Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
French and Francophone Literature Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in French and Francophone Literature
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
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 …
Wild Wales: How Cultural Discrimination Transformed Merlin From Brittonic Legends To French Arthurian Romances, Viveca Calista Lawrie
Wild Wales: How Cultural Discrimination Transformed Merlin From Brittonic Legends To French Arthurian Romances, Viveca Calista Lawrie
Senior Projects Spring 2021
The legend of King Arthur and his knights of the round table is one of the best-known stories in the Western world. Generally people tend to associate Arthurian legend with fifteenth-century English writing or French romances, but in reality, Arthurian legend has its origins in Brittonic oral tradition. Merlin, specifically, represents the concepts of Brittonic paganism and wildness more than any other Arthurian character. The changes made in the character and the narrative of Merlin, from Brittonic legend to Latin writing and then to French romances, reflect a political and cultural shift in Britain and France. An examination of Merlin …