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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

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Articles 91 - 120 of 341

Full-Text Articles in Medieval History

Who Does She Think She Is?, Caroline W. Bynum May 2022

Who Does She Think She Is?, Caroline W. Bynum

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Abstract: A retired medievalist uses an incident from her early career to urge younger scholars to both self-confidence and realism about their own scholarship. Pointing out that suspicion of bright, high-achieving women has not disappeared, she argues that the greatest weapon for triumphing over it is women’s self-confidence that they set their own standards for excellence.


The Lay Saint: Charity And Charismatic Authority In Medieval Italy, Mary Anne Gonzales May 2022

The Lay Saint: Charity And Charismatic Authority In Medieval Italy, Mary Anne Gonzales

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


This Is My Body: Eucharistic Theology And Anthropology In The Writings Of Gertrude The Great Of Helfta, Jessica Barr May 2022

This Is My Body: Eucharistic Theology And Anthropology In The Writings Of Gertrude The Great Of Helfta, Jessica Barr

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Margery Kempe’S Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation And The Life-Course, Lucy Barnhouse May 2022

Margery Kempe’S Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation And The Life-Course, Lucy Barnhouse

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


The Letters Of Margaret Of Anjou, Gabrielle F. Storey May 2022

The Letters Of Margaret Of Anjou, Gabrielle F. Storey

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Notes On Contributors May 2022

Notes On Contributors

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck May 2022

A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The pastourelle achieved what might be called its classic form in Middle French poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a mini-narrative in which the narrator, a knight or clerk, tells how he tried to have his will with a lower-class girl he happened upon while riding in the country. He greets her, sweet-talks her, and propositions her; she protests vigorously. Sometimes the debate ends here. Otherwise, her accoster overcomes her resistance by guile or force, and sexually assails her. The tone is light-hearted and cynical, the action crude. To modern readers, this narrative may be mildly amusing, rather tedious, …


Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis May 2022

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 …


Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini May 2022

Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters …


Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments For An Ill-Used Past, Ana C. Núñez May 2022

Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments For An Ill-Used Past, Ana C. Núñez

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


When Feminism Isn't Enough, Monica H. Green May 2022

When Feminism Isn't Enough, Monica H. Green

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

An invited “retrospective” on Monica H. Green's career in medieval studies.


Mothers, Space, And Power In Athelston, Kirsty Bolton May 2022

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 …


Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority In Poitiers’ Abbey Of Sainte-Croix, Alexandra Verini May 2022

Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority In Poitiers’ Abbey Of Sainte-Croix, Alexandra Verini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men And Salvation In Medieval Women’S Monastic Life, Holle Canatella May 2022

Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men And Salvation In Medieval Women’S Monastic Life, Holle Canatella

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


John Crophill: A Trustworthy Man In Fifteenth-Century Rural England (Gms Essay Prize Article), Rehan Shah May 2022

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, …


The Cunning Linguist Of Agbabi’S “The Kiss”, Elan J. Pavlinich May 2022

The Cunning Linguist Of Agbabi’S “The Kiss”, Elan J. Pavlinich

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the Old French fabliaux tradition, sex acts and generic conventions intersect, revealing strategies of power. For example, Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, a Middle English text that is informed by fabliaux conventions, follows the sexual desires and exchanges of power between men, in the context of a frame narrative that privileges competition between the men of The Canterbury Tales, which is located within English literary canons dominated by men. In “The Kiss,” Patience Agbabi’s modern retelling of The Miller’s Tale, the central woman of the narrative assumes authorial control, and she privileges sex acts that empower women’s …


Brigid Of Kildare: The Saint Who Got A Facelift, Aimee Hunt Jan 2022

Brigid Of Kildare: The Saint Who Got A Facelift, Aimee Hunt

Student Research

On the outskirts of Papal authority, early medieval Ireland created its own Christian identity separate from other European nations closer to Rome. Saint Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of Ireland, played important yet problematic roles in that identity. After her death, the church began to alter her history. Being a female bishop, performing the first recorded abortion, and having both men and women within her monastery, Brigid had trodden on the male-dominated system in a way that few women had. Deemed unacceptable but having already been sainted, the Catholic church gave Brigid a holy facelift.


