Communicating Across Time

Communicating Across Time

Author: Emma Bridget O'Loughlin

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Literary texts reveal the various, and often unexpected, means medieval writers and readers imagined for women’s cross-temporal communications. Female characters frequently employ alternative genealogical ‘bodies’ to that of a male child, actively revising the topos of women as simply the bodily matter and means for a male line. The characters inscribe their claims to land, power and spirituality through footprints in rocks, blood-impressed doors, tenderly-handled books, a mother’s exact resemblance imprinted in her child’s face. The intimacy and deliberateness with which these women create and manage their cross-generational communications both draws on and destabilizes traditional ideals of motherhood and genealogy. The four chapters read across French, English and Latin texts, as many English readers would have done, with a focus on the genres of hagiography, romance and chronicle from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.


Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination

Author: Emma O. Bérat

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1009434772

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Uncovering the many striking female alternatives to patrilineal narratives in medieval texts, Emma O. Bérat explores strategies of writing and illustration that creatively and purposefully depict women's legacies. Genealogy, used to justify a character's present power and project it onto the future, was crucial to medieval political, literary, and historical thought. While patrilineage often limited women to exceptional or passive roles, other genealogical forms that represent and promote women's claims are widespread in medieval texts. Female characters transmit power through book patronage and reading, enduring landmarks, and international travel, as well as childbearing and succession. These flexible – if messy – genealogies reflect the web of political, biological, and spiritual relations that frequently characterized elite women's lives. Examining hagiography, chronicles, genealogical rolls, and French, English, and Latin romances, as well as associated codices and images, Bérat highlights the centrality of female characters and historical women to this fundamental aspect of medieval consciousness.


Genealogies of Fiction

Genealogies of Fiction

Author: Eleonora Stoppino

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780823249381

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"This book is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focusing on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516-1532). Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, it challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso. Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, it shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court."--Publisher's abstract.


Genealogies of Fiction

Genealogies of Fiction

Author: Eleonora Stoppino

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0823240371

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Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso. Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.


Broken Lines

Broken Lines

Author: Raluca L. Radulescu

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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The essays in this collection explore the genealogical literature of late-medieval Britain and France in relation to issues of identity, the transmission of power, and cultural, socio-political and economic developments. They give the reader a complex understanding of genealogical literature and its relationships with other genres.


Medieval Women's Writing

Medieval Women's Writing

Author: Diane Watt

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2007-10-22

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0745632556

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Medieval Women's Writing is a major new contribution to our understanding of women's writing in England, 1100-1500. The most comprehensive account to date, it includes writings in Latin and French as well as English, and works for as well as by women. Marie de France, Clemence of Barking, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and the Paston women are discussed alongside the Old English lives of women saints, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the St Albans Psalter, and the legends of women saints by Osbern Bokenham. Medieval Women's Writing addresses these key questions: Who were the first women authors in the English canon? What do we mean by women's writing in the Middle Ages? What do we mean by authorship? How can studying medieval writing contribute to our understanding of women's literary history? Diane Watt argues that female patrons, audiences, readers, and even subjects contributed to the production of texts and their meanings, whether written by men or women. Only an understanding of textual production as collaborative enables us to grasp fully women's engagement with literary culture. This radical rethinking of early womens literary history has major implications for all scholars working on medieval literature, on ideas of authorship, and on women's writing in later periods. The book will become standard reading for all students of these debates.


Heads Will Roll

Heads Will Roll

Author: Larissa Tracy

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-01-20

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 9004211551

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Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination.


Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages

Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages

Author: Jane Chance

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780813013916

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"A volume of the first importance to the scholarship of medieval women writers.... An ambitious attempt to understand hat 'gender' and 'text' might have meant in the Middle Ages from the perspective of the woman writer and reader rather than through the more usual androcentric lens...[The] collection brings together for the first time in one place essays about a whole range of women writers from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries and from places as distant as Spain and Sweden, as well as the more well-known French and English writers."--Laurie Finke, Kenyon College "Brings together, under three main categories, diverse methodologies from...some of the foremost scholars and interpreters of each type of material and approach."--Nadia Margolis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 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. Jane Chance is professor of English at Rice University. She has written or edited 13 books on Old and Middle English literature, mythology, medieval women, and modern medievalism, including Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433-1177 (UPF, 1994), Woman as Hero in Old English Literature, the Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (UPF 1990), and Christine de Pizan, The Letter of Othea to Hector, Translated, with Introduction and Interpretive Essay. She is the editor of the Focus Library of Medieval Women.