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- Arthurian (1)
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- Distaff (1)
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- Empire; assemblage; material culture; ekphrasis; Christian/Muslim relations; women’s cultural production; Middle English romance (1)
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- Fabric (1)
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Articles 1 - 30 of 31
Full-Text Articles in History
Making It Through The Wilderness: Trees As Markers Of Gendered Identities In Sir Orfeo, Danielle Howarth
Making It Through The Wilderness: Trees As Markers Of Gendered Identities In Sir Orfeo, Danielle Howarth
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Wood was an essential material in the Middle Ages, but trees – and human relationships with them – are too often ignored. Using trees as a lens through which to view medieval romance can provide us with a new perspective on the genre, on medieval gender norms, and on human relationships with the material non-human. This article focusses on the trees in the Middle English Sir Orfeo in order to interrogate how Orfeo’s identity is linked to trees and wooden objects. Although Orfeo’s harp is the most obvious wooden marker of his identity, the ympe-tree in Orfeo and Herodis’s orchard, …
Textiles, Gender, And Materiality: A Response, Bettina Bildhauer
Textiles, Gender, And Materiality: A Response, Bettina Bildhauer
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This response outlines the predominant current conceptions of gendered materiality in contemporary theory (such as Karen Barad’s development of Judith Butler’s thought) and in medieval studies (such as work by Caroline Walker Bynum). It identifies and expands upon four themes from the two articles in the section that are pertinent to the descriptions of textiles and other material objects in a wider range of medieval texts and current medievalist scholarship: 1) the idea that textiles and other material things can have biographies; 2) the idea that textiles are today (but not necessarily in medieval writing) perceived as connective networks; 3) …
Introduction: New Approaches To Medieval Romance, Materiality, And Gender, Amy Burge, Morgan Boharski, Jane Bonsall, Lydia Hayes, Danielle Howarth, Vanessa Wright
Introduction: New Approaches To Medieval Romance, Materiality, And Gender, Amy Burge, Morgan Boharski, Jane Bonsall, Lydia Hayes, Danielle Howarth, Vanessa Wright
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020
Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Like Looking In A Mirror: A Material Reading Of The Sisters In Galeran De Bretagne, Morgan Boharski
Like Looking In A Mirror: A Material Reading Of The Sisters In Galeran De Bretagne, Morgan Boharski
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This article explores the story of Fresne from Renaut’s early thirteenth-century romance of Galeran de Bretagne and, moreover, the often overlooked story of her twin sister Flourie. In Marie de France’s version of the tale, the lai of Le Fraisne, the focus is on the character of Fresne, rather than her twin sister who is rarely mentioned in favour of encouraging the ultimate success of Fresne in winning the handsome knight at the end of the tale. However, inextricably linked to the success of Fresne is the failure of Flourie, and in Renaut’s romance, the reader is allowed a …
Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz
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. …
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 …
"The Best A Man Can Be": Subverting Masculinity’S Excess(Es) In Medieval Texts, Liz Herbert Mcavoy
"The Best A Man Can Be": Subverting Masculinity’S Excess(Es) In Medieval Texts, Liz Herbert Mcavoy
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This response piece situates the articles in the section within current trends in the study of medieval masculinities – including the reclamation of the “femfog” and scholarly work by Carolyn Dinshaw, Jack Halberstam and Mads Ravn – and within current discourse of what it means to “be a man” in popular culture, citing the 2019 Gillette advert “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be” and the “Time’s Up” and “Me Too” feminist movements. The response identifies a performative display of gender – termed ‘psuedomedieval masculinity’ – which borrows from medieval culture to ‘medievalise’ modern toxic masculinity. Using Halberstam’s idea of …
Objectifying Love: Ladies And Their Tokens, Saints And Their Relics In Chrétien De Troyes, Lydia Hayes
Objectifying Love: Ladies And Their Tokens, Saints And Their Relics In Chrétien De Troyes, Lydia Hayes
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Relics are powerful signifiers of the relationship between humanity and the divine because they allow humans to physically touch a part of a saint’s body or an extension of the saint’s body. This type of symbolism may also be found in the relationship between ladies and knights in Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, when a part of the lady’s body (her hair, for example) or an object that once belonged to the lady is touched by the knight. The objects that represent these ladies provide their knights with some form of power at crucial stages in the romances, usually encouraging …
Possession, Production, And Power: Reading Objects In The Material Field, Anne E. Lester
Possession, Production, And Power: Reading Objects In The Material Field, Anne E. Lester
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This response piece explores the revival of interest in materiality and the relationship between medieval material culture and gender. Offering a rich and extensive overview of the study of materiality and gender, including a new definition of the “material field” drawing on Bourdieu, the piece specifically discusses how objects obtain their value and meaning within medieval texts, including Arthurian romance literature. The response argues that material objects give a woman power and control, outlining how this is evident through objects within texts and in material production, as evidenced in the section’s articles. The response piece poses – and offers some …
Distaff As Weapon In The Margins Of Two Late-Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Romance Manuscripts, Emily Shartrand
Distaff As Weapon In The Margins Of Two Late-Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Romance Manuscripts, Emily Shartrand
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The marginal art of two late-thirteenth-century Arthurian romance manuscripts from French-Flanders are rife with motifs depicting violent battles. One such motif is that of a mounted joust between a knight and a woman. The knight is weaponless, but the woman wields a distaff, a tool used to spin wool or flax, as a lance in order to penetrate the knight. By contextualizing this motif with the text of the Vulgate Arthur, as well as the socio-political moment within which the manuscripts were produced, this article seeks to investigate how its inclusion could direct certain interpretations of the narratives in accompanies.
Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020
Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
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 …
Late Medieval Sexual Badges As Sexual Signifiers: A Material Culture Reappraisal, Sarah Hinds
Late Medieval Sexual Badges As Sexual Signifiers: A Material Culture Reappraisal, Sarah Hinds
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019
Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Performing Mystical Union In Mechthild Of Magdeburg’S The Flowing Light Of The Godhead, Jessi C. Piggott
Performing Mystical Union In Mechthild Of Magdeburg’S The Flowing Light Of The Godhead, Jessi C. Piggott
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg characterizes her revelations not as visions but as greetings, a term she uses to encompass gestures, verbal exchanges, and experiences perceived through multiple senses. Mechthild’s mysticism is thus best understood as a series of scenarios, the embodied nature of which cannot be fully contained by text. Using a performance studies approach, this paper identifies the traces of performance—textual prompts inextricable from their (explicit or implied, real or imagined) completion in physical and vocal acts—that can be found throughout Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead. How does Mechthild’s use of performance repertoires convey the mystical …
Disordered Women? The Hospital Sisters Of Mainz And Their Late Medieval Identities, Lucy C. Barnhouse
Disordered Women? The Hospital Sisters Of Mainz And Their Late Medieval Identities, Lucy C. Barnhouse
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Debates over the identity of women’s religious communities have exercised historians no less than late medieval canonists and officials. Even as the legal regulation of such communities increased, so, paradoxically, did the diversity of forms that such communities took. Although these trends have been the subject of much historical attention, the division of mixed-gender hospital communities which occurred across Europe in the thirteenth century has not hitherto been integrated into such studies. I attempt to redress this lacuna by examining the contested religious identity of the hospital sisters of Mainz. Forced to leave the mixed-gender staff of the city’s Heilig …
Experiencing Authority: The Wife Of Bath's Deaf Ear And The Flawed Exegesis Of St. Jerome, David Pedersen
Experiencing Authority: The Wife Of Bath's Deaf Ear And The Flawed Exegesis Of St. Jerome, David Pedersen
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Although Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is among English literature’s most analyzed characters, scholars have been remarkably uninterested in one of her most unique traits: her deaf ear. Despite the fact that this disability is mentioned more often than any of her other physical characteristics, more even than the regularly discussed gap in her teeth, scholars have rarely spent more than a paragraph addressing the deafness, if they do so at all. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that scholars have assumed a symbolic link between the Wife’s inability to hear and her problematic scriptural exegesis, and …
Mechthild Of Magdeburg, Hadewijch Of Brabant, And Marguerite Of Porete: The Annihilation Of The Soul And The Challenge To Church Authority, Ashley Odebiyi
Mechthild Of Magdeburg, Hadewijch Of Brabant, And Marguerite Of Porete: The Annihilation Of The Soul And The Challenge To Church Authority, Ashley Odebiyi
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019
Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Royal And Elite Households In Medieval And Early Modern Europe: More Than Just A Castle, Elena Woodacre
Royal And Elite Households In Medieval And Early Modern Europe: More Than Just A Castle, Elena Woodacre
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Conduct Becoming: Good Wives And Husbands In The Later Middle Ages, Tovah Bender
Conduct Becoming: Good Wives And Husbands In The Later Middle Ages, Tovah Bender
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Fragments For A History Of Vanishing Humanism, Heather Blatt
Fragments For A History Of Vanishing Humanism, Heather Blatt
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Imperial Ladies Of The Ottonian Dynasty: Women And Rule In Tenth-Century Germany, Janna Bianchini
Imperial Ladies Of The Ottonian Dynasty: Women And Rule In Tenth-Century Germany, Janna Bianchini
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, And Religion In The Early Spanish Kingdoms, Jessica A. Boon
Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, And Religion In The Early Spanish Kingdoms, Jessica A. Boon
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
The Witchcraft Sourcebook, Holle Canatella
The Witchcraft Sourcebook, Holle Canatella
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
The French Of Medieval England: Essays In Honour Of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, S. C. Kaplan
The French Of Medieval England: Essays In Honour Of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, S. C. Kaplan
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities In Medieval Europe, Charles-Louis Morand-Metivier
Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities In Medieval Europe, Charles-Louis Morand-Metivier
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
"Le Bone Florence Of Rome": A Critical Edition And Facing Translation Of A Middle English Romance Analogous To Chaucer's "Man Of Law's Tale", Brendan O'Connell
"Le Bone Florence Of Rome": A Critical Edition And Facing Translation Of A Middle English Romance Analogous To Chaucer's "Man Of Law's Tale", Brendan O'Connell
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Peace And Penance In Late Medieval Italy, Janine Larmon Peterson
Peace And Penance In Late Medieval Italy, Janine Larmon Peterson
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.