into the space between 'male' and 'female' might have been as unremarkable in the streets of fourteenth-century London as they would be in Soho today". Historical significance Historians have been aware of Rykener's case since a calendared version of the legal record was published by Arthur Hermann Thomas in his 1932 Calendar of Select Plea and Memoranda Rolls, London, 1381–1412. Thomas's summary was noted only that an examination had taken place "of two men charged with immorality, of whom one implicated several persons, male and female, in religious orders". The case remained in obscurity until the mid-1990s, when the original manuscript records were discovered by Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd in the London Metropolitan Archives. The Rykener documents were filed with the more usual, and more prosaic, fare of debt and property offences that the mayor's court traditionally dealt with. It has been suggested that of particular concern for the officials was not so much the act itself, but Rykener's switching of gender roles. This perceived importance may account for the survival of the record, as it may have been considered to have set a precedent. The manuscript of Rykener's interrogation, according to one commentator, forms "apparently the only legal process document from late medieval England which deals with same-sex intercourse". The case has been described as offering a "microcosmic view of medieval English sexualities and the gulf that lies between the medieval and the modern"—the words used in both periods to describe sexuality mean different things to each. Rykener's case is also significant for its rarity. Surviving records from the fifteenth century provide only two examples of similar cases coming to court. It is impossible in the twenty-first century to know what Rykener's encounters meant personally. As Ruth Karras has pointed out, scholarship on such affairs, "because it relies on court records, has focused much more on acts than on feelings", just as the records do. Thus it is impossible to establish whether Rykener's encounters were brief, or part of longer-term relationships. The majority, suggests Karras, were the former. Karras and Boyd point out the difficulties in viewing Rykener today as Rykener would have viewed themself. "In modern terms", they wrote in 1996, Rykener "would be described as a transvestite (because he cross-dressed) and a prostitute (because he took money for sex), and probably a bisexual" although this label is somewhat "problematic", they suggest, as scholars have