Feminist Archive
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Julian of Norwich’s “Christ as Mother” and Medieval Constructions of Gender
Posted on April 13, 2013 | No CommentsRecent Christian feminists have revived an interest in women mystics and feminine religious imagery. In light of what most people generalize about medieval misogyny and about the veneration of the Virgin as a surrogate for a female divinity, Julian of Norwich's trope of Christ as Mother seems even more remarkable. -
Sisters Between: Gender and the Medieval Beguines
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe origins of the Beguines can be traced to two important medieval religious reform movements: monastic mysticism and the vita apostolica, or "apostolic life." -
Syphilis, Misogyny, and Witchcraft in 16th-Century Europe
Posted on February 19, 2013 | No CommentsSyphilis, Misogyny, and Witchcraft in 16th-Century Europe Eric B. Ross Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 333-337 Abstract While debate continues over the geographical origin of syphilis... -
Mi Suete Leuedi, Her Mi Béne: The Power and Patronage of the Heroine in Middle English Romance
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe Middle English Romances are somewhat difficult to study as a group. In order to examine these works accurately, one must take into consideration other literature produced at the same tirne, as well as that which preceded it. -
En/gendering representations of childbirth in fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish devotional manuscripts
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsLate-medieval representationsof the births of holy and heroic children invariably show a domestic interior with the new mother lying in bed attended by female assistants.These images thus appearto show a `genderedspace' in which women cared for each other and from which men were marginalized. -
Christine de Pizan in her study
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsBy the time Christine began the Cité des dames which she completed in 1405 she stated firmly that it had become the “habit of my life” to study literature (in which she included history) and as usual she was sitting in her cell. But how did this become such a habit? -
New directions for early medieval women’s history?
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsIn what follows, I will be looking largely at the period 500–1000. There is a lot of vitality in late antique women's history in the late antique period, springing ultimately from the twin roots of feminist analysis of early Christianity, such as by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elizabeth A. Clark, and the work of authors such as Michel Foucault and Amy Richlin on classical sexuality. -
Looking Back: Medieval French Romance and the Dynamics of Seeing
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation builds upon the work of feminist medievalists and other literary and cultural scholars to argue that sight, and objects that are seen, articulate love relationships between characters in medieval romances, and that seeing is frequently a locus of resistance to gender norms the texts both establish and refuse to accept. -
Medieval Feminine Humanism and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Presentation of the Anti-Cecilia
Posted on November 22, 2012 | No CommentsPerhaps the tale has been dismissed because, compared to the other tales, it appears to be simple and straightforward. Lynn Staley Johnson points out that “most Chaucerians hold that this legend could not have been written before about 1373” and further that “it is generally accepted that Chaucer decided to include the legend in the Canterbury book relatively late in the Canterbury period” . -
The Wife of Bath: a Tragic Caricature of Women
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Wife is characterized by a preoccupation with sex, which she uses to manipulate her husbands, of which she has had five, into acquiescing their land and money to her control. -
How to be a Man, Though Female: Changing Sex in Medieval Romance
Posted on November 12, 2012 | No CommentsGender participates in a series of taxonomies that structure the social order, and it therefore participates in processes beyond itself, such as Christianity and knighthood, which are equally about identity within the world of chivalric romance. Therefore, the inscription of one often helps to define the other. -
The Empress in Late Antiquity and the Roman Origins of the Imperial Feminine
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis seeks to explore the construction and conceptualization of the Byzantine imperial feminine, up until the sixth century AD. -
The True Characters of Criseyde and of Diomede in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: A Restoration of the Reputations of Two Misunderstood Characters Unjustly Maligned in Literary Criticism
Posted on September 8, 2012 | No CommentsThis is a defence of the characters of Criseyde and of Diomede based, inter alia, on a close textual analysis. -
The Women of the Wars of Independence in Literature and History
Posted on August 29, 2012 | No CommentsMy paper will have two main goals. The first goal is to survey the historical evidence available for the study of real women who were affected by the war...The second goal will be to consider the theoretical implications of the representation of women in a discourse produced entirely by men. -
A Feminist of the Medieval Times: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales
Posted on August 23, 2012 | No CommentsChaucer’s characters take part in a story-telling contest while going on the pilgrimage. Among them, the Wife of Bath is an outstanding woman who seems not to be a typical figure in the medieval times. -
Triangles of the Sacred Sisterhood
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsIn courtly works, the resolution is generally in favour of the status quo as a courtly adulterous affair rarely works out, while in the fabliau the marriage is generally left intact, although a deceitful wife may be given carte blanche to philander. -
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
Posted on July 24, 2012 | No CommentsMadness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society. -
Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsAs a geographic trope transposed to literary discourse, discovery remains closely linked to the desire for possession. Postcolonial criticism has sought to deconstruct the feminized and sexualized discourses of geographic places and spaces as objects of desire, invasion, and annexation. -
The negotiation of gender and power in medieval German writings
Posted on July 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe Christian religion plays a most important role in the internalization and re-enforcement of patriarchy in the Western world. As will be seen later in this thesis, the relationship between a patriarchal God and his "children" is reflected in the relationship between the male head of the family and his wife, children and servants. -
Bogomils, Cathars, Lollards, and the High Social Position of Women During the Middle Ages
Posted on June 24, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the 12th century, if not slightly earlier, Western Europe lived through a period of economic and social upheavel termed by many historians the 12th c. Renaissance. One of its aspects is related to the considerable emancipation of women mostly in Southern France, a development which spread over to Italy, Flanders, and later, England. One can even detect social zones where real emancipation was axhieved. -
Constructions of Gender in Medieval Welsh Literature
Posted on June 17, 2012 | No CommentsThe discussion of gender in medieval literary criticism is generally considered to be a relatively new field, having achieved real momentum only in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, since it was the early fifteenth century when Christine de Pisan wrote a response to Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, it cannot really be imagined that the medieval audience was too primitive to be fully aware of the subtext inside their stories. -
Love, Mercy, and Courtly Discourse: Marguerite de Navarre Reads Alain Chartier
Posted on June 17, 2012 | No CommentsLove, Mercy, and Courtly Discourse: Marguerite de Navarre Reads Alain Chartier Frelick, Nancy (University of British Columbia) Mythes à la cour, mythes pour la four (2010). 325-36 Abstract In the Heptaméron, Marguerite de... -
The daughters of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine: a comparative study of twelfth-century royal women
Posted on June 17, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis is the first study of the daughters of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine which considers them in a dynastic context. -
The Publisher Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Female Readers, and the Debate about Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Posted on June 14, 2012 | No CommentsDrawing on recent work on the social history of the book and the politics of reading, this essay considers the texts under question as social products, whose meaning is not just determined by the author’s initial intentions, but is further shaped in the process of production, dissemination, and reception as a result of negotiation among several parties in a given historical moment. -
Husbands, Wives, and Adultery in Late-Medieval Northern France
Posted on June 10, 2012 | No CommentsIf painting a slightly less stark picture of gender inequality than the above account of total repression for women and total freedom for men, modern scholars generally assume that medieval European courts did not enforce the Christian prohibition against husbands’ adultery.
