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Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren

Medieval Ecocriticisms

Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.

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

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

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

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

No abstract provided.

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

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

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

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

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 …

Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Readings Of The Medieval Orient: Other Encounters, Liliana Sikorska

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of this book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction.

Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the “Oriental obsession,” stimulating …

Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Readings Of The Medieval Orient: Other Encounters, Liliana Sikorska

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. The book discusses that troubled legacy drawing on the discourses on Muslims originating in the European Middle Ages, and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and travel accounts.

Space, Image, And Reform In Early Modern Art: The Influence Of Marcia Hall, Arthur J. Difuria, Ian Verstegen

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations …

Gendered Language In The Catalogues Of Saint Mary’S Academy, 1860-1871, Kylie Hamm

Masters Theses

This research builds upon studies that explore Catholic women’s and girls’ educational institutions in the nineteenth century. This case study focuses on one girls’ academy, Saint Mary’s Academy, precursor to Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, founded by the Congregation of the Holy Cross in 1844. The research provided here analyzes the gendered language utilized by school leaders in the academy’s public catalogues during the decade of the Civil War, from 1860 through 1871. The language in these catalogues subtly changed over the course of the decade, reflecting changing white, middle-class gender norms surrounding women’s work and education. Leaders of …

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 …

Lawful Violence: The Relationship Between Marriage And Conflict In The Wars Of The Roses, Hannah R. Keller

Masters Theses

England’s King Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464. Edward’s sister Margaret of York married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468. Both marriages occurred during England’s fifteenth-century conflict, the Wars of the Roses. And both created conflict between Edward, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and France’s King Louis XI. Most historians regard this conflict as either a sign of or product of disorder. I, however, argue that both marriages could have been a calculated form of “lawful” violence known as disworship used to damage the political capital of Warwick and Louis and thereby instigate war with France. …

Thinking Queerly: Medievalism, Wizardry, And Neurodiversity In Young Adult Texts, Jes Battis

Premodern Transgressive Literatures

Why do we love wizards? Where do these magical figures come from? Thinking Queerly traces the wizard from medieval Arthurian literature to contemporary YA adaptations. By exploring the link between Merlin and Harry Potter, or Morgan la Fey and Sabrina, readers will see how the wizard offers spaces of hope and transformation for young readers. In particular, this book examines how wizards think differently, and how this difference can resonate with both LGBTQ and neurodivergent readers, who’ve been told they don’t fit in.

Reframing National Women's History Month: Practicalities And Consequences, Skylar Bre’Z

Dissertations

This study evaluates the practicalities and consequences of designating one month (March) out of the calendar year for the commemoration of women’s history. In the 1970s and 1980s, national women’s organizations such as the Women’s Action Alliance (WAA) collaborated with the Smithsonian Institute and the Women’s History Program at Sarah Lawrence College to build programs to increase awareness of women’s history. Using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in feminist theory, media studies, and historical memory studies, this project contextualizes the commemoration through its connection to 1970s women’s activism, explores its usefulness as a tool for building educational equity, and questions its …

Xenophobia In The Covid-19 Era, Joanne Jeya

Honors Theses

COVID-19 has altered people's daily lives across the globe and heightened tensions in response to changing economic, social, and political conditions. In the United States, xenophobia has seemingly escalated in the COVID-19 era, particularly towards Asians and people of Asian descent. The assumed reasoning for this rise in anti-Asian sentiment is tied to the presumed origins of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome‐Coronavirus‐2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, first detected in Wuhan, China, prompting some to initially call the disease the Wuhan or Chinese virus, among other racialized terms like the "Kung-flu." It remains to be seen if xenophobic acts have increased throughout the …

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 Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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

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

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

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

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories Of The African Middle Ages, Angela Jane Weisl

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.