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Full-Text Articles in History
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
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 …
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.
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 …
La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon
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 …