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Articles 1 - 23 of 23
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Gender, Sex, And The Body In Medieval Armenia, Ashley Bozian
Gender, Sex, And The Body In Medieval Armenia, Ashley Bozian
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation investigates textual representation of the body, gender, and sexuality in Armenian chronicles produced between the fifth and eleventh centuries CE. In so doing, it reconstructs the development of Armenian somatology between Zoroastrian and Islamic suzerainties. Specifically, the dissertation examines the modalities by which the body functioned to medieval Armenian cognition as the locus of identity and alterity through the deployment of such devices as the following, to each of which is devoted a chapter: masculinity, femininity, archetypes of sexual morality, legislation of sexual conduct, sexual experientiality (in both temporal and eschatological dimensions), anatomy, and violence. As such, the …
Gender, Science, And The Natural World: Essays On Medieval Literature From The 2020 Gender And Medieval Studies Conference, Linda E. Mitchell, Daisy E. Black
Gender, Science, And The Natural World: Essays On Medieval Literature From The 2020 Gender And Medieval Studies Conference, Linda E. Mitchell, Daisy E. Black
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Introduction to the special issue of literature articles from the 2020 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference.
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.
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 …
The Virago Paradigm Of Female Sanctity: Constructing The Masculine Woman In Medieval Christianity, Angela Bolen
The Virago Paradigm Of Female Sanctity: Constructing The Masculine Woman In Medieval Christianity, Angela Bolen
Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The Latin word virago, in its simplest definition, means “a man-like, warrior woman.” For Christian men and women in the Patristic era and the central Middle Ages, the virago represented a woman who denied all biological characteristics of her womanhood, fiercely protected her virginity, and fully embodied the virtues of Christian masculinity. The virago paradigm of female sanctity, a creation of male writers, reconciled a pervasive fear of the female sex with an obvious admiration for holy women. Additionally, the virago model maintained the supremacy of masculine virtues, upheld a patriarchal hierarchy, and created a metaphorical space that validated …
Whose Sword? Materiality, Gender Subversion And The Fairy Women Of Middle English Romance, Jane Bonsall
Whose Sword? Materiality, Gender Subversion And The Fairy Women Of Middle English Romance, Jane Bonsall
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Though frequently steeped in elements of fantasy and featuring idealised or supernatural characters, Middle English romances are, at their core, concerned with the practicalities of material wealth and status among the gentry and aristocracy. This persistent concern with wealth and materiality is manifested in dramatic ways in some of the Middle English romances figuring magical women. In Melusine, Sir Launfal, and Partonope of Blois, the control of masculine-gendered objects of material wealth – and signifiers of chivalric identity – is given to the fairy ladies, rather than their knightly paramours. In their manipulation and control of these material symbols of …
Talking Back: Sodomy Laws And Transgressive Subjectivity In Medieval Venice, Alex Baldassano
Talking Back: Sodomy Laws And Transgressive Subjectivity In Medieval Venice, Alex Baldassano
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Urban Italian law, by the fifteenth-century, would become particularly aggressive in comparison to the rest of Europe not only in prosecuting sodomy, but also in implementing the threatened capital punishment. The 1354 Venetian court case of Rolandinus/a Ronchaia, in the century leading up to the officialization of the law, both exemplifies this trend and yet also stands out as unique because of the subject’s gender presentation; the case seeks to resolve whether or not this person, perceived either as ambiguously gendered or as a man dressed as a woman, can be convicted of committing sodomy or prostitution. Ronchaia, however, is …
Weaponizing Ordinary Objects: Women, Masculine Performance, And The Anxieties Of Men In Medieval Iceland, Steven T. Dunn
Weaponizing Ordinary Objects: Women, Masculine Performance, And The Anxieties Of Men In Medieval Iceland, Steven T. Dunn
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This thesis unravels the deeper meanings attributed to ordinary objects, such as clothing and food, in thirteenth-century Icelandic literature and legal records. I argue that women weaponized these ordinary objects to circumvent their social and legal disadvantages by performing acts that medieval Icelandic society deemed masculine. By comparing various literary sources, however, I show that medieval Icelandic society gradually redefined and questioned the acceptability of that behavior, especially during the thirteenth-century. This is particularly evident in the late thirteenth-century Njal’s Saga, wherein a woman named Hallgerd has been villainized for stealing cheese from a troublesome neighbor. If Hallgerd were a …
Vi Et Armis: Londoners And Violent Trespass Before The Common Pleas In The Fifteenth Century, Lindsey Mcnellis
Vi Et Armis: Londoners And Violent Trespass Before The Common Pleas In The Fifteenth Century, Lindsey Mcnellis
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports
