The women who spoke or wrote in the margins of the Middle Ages—women who were oppressed and diminished by social and religious institutions—often were not literate. Or, if they could read, they did not know how to write. Transforming or subverting Western and patristic traditions associated with the clergy, they also turned to Eastern and North African traditions and to popular oral theater, and focused in their choice of genre on lyric, romance, and confessional autobiography. These essays analyze their texts and reconstruct a medieval feminine aesthetic that begins a rewriting of cultural and literary history.
Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays, dedicated to her work, examines gender as a construct of language, a mode of embodiment, and a critical framework for thinking about the past. Its eleven contributors approach the figure of the gendered body in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. The volume focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliau, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies. Taken together, they celebrate the scholarly career of Elizabeth Robertson while also presenting a coherent and multifaceted investigation of the intersections of gender and medieval literary practice.
A new economy of power relations: female agency in the middle ages / Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski -- Women and power through the family revisited / Jo Ann McNamara -- Women and confession: from empowerment to pathology / Dyan Elliott -- "With the heat of the hungry heart": empowerment and Ancrene wisse / Nicholas Watson -- Powers of record, powers of example: hagiography and women's history / Jocelyn Wogan-Browne -- Who is the master of this narrative? Maternal patronage of the cult of St. Margaret / Wendy R. Larson -- "The wise mother": the image of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary / Pamela Sheingorn -- Did goddesses empower women? the case of dame nature / Barbara Newman -- Women in the late medieval English parish / Katherine L. French -- Public exposure? consorts and ritual in late medieval Europe: the example of the entrance of the dogaresse of Venice / Holly S. Hurlburt -- Women's influence on the design of urban homes / Sarah Rees Jones -- Looking closely: authority and intimacy in the late medieval urban home / Felicity Riddy.
Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.
Tales of xenoglossia—the instantaneous ability to read, to write, to speak, or to understand a foreign language—have long captivated audiences. Perhaps most popular in Christian religious literature, these stories celebrate the erasing of all linguistic differences and the creation of wider spiritual communities. The accounts of miraculous language acquisition that appeared in the Bible inspired similar accounts in the Middle Ages. Though medieval xenoglossic miracles have their origins in those biblical stories, the medieval narratives have more complex implications. In The Gift of Tongues, Christine Cooper-Rompato examines a wide range of sources to show that claims of miraculous language are much more important to medieval religious culture than previously recognized and are crucial to understanding late medieval English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe.
From the contents:00Part I: Allegorical Dream-Visions and Debate Poems Jonathan Morton, 'Friars in love: Manuscript illumination as literary commentary in three fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Roman de la rose' (Paris, BnF, MS .25526; Baltimore, Walters, MS W. 143;London, BL, MS Royal 19 B XIII) - Emma Cayley, ‘Entre deux sommes’: Imagining desire in the songe de la Pucelle' - HelenJ. Swi , 'Limits of representation in late fifteenth-century Burgundy: What the eye doesn’t hear and the ear doesn’t see'. 00Part II: 'Burgundian prose narratives' Dominique Lagorgette, 'Staging transgression rough text and image: Violence and nudity in the cent nouvelles nouvelles'(Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter252, and Vérard 1486 and 1498) – Rebecca Dixon, 'The Roman de Buscalus; or, the artof not being French' – Rosalind Brown-Grant, 'Personal drama or chivalric spectacle? The reception of the Roman d’Olivier de Castille in the illuminations of the Wavrin aster and Loyset Liédet'00Part III: Reworkings of classical and Medieval auctores' J. Chimène Bateman, 'The hybrid art of the compiler: Text/Image relations in the Ovidemoralisé of Colard Mansion' – KathleenWilson-Chevalier, 'Proliferating narratives: Texts, images, and (Mostly Female) dedicatees in a few héroïdes productions' – Elizabeth L’Estrange, 'Re-Presenting Emilia in the context of the Querelle des femmes: Text and image in Anne de Graville’s Beau Roman list of manuscripts and early printed editions'
This collection brings together two flourishing areas of medieval scholarship: gender and religion. It examines gender-specific religious practices and contends that the pursuit of holiness can destabilise binary gender itself. Though saints may be classified as masculine or feminine, holiness may also cut across gender divisions and demand a break from normally gendered behaviour. This work of interdisciplinary cultural history includes contributions from historians, art historians and literary critics and will be of interest not only to medievalists, but also to students of religion and gender in any period.
This vivid and pioneering study illuminates the different roles played in late medieval society by noblewomen - the most substantial group of women to survive as individuals in medieval documents. They emerge (despite limited political opportunities) as figures of consequence themselves in a landowning society through estate management in their husbands' frequent absences, and through hospitality, patronage and affinity.
This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed 'unhomely' spaces. They inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality the homely female space to provide autonomy. While these methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan.
What was the social structure of England in the period 1200 to 1500? What were the basic forms of social inequality? To what extent did such divisions generate social conflict? How significantly did English society change during this period and what were the causes of social change? Is it useful to see medieval social structure in terms of the theories and concepts produced within the medieval period itself? What does modern social theory have to offer the historian seeking to understand English society in the later middle ages? These are the questions which this book seeks to answer. Beginning with an analysis of class structure of medieval England, Part One of this book asks to what extent class conflict was inherent within class relations and discusses the contrasting successes and outcomes of such conflict in town and country. Part Two of the book examines to what extent such class divisions interacted with other forms of social inequality, such as those between orders (nobility and clergy), between men and women, and those arising from membership of a status-group (the Jews). Dr Rigby's discussion of medieval English society is located within the context of recent historical and sociological debates about the nature of social stratification and, using the work of social theorists such as Parkin and Runciman, offers a synthesis of the Marxist and Weberian approaches to social structure. The book should be extremely useful to those undergraduates beginning their studies of medieval England whilst, in offering a new interpretative framework within which to examine social structure, also interesting those historians who are more familiar with this period.
