cantata superba

45’

five singers and chamber orchestra
for my MMus final project

I first read about John Rykener during a lonely winter holiday in London, in Peter Ackroyd's marvellous book Queer City:

Between the hours of eight and nine on a Sunday night, in early December 1394, some London officials picked up a prostitute, John Rykener, 'calling him/herself Eleanor'. He was arrested in Soper Lane, south of Cheapside, a place of small shops, sheds and movable stalls for merchandise. Rykener was 'detected in women's clothing' while 'committing that detestable, unmentional and ignominious vice' with a client called John Britby. Britby, 'thinking he was a woman', had approached him in Cheap and asked it he might 'as he would a woman...commit a libidinous act with her whereupon Rykener asked for money.

In the course of his examination before the city officers Rykener revealed that he had been taught his trade by Anna, 'the whore of a former servant of Sir Thomas Blount. He had then learned how to dress as a woman in the household of an embroiderer, Elizabeth Brouderer, and that in Brouderer's house he had sexual intercourse with a priest 'as with a woman'. The priest, Philip, came from Theydon Garnon in Essex and may not have been used to urban wiliness. Rykener took two of the priest's gowns, no doubt as a form of payment, and when asked to return them, he replied that he was 'the wife of a certain man and that, if Philip wished to ask for them back, he would make his husband bring suit upon him.'

He then travelled up to Oxford, nominally as an embroiderer, where he and three scholars 'practiced the abominable vice often'. He was then employed as a tapster in the Swan Inn at Burford, where he had sex with two Franciscans, one Carmelite, and six 'foreign men'. He confessed that on his return to London he had intercourse with three chaplains in the lanes behind St Katherine's by the Tower. In fact he had enjoyed intimacy with innumerable priests and friars, and really could not remember all their names. He confessed, too, that 'as a man' he enjoyed sexual intercourse with countless women, among them many nuns. (Queer City, p. 37-38)

After his questioning, Rykener was released without charge.

The written summary of his questioning is still in the archives of the Guildhall. It is entirely possible that Rykener is a fiction, the creation of a Lord Mayor who wanted to appear tougher on crime. This is the only document which mentions his name, and we might expect someone who acted like this to have multiple run-ins with authorities. Even so, especially if so, this story must have seemed plausible enough to current audiences to be believable.

Gareth and I decided to write a series of set pieces, a way of telling a story in Western music that's reserved for weighty and important subjects. The scant, colourful details of Rykener's life lent themselves to a hagiography, this time for a saint in an imaginary queer liturgy.

Authority and legitimacy comes from history, and this type of setting, of this type of subject, lends authority and legitimacy to ideas about gender and sexuality which might be considered new and controversial but are actually embedded deep in the history of English society.