Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

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 …


Thomas Middleton And The Plural Politics Of Jacobean Drama, Mark Kaethler May 2021

Thomas Middleton And The Plural Politics Of Jacobean Drama, Mark Kaethler

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton's dramatic works as responses to James I's governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of …


“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler Mar 2021

“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the Brut narratives of medieval historiography, male heroic success and specifically the birth of Arthur are predicated upon the rape of Igerna. A comparative approach to the Tintagel episode across several of these narratives reveals how the emphasis on romance, magic, and nation-building function to validate sexual assault and elide Igerna’s experience. Ultimately, the repetition entailed in translatio studii, specifically the transfer that takes place within history-writing, reinforces the silencing of the survivor’s voice. This repetition lends trauma to the reading experience or creates the risk that readers become inured to the rape.


Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison Mar 2021

Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency …