Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gender, Science, And The Natural World: Essays On Medieval Literature From The 2020 Gender And Medieval Studies Conference, Linda E. Mitchell, Daisy E. Black

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Introduction to the special issue of literature articles from the 2020 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference.

Thereby Hangs A Tail: Creation And Procreation In Medieval Werewolf Romances, Vicki Blud

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

How do you make a werewolf? Moreover, who makes a werewolf, and why? In medieval romance, the latter questions are often the more pressing, since the transformation of man into wolf is connected less with lunar phases than with human interference—especially the intervention of an unfaithful wife. Following in the pawprints of Marie de France’s lai of Bisclavret, these romances are noted for their “courtly” wolves and antifeminist slant, but they also offer unusual perspectives on procreation. While in Aristotelian thought the generative principle was broadly associated with the male partner, the male werewolf of medieval romance is most often …

Abduction And Feminine Expression In Sir Orfeo, Ruth Worgan

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article provides a new, queer feminist reading of Sir Orfeo, in which Dame Heurodis facilitates her abduction by the Fairy King in order to destabilize the patriarchal possession of her body. Using Luce Irigaray’s work on the exchange of women between men, I discuss Heurodis’s value as a commodity and how she extricates herself from this position. Irigaray proposes that the primeval patriarchy created an exclusive between-men discourse within society, a consequence of which is the consuming masculine gaze. I consider how the silencing of the feminine is akin to the silence of the natural world, and how …

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 …

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Medieval Women, Material Culture, And Power: Matilda Plantagenet And Her Sisters, Mary Dockray-Miller

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Notes On Contributors

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren

Medieval Ecocriticisms

Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.

Healthcare Access Barriers And Proposed Solutions For Limited English-Proficient (Lep) Latinx Patients In Southwest Michigan, Carmen Vinkemulder

Honors Theses

This research study explores the circumstances and experiences of LatinX patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) when seeking treatment in the healthcare system of Southwest Michigan, in addition to proposing solutions to better facilitate this population’s access. The terminology used in this research, LatinX, is an American English neologism used as a genderinclusive term used interchangeably with Latino/a and/or Hispanic. This research provides an overview of the current socio-political legislature and climate of the American healthcare system as it pertains to the LatinX population to spread awareness and identify the barriers existing in our current healthcare model. This study will …

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021)

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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, …

Engaging With The Score: Wadada Leo Smith, Graphic Notation, And The Performer’S Perspective, Kennedy Taylor Dixon

Masters Theses

As a Composer/Performer, my work exists in both realms. This thesis reflects the principle that my experience as a violist influences my compositional process and vice versa. Since identifying under both artistic skill sets, it has become evident that the two areas that exist as a creative and presentational output, thrive off one another’s success.

In June 2019, I had the chance to play Wadada Leo Smith’s String Quartet No. 3: Black Church, The First World Gathering of the Spirit (1995) at the Nief-Norf Summer Festival. This encounter was the first time I interacted with graphically notated scores as a …

The Exploration Of Various Literary Genres Through Short Story Writing, Abigail Cowan

Honors Theses

This project contains four short stories and one collection of poetry. The first, “Touch-Me-Nots,” explores self-harm and healing using the touch-me-not plant as an analogy for avoiding self-harm and leaves readers with the hopeful sentiment of a person willing to heal by “leaving it alone.” Next, “The Bear and the Ant,” inspired by Aesop’s Fables, anthropomorphizes a bear and an ant and leaves readers with a ‘moral’ in true Aesop Fable fashion. Inspired by the ants who ransacked my six-month-old Halloween candy stash, I detail a Bear which attempts to “save” its honey for a day that never comes. The …

Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Readings Of The Medieval Orient: Other Encounters, Liliana Sikorska

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of this book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction.

Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the “Oriental obsession,” stimulating …

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 …

Gendered Language In The Catalogues Of Saint Mary’S Academy, 1860-1871, Kylie Hamm

Masters Theses

This research builds upon studies that explore Catholic women’s and girls’ educational institutions in the nineteenth century. This case study focuses on one girls’ academy, Saint Mary’s Academy, precursor to Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, founded by the Congregation of the Holy Cross in 1844. The research provided here analyzes the gendered language utilized by school leaders in the academy’s public catalogues during the decade of the Civil War, from 1860 through 1871. The language in these catalogues subtly changed over the course of the decade, reflecting changing white, middle-class gender norms surrounding women’s work and education. Leaders of …

Adapting The Ceramics Process With Creative Problem-Solving, Jennifer K. Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Madeline Kaczmarczyk, a ceramics sculptor based in Rockford, MI, provided the cover art for the Fall 2021 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). The piece is a wall vase made from clay, luster glaze, and glass beads. Madeline has been creating decorative ceramics for over four decades. In recent years, Madeline has found creative ways to adapt the ceramics process so she can continue creating beautiful works of art. For Madeline, ceramics is more than a means to make a living. This meaningful activity brings focus to her life.

The Star-Gazer, Jennifer Kean

The Hilltop Review

“The Star-Gazer” is modeled loosely on the Old English poem “The Wife’s Lament.” This medieval elegiac composition expresses beautifully the tensions that attend unrequited or abandoned love. It is awkward: there are clearly contrasting sentiments for the absent lover. It is frustrated and distressed: the reasons for the lover’s truancy are unclear to the reader, and presumably to The Wife. It is confused: The Wife does not understand why her partner has put physical and emotional distance between them, and the nature-imagery reflects how open-ended heartbreak can suspend, or even immobilize, personal growth. In my composition, I experiment with the …

3.14.21 - Spring, Clayton Meldrum

The Hilltop Review

This poem, written in one sitting on a Sunday morning, is a reflection not only on the transition between the physical seasons, but on the condition of the authors heart, moving from a personal season of hurt and cold bitterness (winter), on the way towards one of happiness and warmth (summer). But there is the season in between - spring.

Age Of The Universe, Sydney Sheltz-Kempf

The Hilltop Review

No abstract provided.