Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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

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

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, …

Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Medieval alchemy was an overwhelmingly masculine practice, and its instruction books reflect the exclusivity of its practitioners. This article examines the use of secrecy and masculine discourse in a sixteenth-century Latin alchemical handbook, the Liber aureus, to demonstrate that there exists an erotically charged tension between authors and their readers. Alchemical instruction books like the Liber aureus draw upon this tension in the service of a particular kind of gatekeeping that creates hierarchies of both knowledge and alchemical practitioners. By investigating secrecy and its provocative effects both within and beyond this manuscript, I argue that alchemical instruction books’ secretive …

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.

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 …

“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.

Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Extant in only one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, the Middle English romance Emaré has nevertheless captivated modern scholars and readers. The majority of studies have focused on the text’s material culture, centred on the description of a luxurious cloth that takes up 10% of the poem. A recent global turn in medieval studies has consistently highlighted the role of medieval Europe in defining and supporting imperial projects, simultaneously challenging the Eurocentrism of medieval studies and the supposed neutrality of medieval European culture. This article brings Emaré into conversation with material culture and postcolonial critique to investigate the imperial politics of the text. …

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 …

Melusine, Invisible Leadership And The Future (In The Past), Jan Shaw

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper considers the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine from the late Middle English romance Melusine. By invoking contemporary leadership theory, this paper identifies leadership maneuvers in Melusine that are similar to those often practiced by women today, but the discourses of gender identity then ultimately render Melusine’s leadership invisible, just as leadership discourses today often render female leadership invisible. By uncovering the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine and identifying commonalities with the leadership of women today, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the contemporary problem of the marked …

Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article draws on methods from transgender theory, historicist literary studies, and visual analysis of medieval sealing practices to show that Empress Matilda of England was controversially styled as a female king during her career in the early to mid twelfth century. While the chronicle Gesta Stephani castigates Matilda’s failure to engage in sanctioned gendered behaviors as she waged civil war to claim her inherited throne, Matilda’s seal harnesses both masculine and feminine signifiers in order to proclaim herself both king and queen. While Matilda’s transgressive gender position was targeted by her detractors during her lifetime, the obstinately transgender object …

Medieval Trans Lives In Anamorphosis: Looking Back And Seeing Differently (Pregnant Men And Backward Birth), Blake Gutt

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article employs Lacan’s notion of anamorphosis, and the retrospection which Kathryn Bond Stockton presents as fundamental to the assumption of queer identity, as it demonstrates the functions and value of transgender readings of medieval texts. The article analyses two thirteenth-century literary works, Le Roman de Saint Fanuel and Aucassin et Nicolette, both of which feature pregnant male characters, alongside A.K. Summers’ 2014 graphic novel, Pregnant Butch. This juxtaposition reveals the resonances between these medieval and modern portrayals of gender non-conformity, as well as the highly gendered cultural norms surrounding pregnancy. Finally, attention to Janice Raymond’s transmisogynistic claims …

Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …

“A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter”: Medieval Histories Of Intoxication And Consent, Carissa M. Harris

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay traces medieval representations of intoxication and consent and links them to contemporary cases, including Brock Turner’s 2016 rape trial and the 2017 slew of lawsuits filed against Baylor University. Through an examination of medieval texts from a range of genres, including the Biblical stories of Lot and Noah, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, proverbs, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the 1292 legal case of Isabella Plomet, and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, this essay explores past views of gender, perpetrators, culpability, alcohol, and consent. It argues that victim-blaming those who have been assaulted while intoxicated has …

Opportunism & Duty: Gendered Perceptions Of Women's Involvement In Crusade Negotiation And Mediation (1147-1254), Gordon M. Reynolds

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Women’s involvement in negotiation and mediation during the Middle Ages has received close scrutiny. However, few scholars have concentrated their investigations on the trends in female-led negotiations during the crusades in the Near East, and the significance of the religious connotations of such leadership in this theatre. There were dramatic societal shifts in the Latin East during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, most significantly in the aftermath of the Battle of Hattin and loss of Jerusalem in 1187. The destruction of much of the Latin East’s crusader states that followed Jerusalem’s fall displaced many individuals, and with a plethora of Christian nobles …

“Compassion And Benignytee”: A Reassessment Of The Relationship Between Canacee And The Falcon In Chaucer’S “Squire’S Tale”, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Among its many elements, Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” includes an emotionally-charged dialogue between two aristocratic female figures: the human daughter of a king, Canacee, and the wounded falcon she meets in the wood. Scholars have debated the nature of this relationship in interspecial, gendered, and specifically feminist and ecofeminist terms. This essay provides a brief retrospective on some of the most recent scholarship examining their relationship—van Dyke (2005); Kordecki (2011); Crane (2012); and Schotland (2012 and 2015)—leading into a reassessment in two parts: first, that the affinity- and experience-driven bond these female figures develop supports a reading of this scene that …