Civil litigation in early fifteenth-century England encompassed a variety of actions, but only one writ covered acts of violence: trespass vi et armis. These writs, all before the central Court of Common Pleas, detail a variety of violent torts, or wrongs, such as housebreaking, theft, imprisonment, abduction, and assault. The Londoners who entered pleadings in this court between 1405 and 1415 have left a fascinating glimpse into both interpersonal violence and the world of savvy litigators. Through a close examination of eighty-two cases, I demonstrate that Londoners were knowledgeable litigants who used the Court of Common Pleas and its …
The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel
The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Ælfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism provided by the four Latin Doctors and illustrated in the early Latin Lives of Roman martyrs, revealing the importance of memory in the construction of the monastic "third gender." In the second section McDaniel turns to creating a historical and theological cultural …
Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner
Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner
The Medieval Globe
This essay examines the similarities and differences between legal and other precepts outlining corporal punishment in ancient and medieval Indian and early medieval European laws. Responding to Susan Reynolds’s call for such comparisons, it begins by outlining the challenges in doing so. Primarily, the fragmented political landscape of both regions, where multiple rulers and spheres of authority existed side-by-side, make a direct comparison complex. Moreover, the time slippage between what scholarship understands to be the “early medieval” period in each region needs to be taken into account, particularly given the persistence of some provisions and the adapatation or abandonment of …
Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings
Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings
Theses and Dissertations
The interpretation of prehistoric iconography is complicated by the tendency to project
contemporary male/female gender dichotomies into the past. Pictish monumental stone sculpture
in Scotland has been studied over the last 100 years. Traditionally, mirror and comb symbols
found on some stones produced in Scotland between AD 400 and AD 900 have been interpreted
as being associated exclusively with women and/or the female gender. This thesis re-examines
this assumption in light of more recent work to offer a new interpretation of Pictish mirror and
comb symbols and to suggest a larger context for their possible meaning. Utilizing the Canmore
database, …
Identité, Genre, Et Proto-Nationalisme Chez Christine De Pizan Et Alain Chartier, Matthew Lee Blair
Identité, Genre, Et Proto-Nationalisme Chez Christine De Pizan Et Alain Chartier, Matthew Lee Blair
Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects
No abstract provided.
The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles
The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles
The Medieval Globe
Large numbers of outsiders were integrated into premodern Islamic society through the institution of slavery. Many were boys of non-Muslim parents drafted into the army, and some rose to become powerful political figures; in Egypt, after the death of Ayyubid sultan al-Salih (r. 1240–49), they formed a dynasty known as the Mamluks. For slave concubines, the route to power was different: Shajar al-Durr, the concubine of al-Salih, gained enormous status when she gave birth to his son and later governed as regent in her son’s name, converting to Islam after her husband’s death and then reigning as sultan in her …
English King And German Commoner: An Exploration Of Sixteenth Century Clothing And Identity, Bradley Dale Moore
English King And German Commoner: An Exploration Of Sixteenth Century Clothing And Identity, Bradley Dale Moore
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This paper will explore the connections of clothing and identity in the sixteenth century. The fit and construction of clothing can be directly related to how a person is perceived, or indeed, how one perceives one's self. Henry VIII (1491-1547) of England will be compared and contrasted with Matthäus Schwarz (1496-1574), a commoner from Augsburg, Germany. Tudor will represent how identity can be created for others, particularly through legislation and courtly life; while Schwarz' own words will assist in the exploration of the identity of the individual.
Masterpieces Of Italian Literature In Translation, Silvia Valisa
Masterpieces Of Italian Literature In Translation, Silvia Valisa
Silvia Valisa
No abstract provided.
Becoming A Georgian Women, Rebecca Gould
Maternal Reflections On Gender And Medievalism, Mary Dockray-Miller
Maternal Reflections On Gender And Medievalism, Mary Dockray-Miller
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Shared Interests Of Sim And Mfn (Vols. 22 And 23), Kathleen Verduin
Shared Interests Of Sim And Mfn (Vols. 22 And 23), Kathleen Verduin
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Message From The Editor , Ann Marie Rasmussen
Message From The Editor , Ann Marie Rasmussen
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
The Influence Of J. R. R. Tolkien's Masculinist Medievalism., Michael D. C. Drout
The Influence Of J. R. R. Tolkien's Masculinist Medievalism., Michael D. C. Drout
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Recent Bibliography On Women And Gender, Chris Africa
Recent Bibliography On Women And Gender, Chris Africa
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.