Katherina Hetzeldorfer: A Life Outside the Gender Order
In 1477, the court of the Imperial City of Speyer sentenced Katherina Hetzeldorfer to death and had her drowned in the Rhine. She had lived and slept with women, had appeared in public as a man, and had taken on a position in her relationships that the social order of her time reserved for men alone. The court record had no specific name for what she was accused of. The punishment, by contrast, left no room for doubt. [1, 6] Throughout this article, I refer to her as Katherina and use female pronouns. This follows the historical record: we know of no other name she might have chosen for herself, and the sources speak of her as a woman. This choice does not answer the question of who she was. That question will occupy us later on.
Nearly 550 years later, few people know her name. Yet Katherina's trial is among the most revealing documents on same-sex desire between women in the late Middle Ages. It shows how the authorities dealt with people who crossed gender boundaries. And it confronts us with a question that is still not easy to answer: What words can we use to describe people who lived long before our modern terms existed?
A Life in Fragments
Katherina Hetzeldorfer came from Nuremberg. Around 1475, she arrived in Speyer accompanied by a woman whom she presented as her sister. The two lived there together for about two years before Katherina was arrested. [1, 6] Only under interrogation did she admit that her companion was not a relative. The two had been in a sexual relationship for quite some time. To certain people around her, Katherina had apparently described the relationship as a marriage, with herself in the role of the husband. [1]
What this looked like in daily life can only be traced in outline. The testimony describes a masculine bearing in posture and behavior. Several women stated that they had taken Katherina for a man, in some cases even during sexual encounters. [1, 6] At least for a time, then, she moved successfully through her surroundings as a man. When this life began, whether it already started in Nuremberg, and what Katherina herself thought about it, the sources do not tell us.
That we know as much as we do, we owe, of all people, to those who had her executed. What survives is a German-language court document from 1477, only three pages long. Despite its brevity, it is unusually detailed. The historian Helmut Puff has studied it, published a scholarly edition, and translated it into English. [1, 2]
This makes the case exceptionally well documented for its time. At the same time, we see Katherina almost exclusively through the eyes of her judges and the women who testified. What we have is not a life story, but the file of a proceeding that ended with her death.
Speyer, 1477: A City, a Court, No Code of Law
In the 15th century, Speyer was a Free Imperial City. Matters of life and death were decided here not by a church court, but by the city's secular authorities. Puff emphasizes that it was precisely city governments and territorial rulers who took action against "sodomy" during the transition to the early modern period. Their court records put into words what was considered unspeakable. [1]
In 1477, there was not yet a uniform criminal code for the Holy Roman Empire. Only the criminal code of Emperor Charles V of 1532, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, created an empire-wide legal basis. Its Article 116 threatened "unkeusch" (unchastity) committed "wider die natur" (against nature) with death, and explicitly so when it occurred "weib mit weib" (woman with woman). The prescribed penalty, "der gemeynen gewonheit nach" (according to common custom), was death by fire. [9] Katherina's trial thus took place two generations before this codification. The judges in Speyer relied on customary law, theological ideas, and their own judgment of what the order of the city required. The Carolina's article does show, however, that 16th-century jurists were well aware of sexual acts between women as a crime.
A Crime Without a Name
What exactly triggered the proceedings is weighed differently in the literature. According to one account, Katherina had confided to an acquaintance that she and her supposed sister lived together as husband and wife. Puff's analysis of the file, however, makes clear that it was above all accusations of sexually aggressive behavior that brought her to the authorities' attention. These included offering women money for sex and entering women's houses at night. [1]
Several women were questioned during the trial. Their statements describe Katherina's masculine appearance, sexual encounters, and advances, including some pressuring and assaultive behavior. These accounts are part of the story, and for all the justified criticism of the persecution, they must not be ignored. At the same time, we have to read them with caution. The women who testified were themselves under suspicion. They had every reason to present themselves as victims of deception rather than as willing partners. [1] Under the conditions of a late medieval criminal proceeding, in which the threat of torture was always present, the reliability of individual statements can hardly be assessed today.
