The prayer book is shown alongside prints of d’Eon, reproduced with permission from the British Museum.
Alongside ‘Chevalier’ (a rank of a male soldier) D’Eon uses the feminine ‘Mademoiselle’, representing a rare and precious example of a person in the past deliberately and openly adopting both masculine and feminine gender markers. This historic case anticipates today’s adoption of gender-neutral pronouns by members of the non-binary community.
Along with the rest of the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection, the book is regularly used with students in teaching and object-based learning. Sarah Campbell, Curriculum Development Curator at the Museum talks about the experience students gain from this:
“The museum focuses on letting the object lead the teaching experience, with additional methodologies being supplied by the museum but always involving students handling objects. We explore all sorts of topics in our teaching including climate emergency, decolonising the curriculum, identity and neurodiversity.
Although this book is delicate and precious, we do let students gently handle it, and the experience of turning the pages of a book that is hundreds of years old, and that was once held by such an interesting person, is a key part of that experience. The collection has contemporary objects as well as artifacts like this and we combine these objects in our teaching to make links between different objects that address the construction of gender.”
Sarah speculates that the item may have been acquired for its quality and aesthetic value:
“The truth is with this book, we will never know exactly how it came in to the collection, but we can have a good guess. The book is part of the larger museum study collection that was created in the late 1890s. This was when the Central School of Arts and Crafts was first founded, and the study collection, which the book is a part of, formed part of that. So the book was probably acquired around 1900 from an antiquarian bookseller in London.
The book could have been purchased as an example of fine manuscript with wonderful calligraphy and decorated margins. It would always have been an expensive luxury item. It’s a French manuscript dating in part from the 1380s/1390s and in part from the early 15th century. In this volume pages from two separate books of hours have been bound together.”
Mademoiselle permanently claimed her female identity in 1877. D’Eon’s life drew much public interest, some of this reflected in prints from the period. A workshop and collaboration with the Museum of Transology (MoT) discussed the life of the Chevalier and how she should be celebrated. The Museum and MoT teams carried out a visit to the British Museum Print Room to review prints for reproduction in the show, that could celebrate and support Mademoiselle la Chevalier.
Tim Clayton, author and historian with specialist knowledge of British prints, suggests there is a pattern of queer, gender non-conformity appearing in certain print shops. The publishing technology of their time, the prints would have been pinned up in the print shop windows where they would have inspired the imagination of a public broader than the aristocratic elite. People used to gather around and know which print shops were famous for different things.
This is one of the earliest examples we’ve got of a trans celeb capturing the public imagination through print culture.’ - E-J Scott