Printed from Literature Online, http://literature.proquest.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu 02/11/2014 Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures Lynn Ramey. Arthuriana. West Lafayette: 2010. Vol. 20, Iss. 2; pg. 1, 4 pgs Abstract (Summary) Ramey reviews Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures by Sahar Amer. Full Text (1709 words) Copyright Arthuriana 2010 SAHAR AMER. Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 252. isbn: 978-0812240870. $55.00. Amer's book is a bold, imaginative look at the multitude of borders between east and west that are crossed in medieval French literature. She focuses on the Islamic east, and her borders include those between disciplines, languages, gender, friendship and intimacy, and cultures. Her goals are set out from the beginning: to bring into dialogue medieval French and Arabic literatures, to make medieval Arabic erotic literature available to western medievalists, to show the importance of Arabic eroticism in medieval French writings on gender and sexuality, and to insist upon the importance of a cross- cultural approach to theoretical discussions of gender and sexuality. The first chapter sets the tone for the book by examining the history of same-sex literature in the eastern and western traditions. Amer shows that the development of terms to describe certain sexual acts may well have changed not the acts themselves, but our perception of the frequency or importance of those acts. Words for "sodomy" tended to erase female homosexuality in the west, and specific terms for homo- and heterosexuality obscure the continuum and specificity that more specialized terms for lesbianism had in medieval Arabic. Amer is an engaging storyteller, which comes across in one of the most fascinating accounts of the book: her search for medieval Arabic- language erotic literature in the bookstores of Cairo. Turned away because the bookstore owner would not sell licentious material to a woman, Amer had a friend procure the illicit book for her, and even then the pages had been overprinted to escape censorship. Clearly, the medieval does matter today, and erotic stories of the past have apparently not lost their power to titillate. Chapter two looks at a 12^sup th^ century French text and its use of military metaphors to describe sexual activities. Amer provides us with the cultural context in which the book was produced-the