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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Carolingian women poem public private Virgil Aeneid Paderborn Epic hunt chase
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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 …