Medieval Weathers: An Introduction,
2021
Birkbeck College, University of London
Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren
Medieval Ecocriticisms
Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.
Life And Health Concerns Of A European Monastic Scribe During The 14th Century,
2021
Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois
Life And Health Concerns Of A European Monastic Scribe During The 14th Century, Jared Reiling, Christopher O'Neill, Nick Curatolo
2021 Festschrift: The Interpolated Roman de Fauvel in Context
Writing in a quiet, candle-lit room may sound hygge to some, but monks during the 14th century would describe their work on the scriptorium as cold, depressing, tedious, mundane, and exhausting. The copying of all texts, including biblical and musical, was done by hand with monks working around the clock copying, illuminating manuscripts, and binding books. With the regimented schedule of monastic life, the Church worked scribes till exhaustion which created health problems and aggravated underlying conditions. Though cataracts were a common problem, commoners performed surgery on each other to restore sight, but it only made the situation worse.
Do It By The Book - The Development And Manufacturing Of Books In The Middle Ages,
2021
Augustana College
Do It By The Book - The Development And Manufacturing Of Books In The Middle Ages, Casey Cromp, Annaliese Croasdale, Emma Pilmer, Lauren Diciaula
2021 Festschrift: The Interpolated Roman de Fauvel in Context
This paper discusses the book-making progress in the Middle Ages that was used across Europe. This process includes the making of paper, the making of the inks used, bookbinding, and how books were printed. Each is an important aspect of how early manuscripts were created. Without these processes, there would not be written documentation of early literature or music. This paper provides a deeper understanding of the work that was implemented into creating early books, and gives insight as to what the book-making process consisted of before the development of present-day technologies.
Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance,
2021
University of Bonn
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.
Seeing Red: Visuality, Violence, And The Making Of Textiles In Early Medieval Enigmatic Poetry,
2021
University of Birmingham
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 …
Performing Female Sanctity—And Reading It: The Visitatio Sepulchri Of Wilton And Barking Abbey,
2021
University of Geneva
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 …
Transforming Community: Women’S Rape Narratives And Gower’S Confessio Amantis,
2021
St. Mary's University
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 …
Reconstructing Ita At Schaffhausen,
2021
University of Pittsburgh
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, …
Women’S Work And Men’S Devotions: The Fabrics Of The Passion In “O Vernicle”,
2021
Northeastern State University, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
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 …
About The Contributors,
2021
Western Michigan University
About The Contributors
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021),
2021
Western Michigan University
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
A Hive Of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers,
2021
Western Michigan University
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 …
Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom And The Alleged Incontinence Of Female Speech,
2021
University of Bern
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 …
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing,
2021
University of Bonn/Independent Scholar
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 …
Space, Image, And Reform In Early Modern Art: The Influence Of Marcia Hall,
2021
Savannah College of Art and Design
Space, Image, And Reform In Early Modern Art: The Influence Of Marcia Hall, Arthur J. Difuria, Ian Verstegen
Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations …
Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory,
2021
Western Michigan University
Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose
The Hilltop Review
In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …
Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works,
2021
University of Göttingen, Göttingen
Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works, Flora Sophie Lemburg
Journal of Tolkien Research
This paper examines the connection between the motif of the Old English warrior woman and Tolkien’s female characters. It provides a critique of Leslie Donovan’s paper “The valkyrie reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien´s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn and Arwen” and contrasts previous research on Tolkien’s female characters focussed either on gender-studies or on a “Germanic” influence with a more direct and specific connection between Medieval English and his works. The motif of the Old English warrior woman is established by investigating the female characters Judith, Elene, and Juliana from the Old English poems Judith, …
The Virago Paradigm Of Female Sanctity: Constructing The Masculine Woman In Medieval Christianity,
2021
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The Virago Paradigm Of Female Sanctity: Constructing The Masculine Woman In Medieval Christianity, Angela Bolen
Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The Latin word virago, in its simplest definition, means “a man-like, warrior woman.” For Christian men and women in the Patristic era and the central Middle Ages, the virago represented a woman who denied all biological characteristics of her womanhood, fiercely protected her virginity, and fully embodied the virtues of Christian masculinity. The virago paradigm of female sanctity, a creation of male writers, reconciled a pervasive fear of the female sex with an obvious admiration for holy women. Additionally, the virago model maintained the supremacy of masculine virtues, upheld a patriarchal hierarchy, and created a metaphorical space that validated …
The Heart Of Academia: Medieval Universities, Textbooks, And The Birth Of Academic Libraries,
2021
Indiana University Southeast
The Heart Of Academia: Medieval Universities, Textbooks, And The Birth Of Academic Libraries, Christopher Proctor
Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)
The contemporary academic library occupies a crucial role in the teaching and learning mission of universities. This centrality is perhaps best exemplified by the popular saying that the library is the heart of the university. But has this always been the case since the inception of universities in the High Middle Ages? To help answer this question, the following discussion traces the creation of universities within the medieval world, the textual traditions that informed their scholarship and pedagogy, and the later birth of academic libraries within the college and university system. The author attempts to demonstrate that the rise of …
Playing With Fire: The Medieval Judicial Ordeals And Their Downfall,
2021
Ohio State University - Main Campus
Playing With Fire: The Medieval Judicial Ordeals And Their Downfall, Aaron Larson
Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal
Trials by ordeal in the Middle Ages prove to be some of the most complex secular trials in all of history. Both trial by fire, and trial by water looked to call God's judgment into play, hoping that He would make the decisions of guilt or innocence. God is all-knowing. He is all-powerful. Therefore He has all of the relevant information to determine the fates of those who go through the ordeals. Despite this, the theologians in the medieval Church looked to lessen clerical involvement in the ordeals. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council met, and the ordeals ceased to …
