Suzanne Hagedorn
College of William & Mary
Amazons, the legendary warrior women of ancient Scythia, have fascinated Western writers from classical antiquity to the present. From the one-breasted archers described in Herotodus’s History to their more glamorous incarnations in twentieth century popular culture (such as Wonder Woman and Xena: Warrior Princess), portraits of Amazons have given artists license to imagine societies where the norms of female behavior challenge more traditional ideas about gender roles. Although the writers of the Latin Middle Ages frequently were unable to read any Greek themselves, they seized upon these figures from Greek mythology and continued to develop and transform them.
In this paper I will discuss the stereotype of Amazons as sexual adventurers by analyzing the episode of Alexander the Great’s encounter with the Amazon Queen Thalestris in the medieval Latin Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon. I then trace the ways in which this episode evolves in the Old French Roman d’Alexandre and the Middle High German Alexanderroman of Rudolf von Ems. As David Townsend’s article “Sex and the Single Amazon in Twelfth Century Latin Epic” observes, Walter focuses on the titillating aspects of Thalestris’s relationship with the Macedonian monarch. In constrast, Rudolf makes the sexual encounter between these two rulers into a full-blown romance that alludes to courtly texts, including Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolde; version is the only version of this story that I know of that results in Thalestris bearing Alexander a daughter who will eventually succeed her as queen.