Marie Maitland, a Sixteenth-century Scottish gentlewoman, has for hundreds of years been recognised because the most probably scribe of the Maitland 4to. This vital manuscript, now held within the Pepys Library of Magdalene School, Cambridge, is an anthology of Scottish poetry via individuals of the noble Maitland circle of relatives and their buddies.
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Maitland’s identify seems two times at the first leaf and could also be present in a partial anagram within the opening sonnet (“maid ane immortall”). By the use of emphasis the anagram is repeated underneath the poem.
In recent times, researchers have stated the likelihood that Maitland now not best copied and curated the manuscript, however that she additionally composed one of the most poems.
This comprises, maximum significantly, Poem 49, a lyrical exploration of 1 lady’s need for and dedication to every other. That is an erotic in addition to an emotional poem. On the finish of the second one stanza, the speaker submits to her lover:
Ye weild me holie at your will /
and raviss my affectioun.
In her new e book With My Personal Hand: The Secret Lifetime of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s 16th Century Sappho, historian and translator Ashley Douglas puts an research of Poem 49 on the center of her considerate and steadily speculative reconstruction of this early fashionable lady’s queer existence.
Douglas contends that Maitland integrated inside the manuscript two additional sapphic poems: Poem 72, which she argues used to be written via Maitland’s unidentified married lady lover and Poem 89, composed via Maitland herself. Douglas means that the 3 poems, learn in combination, inform the tale in their courting and its unsatisfied finishing. Any other verse, which can have been written both for Maitland via every other lady or about herself, compares her to Sappho, the well-known lesbian lyrical poet of historical Greece.
Reclaiming lesbian historical past
Digging deep into the archives to seek out lengthy overpassed information, Douglas found out that Maitland used to be born within the overdue 1540s. She remained single till after the demise of her father, the courtier Sir Richard Maitland, which passed off when she used to be in her overdue thirties.
Up thus far, Maitland loved substantial monetary independence. Douglas convincingly argues that her father did all he may to make sure that this could be maintained after his demise. This used to be most probably a praise for her serving as his scribe after he misplaced his sight. Sadly, the plan didn’t paintings. When her brother John (the long run Lord Chancellor of Scotland) was head of the family, for causes of political and fiscal expediency, Maitland used to be briefly married off to a far more youthful guy. She died simply ten years later, most likely in childbirth.
In step with Douglas, Maitland will have to be recognised as a “new Anne Lister”. Lauded because the “first modern lesbian”, Lister – a member of the Yorkshire landed gentry – loved an surprisingly self sufficient existence within the first part of the nineteenth century.
Two pages of the Maitland 4to Manuscript transcribed via Marie Maitland.
Pepys Library, Magdelene School, Cambridge
From her intensive diaries, which have been in part written in her “crypt hand” code, we all know Lister had more than one relationships with girls. Certainly, she wrote explicitly about her sexual reviews, discovering the terminology to explain them within the epigrams of the traditional Roman poet Martial and different resources. Maitland, however, wrote about love and need, however now not about intercourse itself.
On this appreciate, I might recommend, Maitland’s verses look forward to extra intently the overdue Seventeenth-century poetry of Katherine Philips and her circle, which depicts intensely amorous friendships between girls in platonic phrases.
Douglas, alternatively, rejects describing the will for girls expressed in Maitland’s poetry in relation to friendship at the grounds that such labelling renders ancient lesbianism invisible.
It’s indisputably the case that the weight of evidence turns out a lot upper in the case of sexual members of the family between girls. With out this kind of detailed firsthand accounts discovered uniquely in Lister’s diaries, or the vanishingly uncommon proof from court docket circumstances or different professional information, the default assumption is steadily that girls previously didn’t have intercourse with every different.
Tthe burden of evidence turns out a lot upper in the case of sexual members of the family between girls. Le Sommeil (The Sleepers) via Gustave Courbet (1866).
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris
This assumption is made even if the ladies are recognized to have shared a house (the British Museum, for instance, is equivocal in regards to the nature of the connection between the Women of Llangollen, who famously eloped and lived in combination or even shared a mattress). However what’s possibly maximum outstanding about Lister’s diaries is they disclose that such a lot of girls in her social circle, whether or not they have been unmarried, married or widowed, had relationships – and intercourse – along with her.
If we didn’t have Lister’s diaries, we merely wouldn’t find out about this facet in their private lives. With this context in thoughts, the chance that, two centuries previous, the younger Maitland had a sexual courting with every other lady, turns out completely believable.
Between 2019 and 2022, the tv sequence Gentleman Jack portrayed Lister (performed via Suranne Jones) as a very smart, charismatic, sexually liberated and gender non-conforming lesbian on the lookout for dedication in overdue Georgian England.
Douglas represents Maitland as Lister’s sapphic forebear – an informed, highbrow and self-determining lady who discovered (and, unfortunately, misplaced) her love, and far of her liberty, within the repressively patriarchal and conflict-riven setting of Reformation Scotland. On this appreciate a minimum of, Maitland might be regarded as the brand new Gentleman Jack.
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