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Being The Bigger Ram: Arable Vs Pastoral Masculinities In The Towneley Mactacio Abel, Daisy E. Black
Being The Bigger Ram: Arable Vs Pastoral Masculinities In The Towneley Mactacio Abel, Daisy E. Black
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This article addresses the construction of rural masculine identities through a study of the Towneley manuscript play Mactacio Abel (The Killing of Abel) and the relationships the play stages between human, animal, and land. It argues that the Mactacio Abel places pastoral and arable agricultural labor in competition through the play’s two brothers, and that this competition takes the form of a gendered attack on the masculinity of each. The article begins with Cain’s arable farming and how the character’s antagonistic relationship with the earth hints at his failures as laborer and as a man. It examines Cain’s …
May Medica: Divine Healing And The Garden In “The Merchants Tale”, Maria Zygogianni
May Medica: Divine Healing And The Garden In “The Merchants Tale”, Maria Zygogianni
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The motif of the woman as a healer and/or cure (as a nurse, interceding saint, or beloved lady) occurs across medieval literary genres from romance to hagiography. This article explores the ways in which the character of May in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale reflects and parodies the figure of the female healer. The first section explores the healing women of romance and hagiographic traditions, as well as the frameworks of magic and saintly intervention which underpin them. The second section applies a framework of disability studies to the enfeebled body of May’s husband January, and his attempts to reconstitute his …