The judges paid particularly close attention to an artificial penis. Katherina is said to have made it from a piece of red leather, stuffed with cotton at the front and fitted onto a wooden stick that was fastened to the body with a string. [1, 6] For the authorities, this instrument was of central importance. It served both as a disguise and for sex, and it allowed Katherina to fill a sexual role attributed exclusively to men. Puff notes that the investigation focused almost entirely on the question of how Katherina was able to embody a male role. Female desire was thus conceived of in male terms. [1]
It is striking that the file does not name the offense with a legal term. It describes the acts in detail but gives them no name. [1, 6] The term "female sodomy" was coined by Puff himself. He uses it deliberately to make this conceptual gap visible to present-day readers. The sources of the time relied instead on extensive description. [1] His German-language essay aptly speaks of a "rhetoric of the unspeakable" ("Rhetorik des Unaussprechlichen"). [2]
This calls for an important note of caution. Anyone who claims today that Katherina was executed solely for loving women, or solely for wearing men's clothing, oversimplifies the case. Both played a role. Added to this was her appropriation of a male social and sexual position. It seems to have been this combination that the judges found truly intolerable. [1, 6]
The Verdict
Katherina was sentenced to death and drowned in the Rhine. Drowning was considered a particularly degrading form of execution and was generally reserved for women. [6] The judges thus punished her in precisely the gender role she had left behind in life. The two women whose sexual encounters with Katherina are recorded in the file were banished from the city. [1]
According to current research, Katherina Hetzeldorfer is the first person whose execution for sexual relations with women is reliably documented. [3] This does not mean there were no earlier cases. It only means that none have been documented so far.
Not an Isolated Case
Katherina's trial does not stand alone. As early as 1444, a religious woman named Katharina Güldin in Rottweil was accused of having committed the "vice against nature" called sodomy with a laywoman. [1] In his work, Puff has compiled further cases from southern Germany and Switzerland, including that of Agatha Dietschi in 1547. [3, 4] Such trials remained rare compared to the persecution of men. But they show that same-sex desire between women was by no means unknown to the authorities.
Almost 250 years after Katherina's death, her story repeated itself in strikingly similar form. Catharina Margaretha Linck lived as a man under the name Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel, served as a soldier, and married a woman in Halberstadt in 1717. Exposed by the mother-in-law, Linck was put on trial, and here, too, an artificial penis played a central role. In November 1721, Linck was executed by the sword in Halberstadt. [7, 8, 10] It was the last known execution in Europe for a sexual relationship between women. [7, 10]
Between Speyer in 1477 and Halberstadt in 1721 lies a pattern that the literary scholar Valerie Traub also points out. Prosecutions for relationships between women were strikingly often connected to one of the partners appropriating male attributes, such as using an artificial penis. [5] It was not desire alone that brought people before the courts. It was the visible transgression of the gender order.
Was Katherina Hetzeldorfer Trans?
From today's perspective, this question is hard to avoid. A person who was apparently assigned female at birth lived, at least for a time, as a man in the 15th century, took on the role of a husband, and was perceived by others as male. This is a story we can readily consider today in connection with trans identities.
But does that entitle us to call Katherina a trans man?
The honest answer is: We don't know.
We don't know whether Katherina understood herself as a man. We don't know whether she lived as a man because it matched her gender, because it was the only way she could pursue her relationships with women, or because the two were inseparable. Nor do we know whether she would have seen herself as a lesbian woman in today's sense. The sources offer no reliable information on this.
There are two mistakes to avoid here. The first is to impose modern identity labels on historical people without scrutiny. The second is to deny them any possible trans identity simply because their era lacked our vocabulary. Trans people did not come into existence with the word "transgender." Same-sex love did not begin with the modern terms for sexual orientation. What has changed are social attitudes, the possibilities for self-description, and our knowledge of how diverse gender and sexuality really are.
Accordingly, scholars classify Katherina's story in different ways. It appears in works on the history of lesbian relationships as well as in studies on the crossing of gender boundaries. [1, 3, 6] Ria Brodell included Katherina in the portrait series Butch Heroes and deliberately uses "him/her" in the accompanying text. [6] The biographer Angela Steidele likewise explicitly asks whether Catharina Margaretha Linck's life should be understood as lesbian, trans, or queer, and leaves the question open. [7]
Perhaps Katherina was a trans man. Perhaps she was a woman who loved women and preferred a male role. Perhaps she would not recognize herself in any of these descriptions. All that is certain is that she did not live the way society expected a woman to live. And that the authorities were prepared to kill her for it.
History From the Perspective of the Persecutors
One of the most oppressive aspects of this story is the way it has been handed down. We do not know Katherina from letters, diaries, or memoirs. We know her because people interrogated her, examined her behavior down to its most intimate details, and put her execution on record.
The court record tells us at length what the judges wanted to know: sexual acts, physical characteristics, and how Katherina was able to fill the male role. What she felt, what she wanted for her life, and how she understood her relationship played hardly any role in this investigation.