Female Masculinity In The Embodied Beowulf Wetlands: A New, Radical, Ecofeminist Approach, Teresa Pilgrim Jan 2022

Female Masculinity In The Embodied Beowulf Wetlands: A New, Radical, Ecofeminist Approach, Teresa Pilgrim

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article argues that the embodied characterization of Grendel’s mother offers us an alternative heroic model for women, from the titular hero, Beowulf, around whose heroic life and legacy the Old English poem is structured and more usually celebrated. In doing so, it addresses the problematic legacy of the heroic, masculinist poem and its pedagogical role as a canonical text for English literature and national identity which also informs our cultural attitudes to gender-based violence. This article examines female masculinity in the embodied Beowulf wetlands to recover an alternative, powerful, legacy for feminism. Grounded within previous feminist, queer, ecofeminist, and …


British Literature I, Justin Shaw Jan 2022

British Literature I, Justin Shaw

Syllabus Share

What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to have an identity? This course serves as an entry point to the study of early British literature and its historical contexts. We examine texts written from the 7th to the 17th Centuries that comprise a portion of what we call British literature. This survey engages poetry, prose, and drama that reimagine the complexities of intersectional identity, render the nation as part of a global stage, and challenge conventions of sexuality and gender. It traces early texts written by and about people on the margins of “Britishness” and "Englishness" such …


Medieval Women, Material Culture, And Power: Matilda Plantagenet And Her Sisters, Mary Dockray-Miller Jan 2022

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.


Foreword To “Gender, Science, And The ‘Natural’ World”, Laura Kalas Jan 2022

Foreword To “Gender, Science, And The ‘Natural’ World”, Laura Kalas

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

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Gender, Science, And The Natural World: Essays On Medieval Literature From The 2020 Gender And Medieval Studies Conference, Linda E. Mitchell, Daisy E. Black Jan 2022

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.


“Let Him Walk With You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, And The Women They Left Behind, Rachel E. Moss Jan 2022

“Let Him Walk With You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, And The Women They Left Behind, Rachel E. Moss

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In this article I use a blend of autoethnography and historical storytelling to explore the role of outdoor space in forming relationships between fifteenth-century men and their maintenance of hegemonic power. By weaving together three striking vignettes from late fifteenth-century England, constructed as creative retellings of the historical evidence, with autoethnographic notes on my own lived experience, I am able to fill in the gaps of the historical record and open up questions about the implications of what has been left out. I argue that the medieval cultural understanding of the outdoors as both spiritually and physically beneficial, as well …


Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And Race In The Middle Ages, C. Libby Jan 2022

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


The Matter Of Virtue: Women’S Ethical Action From Chaucer To Shakespeare, Masha Raskolnikov Jan 2022

The Matter Of Virtue: Women’S Ethical Action From Chaucer To Shakespeare, Masha Raskolnikov

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Christine De Pizan, “The God Of Love’S Letter” And “The Tale Of The Rose”, Roberta Krueger Jan 2022

Christine De Pizan, “The God Of Love’S Letter” And “The Tale Of The Rose”, Roberta Krueger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.


Lessons Learned—They’Re Not Just For Academia, But For Life, Linda E. Mitchell Jan 2022

Lessons Learned—They’Re Not Just For Academia, But For Life, Linda E. Mitchell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This look back on my career as a medieval historian of women, families, and gender focuses on the lessons I have learned from my tenure as a pre-professional and professional academic.


Women Intellectuals And Leaders In The Middle Ages, Edited By Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen., Linda E. Mitchell Jan 2022

Women Intellectuals And Leaders In The Middle Ages, Edited By Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen., Linda E. Mitchell

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 Jan 2022

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.


Female Desire In Chaucer’S “Legend Of Good Women” And Medieval English Romance, Suzanne M. Edwards Jan 2022

Female Desire In Chaucer’S “Legend Of Good Women” And Medieval English Romance, Suzanne M. Edwards

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.