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Articles 1 - 30 of 31
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance, Irina Dumitrescu, Emma O. Bérat
Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance, Irina Dumitrescu, Emma O. Bérat
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Introductory essay to volume 57, issue 1 of Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality.
Performing Female Sanctity—And Reading It: The Visitatio Sepulchri Of Wilton And Barking Abbey, Sarah Brazil
Performing Female Sanctity—And Reading It: The Visitatio Sepulchri Of Wilton And Barking Abbey, Sarah Brazil
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This article discusses two traditions of the Visitatio Sepulcri enacted by women religious in late medieval England, based on the exceptional surviving documentation of liturgical performances from the abbeys of Barking and Wilton. Although these documents do not give access to what happened in these Easter morning performances, they do provide evidence for how the agency of the nuns was encoded into every aspect of their respective liturgical tradition. One of the most striking dimensions of this agency is that the abbesses and nuns shaped performance practices to conceptions of their embodiment. I explore how each abbey grounded authority within …
Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom And The Alleged Incontinence Of Female Speech, Mary C. Flannery
Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom And The Alleged Incontinence Of Female Speech, Mary C. Flannery
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In a passage from The Castle of Perseverance, the reprehensible Malus Angelus dismisses the speech of the personified virtues who are attempting to lead mankind to salvation: ‘Ther wymmen arn, are many wordys. (…) Ther ges syttyn are many tordys’ (2649-51). As the quotation illustrates, likening someone’s words to turds is both an effective brush-off and a colourful insult. This particular insult derives its force from the familiar anti-feminist trope of the voluble woman: like women, the wicked angel implies, the female personifications of virtue talk too much, and the incontinence of their speech is presented in terms that …
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Transforming Community: Women’S Rape Narratives And Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Jennifer Garrison
Transforming Community: Women’S Rape Narratives And Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Jennifer Garrison
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Despite its reputation as socially and politically conservative, John Gower’s fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis highlights sexual violence against women as a central cultural injustice and presents women’s rape narratives as a potentially powerful force for social and political change. This essay focuses on three of Gower’s tales in which women tell their own rape narratives with dramatic and lasting consequences: Mundus and Paulina, Tarquin and Lucrece, and Tereus and Philomena. In all three instances, these women’s narratives of suffering are socially transformative precisely because they threaten the masculine chivalric ideal. For Gower, rape is a direct result of the cultural belief …
About The Contributors
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Reconstructing Ita At Schaffhausen, Shirin Fozi
Reconstructing Ita At Schaffhausen, Shirin Fozi
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The Nellenburg family looms large in the historical memory of Schaffhausen. Count Eberhard (ca. 1015-1078/1079) and his wife Ita (d. ca. 1105) had transformed the small city with their patronage, most notably through the foundation of the monastery of Allerheiligen; their children held prominent military and ecclesiastical positions across the Lake Constance region. Together with their son Burkhard, his wife Hedwig, and a cousin known as Irmentrud, Eberhard and Ita were buried prominently in Allerheiligen; their collective funerary monument is one of the earliest and most ambitious of its type that is known from the twelfth century. The monument, however, …
Seeing Red: Visuality, Violence, And The Making Of Textiles In Early Medieval Enigmatic Poetry, Megan Cavell
Seeing Red: Visuality, Violence, And The Making Of Textiles In Early Medieval Enigmatic Poetry, Megan Cavell
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay explores a group of thematically related, enigmatic poems in Old English, Anglo-Latin and Old Norse that play with gender through their representations of violent textile production. The tenth-century Exeter Book’s Riddle 56, eighth-century archbishop Tatwine’s Enigmata 11 and 13, and the traditional eddic-style poem Darraðarljóð merge the highly gendered activities of textile production and warfare, questioning binaries and naturalized categories in the process. This process ends with the containment of gender play during the act of solving and interpreting the enigmatic, which restores the status quo. In analysing the space that enigmatic poetry provides for subversive …
Women’S Work And Men’S Devotions: The Fabrics Of The Passion In “O Vernicle”, Jenny C. Bledsoe
Women’S Work And Men’S Devotions: The Fabrics Of The Passion In “O Vernicle”, Jenny C. Bledsoe
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This article explores how male Cistercians producing an early fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript made devotional use of images representing women’s textile labor. An early manuscript copy of “O Vernicle,” a Middle English arma Christi poem, appears in Royal 17 A. xxvii, likely produced at Bordesley Abbey. The Royal version of “O Vernicle” features a unique marginal illumination of two women of Bethlehem and Jerusalem wearing green and red dresses. The woman in green holds a baby swaddled in a green and blue cloth with red stripes, similar to a Scottish tartan. Three other examples demonstrate the illuminator’s careful attention to fabric’s …
A Hive Of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers, Shannon Jane Garner
A Hive Of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers, Shannon Jane Garner
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
While much important work has been done on the early modern fascination with the political nature of bees and bee societies, this essay instead takes a closer look at the conflation of honeybees, women, and domestic spaces within the multi-generic textual ecology of early modern beekeeping. In the early modern period women were the primary beekeepers. As key participants in this art of sustained and intimate collaboration across species and environment, these women managed their own hives using the multifaceted skills of the early modern housewife, including textile arts, brewing, distilling, medicine, horticulture, and husbandry. This essay highlights the tension …
Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose
Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose
The Hilltop Review
In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …
Men And Masculinities In The Sagas Of The Icelanders, Amanda Mcvitty
Men And Masculinities In The Sagas Of The Icelanders, Amanda Mcvitty
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Medieval Saints And Modern Screens: Divine Visions As Cinematic Experience, Dorothy Ann Bray
Medieval Saints And Modern Screens: Divine Visions As Cinematic Experience, Dorothy Ann Bray
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020
Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
The Erotic Hunt: Gender And Space In Early-Ninth-Century Carolingian Verse, Dana M. Polanichka
The Erotic Hunt: Gender And Space In Early-Ninth-Century Carolingian Verse, Dana M. Polanichka
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay analyzes descriptions of royal and imperial Carolingian women on hunts in both the Paderborn Epic and Ermold’s Carmen in honorem Hludowici Caesaris. It compares these early ninth-century verses to their main classical model, Virgil’s Aeneid, and considers how the latter’s ambiguous depictions of Dido and Venus might have inflected the Carolingian’s poems’ depictions of women. Recognizing that the poets’ panegyrical intentions appear at odds with these ambiguous Virgilian exempla, the article investigates the royal hunt as a poetic stage, considering how the chase offered a public space in which to present positive depictions of women. The essay …
“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler
“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In the Brut narratives of medieval historiography, male heroic success and specifically the birth of Arthur are predicated upon the rape of Igerna. A comparative approach to the Tintagel episode across several of these narratives reveals how the emphasis on romance, magic, and nation-building function to validate sexual assault and elide Igerna’s experience. Ultimately, the repetition entailed in translatio studii, specifically the transfer that takes place within history-writing, reinforces the silencing of the survivor’s voice. This repetition lends trauma to the reading experience or creates the risk that readers become inured to the rape.
Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison
Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency …
Discovering Constance: Reconstructing The Life Of The Illegitimate Daughter Of John Paston Ii, Jane Clayton
Discovering Constance: Reconstructing The Life Of The Illegitimate Daughter Of John Paston Ii, Jane Clayton
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The Paston Letters contain one letter from Constance Reynyforth, the mistress of Sir John Paston, and one reference to her ‘bastard’ daughter, Constance Paston. The subsequent life of Constance Paston has, until now, remained obscure. My research, which outlines these discoveries for the first time, reveals that, not only was she acknowledged and cared for by the Pastons, but she also married into a local gentry family, had children, and lived a normal lifespan.
African Dominion: A New History Of Empire In Early And Medieval West Africa, Elizabeth Hubble
African Dominion: A New History Of Empire In Early And Medieval West Africa, Elizabeth Hubble
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories Of The African Middle Ages, Angela Jane Weisl
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories Of The African Middle Ages, Angela Jane Weisl
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
The Virgin Mary's Book At The Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, And Devotion In Medieval England, Godelinde Gertrude Perk
The Virgin Mary's Book At The Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, And Devotion In Medieval England, Godelinde Gertrude Perk
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020
Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Fictions Of Containment In The Spanish Female Picaresque: Architectural Space And Prostitution In The Early Modern Mediterranean, Amanda L. Scott
Fictions Of Containment In The Spanish Female Picaresque: Architectural Space And Prostitution In The Early Modern Mediterranean, Amanda L. Scott
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Medieval Art In Motion: The Inventory And Gift-Giving Of Queen Clemence Of Hungary, Elena Woodacre
Medieval Art In Motion: The Inventory And Gift-Giving Of Queen Clemence Of Hungary, Elena Woodacre
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery And Divorce In The Fourteenth Century: The Life Of Lucy De Thweng (1279-1347), Linda E. Mitchell
Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery And Divorce In The Fourteenth Century: The Life Of Lucy De Thweng (1279-1347), Linda E. Mitchell
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Miraculous Monstrosity: Birth And Female Sexuality In The Illuminated Scivias And Cloisters Apocalypse, Jenna M. Mckellips
Miraculous Monstrosity: Birth And Female Sexuality In The Illuminated Scivias And Cloisters Apocalypse, Jenna M. Mckellips
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This paper compares the illuminations in two medieval apocalypses, the Cloisters Apocalypse and Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias, to inspect their similar constructions of female sexuality, motherhood, and monstrosity. It first analyzes the monstrosity of female sexual organs found in Hildegard’s portrayal of the Church and the Mother of the Antichrist. The paper then goes on to consider the uncanny slippage between images of birth and death in the Cloisters’s depiction of John and the Woman of Revelation 12. Ultimately, the paper not only explores the monstrosity of female bodies in apocalyptic manuscripts, but also concludes that medieval women’s …
El Libro De La Oracion De Maria De Santo Domingo, Estudio Y Edicion, Pablo Acosta-Garcia
El Libro De La Oracion De Maria De Santo Domingo, Estudio Y Edicion, Pablo Acosta-Garcia
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Stories Of Women In The Middle Ages, Misty Urban
Stories Of Women In The Middle Ages, Misty Urban
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Precarious Manhood: Adolescence And Group Rape In Late Medieval Europe, Michelle Armstrong-Partida
Precarious Manhood: Adolescence And Group Rape In Late Medieval Europe, Michelle Armstrong-Partida
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Sexual assault, through coercion or violence, was omnipresent at every level of medieval society and perpetrated by males from all socio-economic backgrounds. This article argues that a specific type of sexual violence—group rape—committed by two or more individuals, was a phase of men’s social development. It explores the connection between adolescence and sexual aggression to show that collective rape was a feature of male youth culture used a form of recreation to gain sexual experience, forge bonds with peers, and publicly prove masculinity as adolescents transitioned from childhood to adulthood. Many young males first learned to rape in groups before …