This is a fundamental problem with many sources on queer history. People who lived outside social norms rarely left written records of their own. They usually only become visible to us when they came into conflict with the authorities. Their stories reach us through court files, prohibitions, and verdicts. Puff describes the silence about same-sex desire between women in the Middle Ages and the early modern period as even more unyielding than the silence about men. [1]
Such records are therefore both valuable and problematic. They preserve the traces of a life that would otherwise have been completely forgotten. But they show this life through a lens shaped by suspicion, moral convictions, and the will to control. The judges did not want to understand who Katherina was. They wanted to determine whether her behavior had to be punished.
Gender Roles Were Never as Clear-Cut as Some Believe
Anyone who claims today that there have always been only two clearly separated sexes with fixed roles should take a look at history.
Of course, people in the 15th century had firm ideas about what men and women were and what they were supposed to do. These ideas were deeply rooted in religion, law, and the social order. But it does not follow that everyone adhered to them, or that lived reality was actually so clear-cut.
Katherina Hetzeldorfer shows that people crossed these boundaries centuries ago. She lived in Speyer for about two years before the authorities intervened. During that time, there must have been people who noticed her way of life and still did not report her right away. In a similar way, Catharina Margaretha Linck was able to live, work, and marry as a man in various places for many years. [7, 10]
This does not make the late Middle Ages a tolerant era. Katherina's execution proves the opposite. But the very fact that the authorities persecuted such ways of life, and that later legal codes explicitly made them punishable, proves that they existed. If people had only come up with the idea of living differently than expected because of modern developments, there would be no court record from 1477 and no Article 116 of the Carolina.
Gender diversity is not an invention of our time. What is new, above all, are the terms we use to describe it and the freedom to talk about it openly.
A Name That Should Not Be Forgotten
Katherina Hetzeldorfer died in the Rhine in 1477. We don't know how old she was. We don't know whether she understood herself as a man. We don't even know how she would have described her life had she been allowed to speak about it freely.
What remains are three pages of a court record and the memory of a person who lived outside the prescribed gender order.
I do not want to assign Katherina an identity she might never have claimed for herself. Nor do I want to deny her that possibility. She deserves to have her story told without being appropriated.
For me, this is at the heart of any engagement with trans and queer history. We do not need to assign every person from the past unambiguously to a present-day category in order to recognize that gender and sexual diversity have always been part of human life. At the same time, Katherina's story reminds us of the price people could pay for crossing the boundaries set for them.
Nearly 550 years later, we can no longer ask Katherina who she was. But we can make sure that her name does not live on only in the files of those who sentenced her to death.
That, too, is part of making queer and trans history visible.
Yours, Lizbeth
Sources
Puff, Helmut (2000): Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477). Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30(1), pp. 41-61. Includes an edition and English translation of the court document. DOI: 10.1215/10829636-30-1-41
Puff, Helmut (1999): Weibliche Sodomie. Der Prozeß gegen Katharina Hetzeldorfer und die Rhetorik des Unaussprechlichen an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur frühen Neuzeit. Historische Anthropologie, 7(3), pp. 364-380. In German. Bibliographic record
Puff, Helmut (2003): Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600. University of Chicago Press, esp. pp. 32-33. ISBN 978-0-226-68505-2. Google Books
Puff, Helmut (2018): "Mann mit Mann, Weib mit Weib": Gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. In: Cüppers, Martin; Domeier, Norman (eds.): Späte Aufarbeitung. LSBTTIQ-Lebenswelten im deutschen Südwesten. Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden-Württemberg, Landeskundliche Reihe vol. 50. In German. Publication page, PDF
Traub, Valerie (2002): The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 42). ISBN 978-0-521-44885-7. Sample chapter, Cambridge University Press
Brodell, Ria (2012): Katherina Hetzeldorfer, c. 1477 Germany. Gouache on paper from the series Butch Heroes, collection of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, with an accompanying text based on the work of Helmut Puff and Leila J. Rupp. Ria Brodell
Steidele, Angela (2021): In Männerkleidern. Das verwegene Leben der Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel, hingerichtet 1721. Biographie und Dokumentation. Expanded new edition, Insel Verlag, Berlin (first edition Böhlau, Cologne 2004). In German. ISBN 978-3-458-68340-7. Sample, Insel Verlag
Eriksson, Brigitte (1981): A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records. Journal of Homosexuality, 6(1-2), pp. 27-40. Bibliographic record
Kohler, Josef; Scheel, Willy (eds.): Die Peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V. Constitutio Criminalis Carolina. Student edition, Art. 116. In German. Internet Archive
City of Münster: Gedenktafel Catharina Margaretha Linck / Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel (memorial plaque). In German. stadt-muenster.de
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