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Vice & Virtue As Woman?: The Iconography Of Gender Identity In The Late Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations, Stephenie Mcgucken Oct 2019

Vice & Virtue As Woman?: The Iconography Of Gender Identity In The Late Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations, Stephenie Mcgucken

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the Late Anglo-Saxon illustrated manuscripts of Prudentius's Psychomachia, vice and virtue are often shown ambiguously and the audience is encouraged to question what is male and what is female, and whether such categories are appropriate in understanding these illustrations. This paper utilises transgender theory to demonstrate how gender could be deployed in Late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to question the roles of men and women with the ultimate aim of stressing the importance of righteous behaviours.


Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman May 2019

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 …