Flying, Hunting, Reading: Rethinking Falcon-Woman Comparisons, Sara Petrosillo

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper assesses structures of power through the medieval practice of falconry, offering two considerations about how feminist studies and animal studies fruitfully converge: first, assessing a human-animal relationship helps dismantle patriarchal control when human handler stands for patriarch and subjugated animal stands for domesticated woman. Second, this particular human-animal relationship represents a feminist poetics. In addition to overturning misogynous comparisons between falcons and women, something more pointedly self-representational occurred when women were themselves depicted as falconers. Rather than a human-animal relationship standing in for a man-woman relationship, men seem to be out of the foreground, or even out of …

La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret's bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status …

Women And Other Beasts: A Feminist Perspective On Medieval Bestiaries, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Gender and species intersect in the subject-matter, readership, and authorship of medieval beast-books. First, androcentric norms result in inconsistent gender references to species: the grammatically feminine eagle (Aquila) is represented as a stern father, the masculine turtledove (Turtura) as a clinging wife. More broadly, male exemplars represent nearly all species regardless of grammatical gender.

Second, both discursive norms and bibliographic practice presumed an exclusively male readership for the bestiary, but external and internal evidence suggest that bourgeois mothers used bestiaries in educating their children.

Third, a more radical intervention in androcentric bestiary norms is an instance …

Woman Personified: A Theoretical Framework For The Female Gender Of Personifications In Medieval Literature, Dinah Wouters

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article wants to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of why the majority of personifications in medieval literature are women. Especially, it seeks to refute the notion that female personifications of positive concepts would somehow escape or reverse the dominant gender ideology of its time. It brings together the different theories that have been proposed by scholars and situates them within a common framework. The article distinguish three levels to which these theories refer: these are, first, the level of the literal or the personification as a woman; second, the level of the figurative, or the idea that …

Simon De Montfort Et Le Gouvernement : Statut Des Femmes Dans Les Statuts De Pamiers (Art. 46) Avant La Magna Carta, Marjolaine Raguin-Barthelmebs

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Promulgated at Pamiers (Languedoc, France), 1^stDecember 1212 by Simon de Montfort after its first great victory during the Albigensian Crusade, those Statutes (juridical texts) are known as the introductory act for the Coutume of Paris in Languedoc, and more specifically regarding heirs rights. Redacted for the administration of newly conquest territories, the establishment of peace and to promote catholic faith against heresy and Languedocians owners of the land, theses Statutes dispose on women in their three final articles. More particularly, the article 46 concerns nobles and heirs women and decides, thanks to matrimony institution, who (and how) they …

Depending On Sex? Tongue, Sieve, And Ladle Shaped Pendants From Late Iron Age Gotland, Meghan P. Mattsson Mcginnis

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Artifacts of female dress such as brooches and pendants have long been objects of interest to scholars of late Iron Age /early medieval Scandinavia. They figure in dating and tracing stylistic developments, and their presence is often (controversially) used to help assign gender to burials. There are three types of pendants which constitute a type of feminine adornment unique to Viking Age Gotland: the so-called tongue, sieve, and ladle pendants. The purpose of this paper is to examine these pendant types and the possible symbolic and magical functions behind their forms and manner of use, and how these functions intersected …

‘Mony Prowde Wordez’: Pronominal Speech Acts, Identity And Community In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Katharine Jager

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper examines distinctions between Middle English second person pronouns thou and you and argues that such distinctions provide an important measure by which to understand late medieval chivalric masculinity.

The War Of The Two Jeannes And The Role Of The Duchess In Lordship In The Fourteenth Century, Katrin E. Sjursen

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the mid-fourteenth century, two women headed opposing parties in a civil war for control of the duchy of Brittany in France. Conventional scholarship explains their involvement in politics and warfare as exceptions possible only during emergencies. Contemporary chronicles and the letters of the two women themselves, however, tell another story, one in which these two women participated in politics and warfare even before their husbands entered captivity. Their participation makes sense if we recognize that medieval society understood lordship as a form of shared governance performed by a noble couple. While separate roles did exist for the husband and …

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.51, No.1, 2015

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Reginal Intercession And The Case Of Cristina, Convicted Murderer, Katherine Allocco

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the winter of 1328-1329, Cristina, widow of Thomas Scot, potter of London, was convicted, imprisoned in Newgate and sentenced to hang for the crime of murdering her husband. Her execution was delayed due to her pregnancy. In January or February 1329, Cristina sent a letter to Isabella of France, queen mother, requesting a King’s pardon. On March 2, Edward III pardoned Cristina, at his mother’s request, through letters patent. It appears that Isabella, who had an established reputation as an intercessor for both personal petitions and general political appeals, had successfully interceded on Cristina’s behalf. Although medieval queens- both …

Kingship And Masculinity In Late Medieval England, Jennifer Thibodeaux

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Unrivalled Influence: Women And Empire In Byzantium, Hailey Lavoy

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Back Matterr, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.51, No.1, 2015

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.50, No.2, 2015

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.