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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini
Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters …
Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid, Elizabeth Elliott
Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid, Elizabeth Elliott
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The penultimate verse of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid suggests the possibility that Troilus raised a monument in memory of his former love, Cresseid: “Sum said he maid ane tomb of merbell gray” (l. 603). Examining the political implications of this uncertain act of memorialisation, this article considers how Henryson's poem mobilises the reader's emotional response to constitute Cresseid as a mourned subject, whose subjectivity is recognised only insofar as it is limited to suffering and death. In doing so, the Testament also establishes a subjectivity for women that offers conditional tolerance predicated on respectable behaviour, contributing to the historical production …
A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck
A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The pastourelle achieved what might be called its classic form in Middle French poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a mini-narrative in which the narrator, a knight or clerk, tells how he tried to have his will with a lower-class girl he happened upon while riding in the country. He greets her, sweet-talks her, and propositions her; she protests vigorously. Sometimes the debate ends here. Otherwise, her accoster overcomes her resistance by guile or force, and sexually assails her. The tone is light-hearted and cynical, the action crude. To modern readers, this narrative may be mildly amusing, rather tedious, …
“Let Him Walk With You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, And The Women They Left Behind, Rachel E. Moss
“Let Him Walk With You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, And The Women They Left Behind, Rachel E. Moss
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In this article I use a blend of autoethnography and historical storytelling to explore the role of outdoor space in forming relationships between fifteenth-century men and their maintenance of hegemonic power. By weaving together three striking vignettes from late fifteenth-century England, constructed as creative retellings of the historical evidence, with autoethnographic notes on my own lived experience, I am able to fill in the gaps of the historical record and open up questions about the implications of what has been left out. I argue that the medieval cultural understanding of the outdoors as both spiritually and physically beneficial, as well …