay men and women figured as entire androgynes. The reasoning behind this reversal is biologically essentialist: in a gay man, the ‘female half’ of the androgyne was what led him to be attracted to other men, since attraction to men was an essentially ‘female’ characteristic.

The garment-sharing wedding ritual was probably imported from Cilicia to Cyprus as part of the two states’ intimate trading relationship, which was – appropriately enough – created and cemented by a series of marital alliances. The late medieval Cypriot marriages which ‘wedding bowls’ like this depict, and at which they were probably used or given as gifts, had gendered economic aspects that differed from the norm elsewhere in Western Europe. Specifically, it appears to have been conventional for the groom to provide a counter-gift, or antefactum, that matched the dowry provided by the bride’s family. Consequently, marriage was framed as a more economically equal transaction. Although this practice can be documented across economic classes, it is more prevalent in artisan families: this suggests that the labour and skills that each partner was to bring to the marriage were considered to be equal regardless of gender, as opposed to the husband being expected to financially provide for the wife (as is suggested by the Western European dowry). Additionally, it was common for women to arrange marriage contracts, though this may be partly attributable to their immigrant status, if they had not been accompanied to Cyprus by any male family members. In the case of marriages between a man and woman from different cultural backgrounds, as was common in multicultural Cyprus, marriage contracts often stated which culture’s customs – both legal and social – were to be followed by the couple.

Research into artisanal workers in medieval Cyprus has suggested that women were likely to work alongside their husbands, enabling both partners to contribute to the family income. More broadly, Cypriot women acted as business partners in numerous trades, though their activities remain largely invisible to historians unless they enlisted the services of a notary at any point in their lives.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• Aysu Dincer, ‘Wills, Marriage and Business Contracts: Urban Women in Late‐Medieval Cyprus’, Gender & History, 24.2 (2012), 310-32
• Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. by W.R.M. Lamb ,Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1925)
• Scott Redford, ‘On Sāqīs and Ceramics: Systems of Representation in the Northeast Mediterranean’, in Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa Mahoney (eds.), France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
• Scott Redford, 'Port Saint Symeon Ceramics and Cyprus', in Cypriot Medieval Ceramics: Reconsiderations and New Perspectives, ed. by Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzi and Nicholas Coureas (Nicosia: The Cyprus Research Centre and The A. G. Leventis Foundation, 2014), pp. 125-151
• Joanita Vroom, ‘Human Representations on Medieval Cypriot Ceramics and beyond: The Enigma of Mysterious Figures Wrapped in Riddles’, in Cypriot Medieval Ceramics: Reconsiderations and New Perspectives, ed. by Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzi and Nicholas Coureas (Nicosia: The Cyprus Research Centre and The A. G. Leventis Foundation, 2014), pp. 153-87

Further reading

• Nicholas Coureas, ‘Historical Conclusions‘ in Cypriot Medieval Ceramics: Reconsiderations and New Perspectives, ed. by Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzi and Nicholas Coureas (Nicosia: The Cyprus Research Centre and The A. G. Leventis Foundation, 2014), pp. 309-11
• Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France’, GLQ, 1 (1995), 419-438
• Michael Groneberg, ‘Myth and Science around Gender and Sexuality: Eros and the Three Sexes in Plato’s Symposium’, Diogenes, 208 (2005), 39–49
• Jenny C. Mann, ‘How to Look at a Hermaphrodite in Early Modern England’, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 46.1 (Winter 2006), 67-91
• Pablo Maurette, ‘Plato’s Hermaphrodite and a Vindication of the Sense of Touch in the Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68 (2015), 872–98
• Marian Rothstein, ‘Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 34.2 (Summer, 2003), 409-437
• Steven Runciman, ‘The First Crusade: Constantinople to Antioch’, in A History of the Crusades, vol. I, The First Hundred Years, ed. by Marshall B. Baldwin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), pp. 280-304