Lenses, Focus, And Fluidity: Lessons From Medieval Queer History,
2022
Gettysburg College
Lenses, Focus, And Fluidity: Lessons From Medieval Queer History, Reese Hollister
The Gettysburg Historical Journal
The Medieval era is sometimes overlooked within the field of Queer and Transgender History, but a recent shift in focus has revealed new discoveries and interpretations. This historiographical analysis posits that in the Middle Ages, gender and sexuality were much more fluid than previously believed.
The Battle Of Tours Reconsidered,
2022
Liberty University
The Battle Of Tours Reconsidered, Paul Aitchison
Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship
This paper examines the Battle of Tours/Poitiers in 732 between the Merovingian Mayor of the Palace, Charles Martel, and the Umayyad governor-general of al-Andalus in modern-day Spain, Abdul Rahman Al-Ghafiqi. Since the pivotal works of Sir Edward Gibbons were published in 1776, the battle has been seen as keeping Europe from falling completely to Islam. More recent scholarship highlights the battle as pivotal in Charles's quest to consolidate power in his ultimately successful bid to create a new power in western Europe, the Carolingian dynasty, which would eventually be created in the crowning as the Holy Roman Empire his grandson, …
The Levant: France’S Colonial Crucible,
2022
Ursinus College
The Levant: France’S Colonial Crucible, Michael Adelson
French Summer Fellows
In the medieval era of religious and political tumult that culminated with the Crusades, (mostly) Roman Catholic Western European citizens from all walks of life committed themselves to conquer Jerusalem and wrest control of historically Christian lands from the Muslim polities that claimed the region. The historical Kingdom of France was a major contributor to the Crusades, and as such, the feudal realms established in the Levant in the wake of the First Crusade were dominated by former French crusaders and citizenry. The geographic boundaries and demography of these Crusader States are reminiscent of French hegemony in the Middle East …
Gendered Violence And The Family: An Analysis Of The 14th-Century Epic "Lion De Bourges",
2022
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
Gendered Violence And The Family: An Analysis Of The 14th-Century Epic "Lion De Bourges", Ashley Paige Holt
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is the first to focus on gender roles within the fourteenth-century French epic Lion de Bourges and the first work to feature extensive translations into English of this medieval text. Using the cyclical dismemberment and reunification of the Bourges family as a lens, it brings into focus the various members of the family, their relationships, and the larger thematic questions about family and society put forward by the poet. Chapter one interrogates the notion of the king as a national father figure as well as the spread of injury and violence from the father/king to the members of …
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 58.1 (2022),
2022
Western Michigan University
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 58.1 (2022)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Anglo-Danish Empire: A Companion To The Reign Of King Cnut The Great,
2022
University College London
Anglo-Danish Empire: A Companion To The Reign Of King Cnut The Great, Richard North, Erin Goeres, Alison Finlay
Northern Medieval World
Anglo-Danish Empire is an interdisciplinary handbook for the Danish conquest of England in 1016 and the subsequent reign of King Cnut the Great. Bringing together scholars from the fields of history, literature, archaeology and manuscript studies, the volume offers comprehensive analysis of England's shift from Anglo-Saxon to Danish rule. It follows the history of this complicated transition, from the closing years of the reign of King Æthelred II and the Anglo-Danish wars to Cnut's accession to the throne of England and his consolidation of power at home and abroad. Ruling from 1016 to 1035, Cnut drew England into a Scandinavian …
Trouble Within The Fold: The Communal Response To Madness In Medieval Europe,
2022
Portland State University
Trouble Within The Fold: The Communal Response To Madness In Medieval Europe, Alice P. Holland
University Honors Theses
Medieval descriptions of mental distress can inform us on a range of subjects, from community organization to diagnostic and interpretive practices. While we often employ the medical model of understanding disability presently and, while this model was still present in the Middle Ages, medieval individuals often understood mental distress as a religious phenomenon. This paper utilizes two miracle collections written in the twelfth century: The Miracle Collections of Thomas Becket and the Miracle Collection of Our Lady of Rocamadour. Miracle collections record miraculous occurrences at a saint's shrine. Many of these miracles documented healings and, of these healings, some …
“In Lucem Latine Locutionis”: The Hagiography Of Aelred Of Rievaulx,
2022
CUNY Graduate Center
“In Lucem Latine Locutionis”: The Hagiography Of Aelred Of Rievaulx, Chad Turner
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation analyzes the hagiography of Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1110-1167), a Cistercian who served as abbot of Rievaulx, a northern English monastery, from 1147 until his death. While there is much scholarship on his other works, his hagiographical works have received little attention, a fact that this dissertation seeks to rectify. In fact, as this dissertation demonstrates, attending to Aelred’s hagiography is well worth doing. It brings us to a better understanding of Aelred himself and his understanding of the world, both how it was and how it ought to be. This dissertation analyzes Aelred’s hagiographical works by placing …
Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building,
2022
Washington University in St. Louis
Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene
MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture
This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …
The Mélusine Romance In Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, And Material Contexts,
2022
Seton Hall University
