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Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

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“Let Him Walk With You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, And The Women They Left Behind, Rachel E. Moss Jan 2022

“Let Him Walk With You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, And The Women They Left Behind, Rachel E. Moss

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In this article I use a blend of autoethnography and historical storytelling to explore the role of outdoor space in forming relationships between fifteenth-century men and their maintenance of hegemonic power. By weaving together three striking vignettes from late fifteenth-century England, constructed as creative retellings of the historical evidence, with autoethnographic notes on my own lived experience, I am able to fill in the gaps of the historical record and open up questions about the implications of what has been left out. I argue that the medieval cultural understanding of the outdoors as both spiritually and physically beneficial, as well …


Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And Race In The Middle Ages, C. Libby Jan 2022

Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And Race In The Middle Ages, C. Libby

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


The Matter Of Virtue: Women’S Ethical Action From Chaucer To Shakespeare, Masha Raskolnikov Jan 2022

The Matter Of Virtue: Women’S Ethical Action From Chaucer To Shakespeare, Masha Raskolnikov

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Christine De Pizan, “The God Of Love’S Letter” And “The Tale Of The Rose”, Roberta Krueger Jan 2022

Christine De Pizan, “The God Of Love’S Letter” And “The Tale Of The Rose”, Roberta Krueger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Being The Bigger Ram: Arable Vs Pastoral Masculinities In The Towneley Mactacio Abel, Daisy E. Black Jan 2022

Being The Bigger Ram: Arable Vs Pastoral Masculinities In The Towneley Mactacio Abel, Daisy E. Black

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article addresses the construction of rural masculine identities through a study of the Towneley manuscript play Mactacio Abel (The Killing of Abel) and the relationships the play stages between human, animal, and land. It argues that the Mactacio Abel places pastoral and arable agricultural labor in competition through the play’s two brothers, and that this competition takes the form of a gendered attack on the masculinity of each. The article begins with Cain’s arable farming and how the character’s antagonistic relationship with the earth hints at his failures as laborer and as a man. It examines Cain’s …


May Medica: Divine Healing And The Garden In “The Merchants Tale”, Maria Zygogianni Jan 2022

May Medica: Divine Healing And The Garden In “The Merchants Tale”, Maria Zygogianni

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The motif of the woman as a healer and/or cure (as a nurse, interceding saint, or beloved lady) occurs across medieval literary genres from romance to hagiography. This article explores the ways in which the character of May in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale reflects and parodies the figure of the female healer. The first section explores the healing women of romance and hagiographic traditions, as well as the frameworks of magic and saintly intervention which underpin them. The second section applies a framework of disability studies to the enfeebled body of May’s husband January, and his attempts to reconstitute his …


Female Desire In Chaucer’S “Legend Of Good Women” And Medieval English Romance, Suzanne M. Edwards Jan 2022

Female Desire In Chaucer’S “Legend Of Good Women” And Medieval English Romance, Suzanne M. Edwards

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Notes On Contributors Jan 2022

Notes On Contributors

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Lessons Learned—They’Re Not Just For Academia, But For Life, Linda E. Mitchell Jan 2022

Lessons Learned—They’Re Not Just For Academia, But For Life, Linda E. Mitchell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This look back on my career as a medieval historian of women, families, and gender focuses on the lessons I have learned from my tenure as a pre-professional and professional academic.


Women Intellectuals And Leaders In The Middle Ages, Edited By Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen., Linda E. Mitchell Jan 2022

Women Intellectuals And Leaders In The Middle Ages, Edited By Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen., Linda E. Mitchell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before The Modern, Edited By Greta Lafleur, Masha Raskolnikov, And Anna Klosowska., Nat Rivkin Jan 2022

Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before The Modern, Edited By Greta Lafleur, Masha Raskolnikov, And Anna Klosowska., Nat Rivkin

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance, Irina Dumitrescu, Emma O. Bérat Dec 2021

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, Megan Cavell Dec 2021

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, Sarah Brazil Dec 2021

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, Jennifer Garrison Dec 2021

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, Shirin Fozi Dec 2021

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”, Jenny C. Bledsoe Dec 2021

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 Dec 2021

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) Dec 2021

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, Shannon Jane Garner Dec 2021

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, Mary C. Flannery Dec 2021

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, Emma O. Bérat Dec 2021

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 …


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020 Mar 2021

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.2, Winter 2020

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020 Nov 2020

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019 May 2020

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019 May 2020

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


La Compiuta Donzella Of Florence (Ca. 1260): The Complete Poetry, Fabian Alfie Nov 2019

La Compiuta Donzella Of Florence (Ca. 1260): The Complete Poetry, Fabian Alfie

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Translation into English of extant poems of the thirteenth-century Italian poet La Compiuta Donzella of Florence with poems addressed to her by Mastro Torrigiano and a letter to her from Guittone d'Arezzo.


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.1, Summer 2019 Jul 2019

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.1, Summer 2019

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.54, No.2, Winter 2018 May 2019

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.54, No.2, Winter 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.54, No.1, Summer 2018 Oct 2018

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.54, No.1, Summer 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.