Medieval History Commons^™

The Afterward: Sylvia Rivera And Marsha P. Johnson In The Medieval Imaginary, Joy Ellison, Nicholas Hoffman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Studying Gender In Medieval Europe: Historical Approaches, Caroline Dunn

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Amalasuintha: The Transformation Of Queenship In The Post-Roman World, Nicole Lopez-Jantzen

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.1, Summer 2019

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing The Legacy Of A Medieval Myth, S. C. Kaplan

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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, …

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

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.

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.

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Opportunism & Duty: Gendered Perceptions Of Women's Involvement In Crusade Negotiation And Mediation (1147-1254), Gordon M. Reynolds

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Women’s involvement in negotiation and mediation during the Middle Ages has received close scrutiny. However, few scholars have concentrated their investigations on the trends in female-led negotiations during the crusades in the Near East, and the significance of the religious connotations of such leadership in this theatre. There were dramatic societal shifts in the Latin East during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, most significantly in the aftermath of the Battle of Hattin and loss of Jerusalem in 1187. The destruction of much of the Latin East’s crusader states that followed Jerusalem’s fall displaced many individuals, and with a plethora of Christian nobles …

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.

Approaches To Teaching Behn's Oroonoko, Laura Saetveit Miles

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 …

“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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.53, No.2 2018

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.