The Mélusine Romance In Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, And Material Contexts, Angela Weisl
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge,
2022
University of California, Los Angeles
Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Medieval alchemy was an overwhelmingly masculine practice, and its instruction books reflect the exclusivity of its practitioners. This article examines the use of secrecy and masculine discourse in a sixteenth-century Latin alchemical handbook, the Liber aureus, to demonstrate that there exists an erotically charged tension between authors and their readers. Alchemical instruction books like the Liber aureus draw upon this tension in the service of a particular kind of gatekeeping that creates hierarchies of both knowledge and alchemical practitioners. By investigating secrecy and its provocative effects both within and beyond this manuscript, I argue that alchemical instruction books’ secretive …
The Cunning Linguist Of Agbabi’S “The Kiss”,
2022
Wabash College
The Cunning Linguist Of Agbabi’S “The Kiss”, Elan J. Pavlinich
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In the Old French fabliaux tradition, sex acts and generic conventions intersect, revealing strategies of power. For example, Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, a Middle English text that is informed by fabliaux conventions, follows the sexual desires and exchanges of power between men, in the context of a frame narrative that privileges competition between the men of The Canterbury Tales, which is located within English literary canons dominated by men. In “The Kiss,” Patience Agbabi’s modern retelling of The Miller’s Tale, the central woman of the narrative assumes authorial control, and she privileges sex acts that empower women’s …
A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles,
2022
University of New Brunswick (Emerita)
A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The pastourelle achieved what might be called its classic form in Middle French poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a mini-narrative in which the narrator, a knight or clerk, tells how he tried to have his will with a lower-class girl he happened upon while riding in the country. He greets her, sweet-talks her, and propositions her; she protests vigorously. Sometimes the debate ends here. Otherwise, her accoster overcomes her resistance by guile or force, and sexually assails her. The tone is light-hearted and cynical, the action crude. To modern readers, this narrative may be mildly amusing, rather tedious, …
Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority In Poitiers’ Abbey Of Sainte-Croix,
2022
Ashoka University
Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority In Poitiers’ Abbey Of Sainte-Croix, Alexandra Verini
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde,
2022
Hastings College
Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters …
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.2 (2022),
2022
Western Michigan University
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.2 (2022)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid,
2022
University of Aberdeen
Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid, Elizabeth Elliott
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The penultimate verse of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid suggests the possibility that Troilus raised a monument in memory of his former love, Cresseid: “Sum said he maid ane tomb of merbell gray” (l. 603). Examining the political implications of this uncertain act of memorialisation, this article considers how Henryson's poem mobilises the reader's emotional response to constitute Cresseid as a mourned subject, whose subjectivity is recognised only insofar as it is limited to suffering and death. In doing so, the Testament also establishes a subjectivity for women that offers conditional tolerance predicated on respectable behaviour, contributing to the historical production …
Mothers, Space, And Power In Athelston,
2022
University of Southampton
Mothers, Space, And Power In Athelston, Kirsty Bolton
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The late fourteenth-century Middle English romance Athelston explores the extent and propriety of monarchic power. Integral to this exploration are the characters of two women in the text whose enactments of motherhood reveal the very human failings of the divinely elected king and contribute to the romance’s advocation of law and the church to temper monarchic power. This article focuses on the use of space in relation to power, authority, gender, and motherhood, arguing that the writer of Athelston uses the disruption of gendered spaces, particularly in relation to pregnant women, to comment on systems of power and authority in …
John Crophill: A Trustworthy Man In Fifteenth-Century Rural England (Gms Essay Prize Article),
2022
University of York
John Crophill: A Trustworthy Man In Fifteenth-Century Rural England (Gms Essay Prize Article), Rehan Shah
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This paper explores the role of trust and trustworthiness in the masculine gender identity of the fifteenth-century bailiff and medical practitioner John Crophill (d. c. 1485) who resided in Wix, Essex. Drawing on evidence from his personal notebook, the work argues that Crophill was aware of the need to construct his trustworthy reputation, a requirement enacted via his own interaction with other individuals. A consideration of three separate elements of his persona (party host, craft master, and probable involvement with childbirth) provide a structure for the paper, as Crophill seemingly negotiates his own relationships with both male and female individuals, …
Who Does She Think She Is?,
2022
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Who Does She Think She Is?, Caroline W. Bynum
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Abstract: A retired medievalist uses an incident from her early career to urge younger scholars to both self-confidence and realism about their own scholarship. Pointing out that suspicion of bright, high-achieving women has not disappeared, she argues that the greatest weapon for triumphing over it is women’s self-confidence that they set their own standards for excellence.
