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Full-Text Articles in History

Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before The Modern, Edited By Greta Lafleur, Masha Raskolnikov, And Anna Klosowska., Nat Rivkin Jan 2022

Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before The Modern, Edited By Greta Lafleur, Masha Raskolnikov, And Anna Klosowska., Nat Rivkin

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Women Intellectuals And Leaders In The Middle Ages, Edited By Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen., Linda E. Mitchell Jan 2022

Women Intellectuals And Leaders In The Middle Ages, Edited By Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen., Linda E. Mitchell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Foreword To “Gender, Science, And The ‘Natural’ World”, Laura Kalas Jan 2022

Foreword To “Gender, Science, And The ‘Natural’ World”, Laura Kalas

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

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Gender, Science, And The Natural World: Essays On Medieval Literature From The 2020 Gender And Medieval Studies Conference, Linda E. Mitchell, Daisy E. Black Jan 2022

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.


Female Masculinity In The Embodied Beowulf Wetlands: A New, Radical, Ecofeminist Approach, Teresa Pilgrim Jan 2022

Female Masculinity In The Embodied Beowulf Wetlands: A New, Radical, Ecofeminist Approach, Teresa Pilgrim

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article argues that the embodied characterization of Grendel’s mother offers us an alternative heroic model for women, from the titular hero, Beowulf, around whose heroic life and legacy the Old English poem is structured and more usually celebrated. In doing so, it addresses the problematic legacy of the heroic, masculinist poem and its pedagogical role as a canonical text for English literature and national identity which also informs our cultural attitudes to gender-based violence. This article examines female masculinity in the embodied Beowulf wetlands to recover an alternative, powerful, legacy for feminism. Grounded within previous feminist, queer, ecofeminist, and …


Lessons Learned—They’Re Not Just For Academia, But For Life, Linda E. Mitchell Jan 2022

Lessons Learned—They’Re Not Just For Academia, But For Life, Linda E. Mitchell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This look back on my career as a medieval historian of women, families, and gender focuses on the lessons I have learned from my tenure as a pre-professional and professional academic.


Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And Race In The Middle Ages, C. Libby Jan 2022

Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And Race In The Middle Ages, C. Libby

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Christine De Pizan, “The God Of Love’S Letter” And “The Tale Of The Rose”, Roberta Krueger Jan 2022

Christine De Pizan, “The God Of Love’S Letter” And “The Tale Of The Rose”, Roberta Krueger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Medieval Women, Material Culture, And Power: Matilda Plantagenet And Her Sisters, Mary Dockray-Miller Jan 2022

Medieval Women, Material Culture, And Power: Matilda Plantagenet And Her Sisters, Mary Dockray-Miller

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Notes On Contributors Jan 2022

Notes On Contributors

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 Dec 2021

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 …


Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance, Irina Dumitrescu, Emma O. Bérat Dec 2021

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 Dec 2021

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 Dec 2021

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 …


Seeing Red: Visuality, Violence, And The Making Of Textiles In Early Medieval Enigmatic Poetry, Megan Cavell Dec 2021

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 Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat Dec 2021

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) Dec 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 Dec 2021

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 Dec 2021

About The Contributors

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


A Hive Of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers, Shannon Jane Garner Dec 2021

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 …


Reconstructing Ita At Schaffhausen, Shirin Fozi Dec 2021

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, …


Men And Masculinities In The Sagas Of The Icelanders, Amanda Mcvitty Mar 2021

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 Mar 2021

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.


Stories Of Women In The Middle Ages, Misty Urban Mar 2021

Stories Of Women In The Middle Ages, Misty Urban

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 Mar 2021

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 Mar 2021

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 Mar 2021

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.


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020 Mar 2021

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 Mar 2021

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 Mar 2021

“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.