Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

One of the most ambiguous and contentious characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales is the Pardoner, the last (and arguably worst) of the pilgrims described in the General Prologue. The Pardoner accused of being a gelding or a mare endowed with several effeminate traits, plays on multiple gendered associations—including that of a cross-dressing woman. Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer manipulates gender expectations and assumptions in the figure of the Pardoner without fully clarifying the Pardoner’s sex, sexuality or gender, leaving the text open to potentially subversive interpretations. By the fourteenth century, cross-dressing was a relatively common literary motif, …

“A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter”: Medieval Histories Of Intoxication And Consent, Carissa M. Harris

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay traces medieval representations of intoxication and consent and links them to contemporary cases, including Brock Turner’s 2016 rape trial and the 2017 slew of lawsuits filed against Baylor University. Through an examination of medieval texts from a range of genres, including the Biblical stories of Lot and Noah, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, proverbs, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the 1292 legal case of Isabella Plomet, and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, this essay explores past views of gender, perpetrators, culpability, alcohol, and consent. It argues that victim-blaming those who have been assaulted while intoxicated has …

Afterlives Of Rape In Medieval English Literature, Nicole Nyffenegger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Monastic Women And Religious Orders In Late Medieval Bologna, Margaret Aziza Pappano

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

A Revelation Of Purgatory, Barbara Zimbalist

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Approaches To Teaching Behn's Oroonoko, Laura Saetveit Miles

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Book Of The Mutability Of Fortune By Christine De Pizan, Roberta Krueger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …

The Wealth Of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual, Olympia Pelosi

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Cristalian De Espana, Ana Grinberg

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Encyclopedia Of Medieval Literature In Britain, Alexandra Reider

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory And The Environmental Imagination, Renee R. Trilling

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Does It Have To Be About Women?, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The six essays on medieval texts in the "Gender and Species" cluster (or Special Issue) demonstrate the power of combining feminist analysis with critical animal studies.

Flying, Hunting, Reading: Rethinking Falcon-Woman Comparisons, Sara Petrosillo

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper assesses structures of power through the medieval practice of falconry, offering two considerations about how feminist studies and animal studies fruitfully converge: first, assessing a human-animal relationship helps dismantle patriarchal control when human handler stands for patriarch and subjugated animal stands for domesticated woman. Second, this particular human-animal relationship represents a feminist poetics. In addition to overturning misogynous comparisons between falcons and women, something more pointedly self-representational occurred when women were themselves depicted as falconers. Rather than a human-animal relationship standing in for a man-woman relationship, men seem to be out of the foreground, or even out of …

La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret's bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status …

“Compassion And Benignytee”: A Reassessment Of The Relationship Between Canacee And The Falcon In Chaucer’S “Squire’S Tale”, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Among its many elements, Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” includes an emotionally-charged dialogue between two aristocratic female figures: the human daughter of a king, Canacee, and the wounded falcon she meets in the wood. Scholars have debated the nature of this relationship in interspecial, gendered, and specifically feminist and ecofeminist terms. This essay provides a brief retrospective on some of the most recent scholarship examining their relationship—van Dyke (2005); Kordecki (2011); Crane (2012); and Schotland (2012 and 2015)—leading into a reassessment in two parts: first, that the affinity- and experience-driven bond these female figures develop supports a reading of this scene that …

Questioning Gynocentric Utopia: Nature As Addict In “Description Of Cookeham”, Liberty S. Stanavage

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In her 1610 “The Description of Cookeham,” Amelia Lanyer presents Cookeham as a space in which women and nature exist in poetry-inducing harmony until the intervention of man. Lanyer’s poem highlights the deference of both the animals (who “sport . . . in her eye” and “attend”), and the landscape to Clifford: the hills “descend” to meet her footstep and then raise themselves again at her whim. This alignment frequently leads critics to describe Cookeham as a utopian feminist landscape that aligns women and nature against an antagonistic masculine influence.

However, this utopian vision dramatizes a landscape that is not …

Belligerent Mothers And The Power Of Feminine Speech In _The Owl And The Nightingale_, Wendy A. Matlock

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale famously records the dispute between a hostile Nightingale and a bellicose Owl. Within that dialogue the birds reproduce themselves in word and egg, in rhetoric and body. Their digressions on bodies and scatology and on childbearing and childrearing become fertilizer that expands maternal authority into public, intellectual discourse. In addition to calling forth their own communicative powers, both characters aggressively recount narratives best known from the work of Marie de France, a voice feminist scholars have successfully restored to the canon, to condemn their foe. In this light, I argue, The …

Women And Other Beasts: A Feminist Perspective On Medieval Bestiaries, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Gender and species intersect in the subject-matter, readership, and authorship of medieval beast-books. First, androcentric norms result in inconsistent gender references to species: the grammatically feminine eagle (Aquila) is represented as a stern father, the masculine turtledove (Turtura) as a clinging wife. More broadly, male exemplars represent nearly all species regardless of grammatical gender.

Second, both discursive norms and bibliographic practice presumed an exclusively male readership for the bestiary, but external and internal evidence suggest that bourgeois mothers used bestiaries in educating their children.

Third, a more radical intervention in androcentric bestiary norms is an instance …

Not A Conclusion To Gender And Species, Ecofeminist Intersections, Lesley Kordecki

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Woman Personified: A Theoretical Framework For The Female Gender Of Personifications In Medieval Literature, Dinah Wouters

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article wants to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of why the majority of personifications in medieval literature are women. Especially, it seeks to refute the notion that female personifications of positive concepts would somehow escape or reverse the dominant gender ideology of its time. It brings together the different theories that have been proposed by scholars and situates them within a common framework. The article distinguish three levels to which these theories refer: these are, first, the level of the literal or the personification as a woman; second, the level of the figurative, or the idea that …

Simon De Montfort Et Le Gouvernement : Statut Des Femmes Dans Les Statuts De Pamiers (Art. 46) Avant La Magna Carta, Marjolaine Raguin-Barthelmebs

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Promulgated at Pamiers (Languedoc, France), 1^stDecember 1212 by Simon de Montfort after its first great victory during the Albigensian Crusade, those Statutes (juridical texts) are known as the introductory act for the Coutume of Paris in Languedoc, and more specifically regarding heirs rights. Redacted for the administration of newly conquest territories, the establishment of peace and to promote catholic faith against heresy and Languedocians owners of the land, theses Statutes dispose on women in their three final articles. More particularly, the article 46 concerns nobles and heirs women and decides, thanks to matrimony institution, who (and how) they …

“Ubi Et Est Habitatio Sororum Et Mansio Fratrum”: Doppelklöster Und Ähnliche Klostergemeinschaften Im Mittelalterichen Österreich (Diözese Passau In Den Ausdehnungen Des 13. Jahrhunderts), Lucy Barnhouse

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Empress Adelheid And Countess Matilda: Medieval Female Rulership And The Foundation Of European Society, Constance H. Berman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Medicine Beyond Doctors: Aphrodisiac Recipes In Tenth-Century Medicine And Cuisine, Shireen Hamza

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Textiles, Text And Intertext: Essays In Honour Of Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Laura Diener

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Silk Industries Of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, And Gendered Experience, Margaret Goehring

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.