A Queer Georgian Social Season: Queen Christina’s Queer Cabal – Handel & Corelli

Join us at the Foundling Museum for the grand opening of our third annual A Queer Georgian Social Season – this time, in truncated ‘trilogy’ format prior to its full fourth edition return in 2025-2026 – as we take you back to a time when queers were more visible and accepted than you thought.

According to Queen Christina of Sweden’s (1626-1689) 1681 autobiography, the midwives at her birth first believed her to be a boy because she was “completely hairy, and had a coarse and strong voice”. Such ambiguity did not end with her birth; Christina herself made cryptic statements about her “constitution” and body throughout her life. She also believed that a wet nurse had carelessly dropped her to the floor when she was a baby; a shoulder bone broke, leaving one shoulder higher than the other for the rest of her life (something a number of her contemporaries noted). As a child, her mannerisms could probably best be described as those of a tomboy. Her father insisted she should receive “the education of a prince”, and some have interpreted this as acceptance, on the part of the king, that she had masculine features or that there was some form of gender ambiguity in her upbringing. She was educated as a prince and was taught (and enjoyed) fencing, horse riding, and bear hunting. As she was chiefly preoccupied with her studies, she slept three to four hours a night, forgot to comb her hair, donned her clothes in a hurry, and wore men’s shoes for the sake of convenience. In fact, her permanent bed-head became her trademark look in most paintings. As an adult, it was said that Christina “walked like a man, sat and rode like a man, and could eat and swear like the roughest soldiers”. Her contemporary John Bargrave described her comportment in a similar fashion, but said that witnesses ascribed her style more to childishness or madness than masculinity. When she arrived in Rome in 1655, she had shaven her head and wore a big, dark wig. By 1665, according to Edward Browne, she regularly wore a velvet justacorps, cravat, and peruke (man’s wig). One must note, however, that Christina was not alone in her own time for choosing masculine dress over feminine dress; Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, for example, was known for dressing the same way.

By the age of nine, Christina was already impressed by the Catholic religion and the merits of celibacy associated with it. She had also read a biography of the virgin queen Elizabeth I of England with interest. Despite this, she understood all to well that she was expected to provide an heir to the Swedish throne. Her first cousin Charles was infatuated with her, and they became secretly engaged before he left in 1642 to serve in the Swedish army in Germany for three years. Christina later revealed in her autobiography that she felt “an insurmountable distaste for marriage” and “for all the things that females talked about and did”; she once stated, “It takes more courage to marry than to go to war.” One of Christina’s biographers, Veronica Buckley, believes that there was “in Christina a curious squeamishness with regard to sex”. In any case, Christina’s conversion to Catholicism and refusal to marry led her to relinquish the Swedish throne and move to Rome.

In Rome, Queen Christina was the undisputed patron of the arts; After she settled down in the Duke of Parma’s Palazzo Farnese there, every Wednesday, she held the palace open to visitors from the higher classes who kept themselves busy with poetry and intellectual discussions. She also went on to open an Academy in the palace on January 24th, 1656, called the ‘Accademia dell’Arcadia’ (‘Academy of Arcadia’) where the participants enjoyed music, theatre, and literature. The Academy’s principal intention was to reform the diction of Italian poetry, with its norms and rituals – such as the custom of assuming ‘pastoral’ names – taking their cue from classic and pastoral mythology; such norms and customs hearkening back to an idyllic antiquity where homosexuality happened to be socially acceptable cannot be ignored when applied by and to an Academy such as the Arcadian Academy, whose members were predominantly male.

The Arcadian Academy’s queer-coding attracted two of the greatest queer composers of the day: Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). Despite being known to Queen Christina during her lifetime (he had led festival performances of music for her in 1687), Corelli was formally elected a member of the Academy seventeen years after Christina’s death, in 1706. Corelli’s style has long been praised as paradigmatic – the quintessence of Arcadian good taste – for its clarity and its sober and expressive melodism. Handel, on the other hand, often attended the meetings & symposia of the Arcadians while in Rome through two of his most important Roman patrons, who also happened to be leading members of the Academy: Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli, and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni Handel’s sophisticated cantatas were his most significant (and lasting) contribution to the Academy’s meetings. Handel’s cantatas are of particular interest due to the fact that many of them avoid identifying the gender of the beloved in a way that is deliberately ambiguous – especially when one considers that he wrote these be sung by men and women, with those sung by women also sung by largely male-identifying castrati. Most of the men who commissioned these cantatas (Cardinal Ottoboni and Prince Ruspoli in particular) had already been identified with the homosexual/homosocial culture of their time (despite being married, or ordinated members of the Catholic Church, many of them had same-sex affairs) – and since these cantatas were private pieces for patrons to be performed in their houses, there was no real danger of the sophisticated queer-coding found within these pieces being dangerously interpreted by those who wished them harm.

In her 1681 autobiography, Christina seems to be flirting with her androgynous personality. The question of her sexuality has been debated, even as a number of modern biographers generally consider her to have been a lesbian, and her relationships with women were noted during her lifetime. She seems to have written passionate letters to Ebba Sparre (to whom Christina continued to write passionate letters [in which she told Ebba that she would always love her] after leaving Sweden), and Guilliet has suggested a relationship between Christina and Gabrielle de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Rachel, a niece of Diego Teixeira, and the singer Angelina Giorgino. Some historians assert that she maintained heterosexual, non-sexual, lesbian, or bisexual relationships during the course of her life depending on which source is consulted. According to Veronica Buckley, Christina was a “dabbler” who was “painted a lesbian, a prostitute, a hermaphrodite, and an atheist” by her contemporaries, though “in that tumultuous age, it is hard to determine which was the most damning label”. Based on historical accounts of her physicality, some scholars also believe that she may have been an intersex individual. Christina herself wrote near the end of her life that she was “neither Male nor Hermaphrodite, as some People in the World have pass’d me for”.