Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in History
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 58.1 (2022)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 58.1 (2022)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Mothers, Space, And Power In Athelston, Kirsty Bolton
Mothers, Space, And Power In Athelston, Kirsty Bolton
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
The late fourteenth-century Middle English romance Athelston explores the extent and propriety of monarchic power. Integral to this exploration are the characters of two women in the text whose enactments of motherhood reveal the very human failings of the divinely elected king and contribute to the romance’s advocation of law and the church to temper monarchic power. This article focuses on the use of space in relation to power, authority, gender, and motherhood, arguing that the writer of Athelston uses the disruption of gendered spaces, particularly in relation to pregnant women, to comment on systems of power and authority in …
John Crophill: A Trustworthy Man In Fifteenth-Century Rural England (Gms Essay Prize Article), Rehan Shah
John Crophill: A Trustworthy Man In Fifteenth-Century Rural England (Gms Essay Prize Article), Rehan Shah
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This paper explores the role of trust and trustworthiness in the masculine gender identity of the fifteenth-century bailiff and medical practitioner John Crophill (d. c. 1485) who resided in Wix, Essex. Drawing on evidence from his personal notebook, the work argues that Crophill was aware of the need to construct his trustworthy reputation, a requirement enacted via his own interaction with other individuals. A consideration of three separate elements of his persona (party host, craft master, and probable involvement with childbirth) provide a structure for the paper, as Crophill seemingly negotiates his own relationships with both male and female individuals, …
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.2 (2022)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.2 (2022)
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
No abstract provided.
Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis
Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Medieval alchemy was an overwhelmingly masculine practice, and its instruction books reflect the exclusivity of its practitioners. This article examines the use of secrecy and masculine discourse in a sixteenth-century Latin alchemical handbook, the Liber aureus, to demonstrate that there exists an erotically charged tension between authors and their readers. Alchemical instruction books like the Liber aureus draw upon this tension in the service of a particular kind of gatekeeping that creates hierarchies of both knowledge and alchemical practitioners. By investigating secrecy and its provocative effects both within and beyond this manuscript, I argue that alchemical instruction books’ secretive …
Gender, Science, And The Natural World: Essays On Medieval Literature From The 2020 Gender And Medieval Studies Conference, Linda E. Mitchell, Daisy E. Black
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.
Women’S Work And Men’S Devotions: The Fabrics Of The Passion In “O Vernicle”, Jenny C. Bledsoe
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 …
A Hive Of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers, Shannon Jane Garner
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 …
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (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.
Whose Sword? Materiality, Gender Subversion And The Fairy Women Of Middle English Romance, Jane Bonsall
Whose Sword? Materiality, Gender Subversion And The Fairy Women Of Middle English Romance, Jane Bonsall
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Though frequently steeped in elements of fantasy and featuring idealised or supernatural characters, Middle English romances are, at their core, concerned with the practicalities of material wealth and status among the gentry and aristocracy. This persistent concern with wealth and materiality is manifested in dramatic ways in some of the Middle English romances figuring magical women. In Melusine, Sir Launfal, and Partonope of Blois, the control of masculine-gendered objects of material wealth – and signifiers of chivalric identity – is given to the fairy ladies, rather than their knightly paramours. In their manipulation and control of these material symbols of …
Talking Back: Sodomy Laws And Transgressive Subjectivity In Medieval Venice, Alex Baldassano
Talking Back: Sodomy Laws And Transgressive Subjectivity In Medieval Venice, Alex Baldassano
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Urban Italian law, by the fifteenth-century, would become particularly aggressive in comparison to the rest of Europe not only in prosecuting sodomy, but also in implementing the threatened capital punishment. The 1354 Venetian court case of Rolandinus/a Ronchaia, in the century leading up to the officialization of the law, both exemplifies this trend and yet also stands out as unique because of the subject’s gender presentation; the case seeks to resolve whether or not this person, perceived either as ambiguously gendered or as a man dressed as a woman, can be convicted of committing sodomy or prostitution. Ronchaia, however, is …
The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel
The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Ælfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism provided by the four Latin Doctors and illustrated in the early Latin Lives of Roman martyrs, revealing the importance of memory in the construction of the monastic "third gender." In the second section McDaniel turns to creating a historical and theological cultural …
More Than One Way To Measure: Masculinity In The Zurkaneh Of Safavid Iran, Zachary T. Smith
More Than One Way To Measure: Masculinity In The Zurkaneh Of Safavid Iran, Zachary T. Smith
The Hilltop Review
The zurkhaneh of early modern Safavid Iran was an institution where men undertook physical training, in some ways reminiscent of a modern-day gymn. This paper attempts to theorize the zurkhaneh as a public space in which primarily non-elite men participated in the social economy of early modern Safavid Iran based upon their pursuit of the ideal of javanmardi, or young manliness. To accomplish this, this paper will combine the themes of publicity, the social utility of the body, and the authority of textuality with an examination of the physical culture of the zurkhaneh to theorize the utility, representation, and …
Gender And The Boundaries Of National Identity: U.S. Women As A Citizen Class In The Long 1960s, Sara Bijani
Gender And The Boundaries Of National Identity: U.S. Women As A Citizen Class In The Long 1960s, Sara Bijani
Masters Theses
This text analyzes the public ideologies and institutions that underpinned women's unequal status within the national collective of United States citizens during the long 1960s, paying particular attention to the executive office of Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the national security establishment. Women were frequently framed within these institutions as a separate special class of citizen, with rights and responsibilities not akin to those of the elite—male bodied—members of the national collective. Allowing for the imaginative construction of "women" as a subject class in U.S. society, this text argues that even with the guarantee of formal political rights in place, women …