Husbands, Wives, and Adultery in Late-Medieval Northern France
If 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.
The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art: An Introduction
This simplification is frankly astonishing when one considers the complex, multivalent and inventive iconographic contexts in which full or partial nakedness appears in medieval art.
The Middle English Manuscripts and Early Readers of Ancrene Wisse
The main manuscripts (i.e. leaving aside E’) range in date from the mid- thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The eartiest seem to be C and A. These manuscripts both seem to date on textual and palaeographical grounds from around the middle of the first half of the thirteenth century (C has revisions by other scribes in hands from towards the end of the century).
Saints and sinners in the works of Marie de France
What was Marie trying to share with her twelfth century audience when she wrote The Lais?
Partners in Rule: A Study of Twelfth-Century Queens of England
The queens of twelfth-century England provide a prime example of how the queen was not, in fact, powerless in the rule of her realm, but rather a significant governmental official who had the opportunity to take a complementary part in royal rule that suited her strengths.
Figures of Female Militancy in Medieval France
These days when chivalry is everywhere on the decline, and no one dares to tourney anymore, and all knights are cowards, women are all the more courageous in battle.’
“Ek Skal Hér Ráða”: Themes of Female Honor in the Icelandic Sagas
A major goal of this thesis is to not only interpret the representations of women from these sagas, but also to place these representations in the context of the time and the writers. Icelanders wrote these sagas a couple centuries after the Viking age ended and are based nearly entirely on oral tradition.
What Can Historians Do with Clerical Masculinity? Lessons from Medieval Europe
Clerical masculinity, the subject of this volume, has the power to revitalize connections between modern and premodern histories.
Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective
erhaps some help is to be found in the usual scholarly move of sur- veying the literature. What does the phrase mean in the rapidly increas- ing number of books with the body in the title-an increase only too apparent to anyone who walks these days into a bookstore?
‘He contents the people wherever he goes’ Richard III: His Parliament and Government
In recent years new biographies of great figures such as Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy have shed great light on key issues of English-European relations, while studies of Margaret Beaufort have redefined the political role of the women of this era.
Oda: An Extraordinary Example of a Medieval Woman’s Religious Authority and Economic Power
hristianity posed as a shackle for many women in the early Middle Ages. Though sexism and female subordination were prevalent prior to the emergence of this monotheistic religion, Christianity established its own justifications for continuing in the male domination.
Women and Marriage in Medieval Society
The feudal world was a face-to-face society in which women participated in important activities and were expected to submit to social discipline like their men.
Flowers for the Book-binder’s Wife: An Investigation of Florilegia and Early Modern Women’s Writing
To an early modern, nothing could be fully learned through a “hands off” approach. Heidi Brayman Hackel corroborates this with her book, Reading Material. Critical to early modern thoughts on comprehension was “taking note,” a phrasing that carried the double implication of both noticing and annotating…
The female body, animal imagery, and authoritarian discourse in the Ancrene Riwle
Through close reading and rhetorical analysis of numerous passages in the guide, this dissertation re-examines the importance of the body and authority in this work and notes the points at which the discourse of the Ancrene Riwle tends to place restrictions on its audience of medieval women religious.
VAGANTES: “I See Red: Language of Blood and Feminity in Táin Bó Cúailnge
This paper examined the role of Medb and Fedelm, the seer in the Táin. It focuses on this conversation between the seer and Medb.
VAGANTES: “That is a Long Preamble of a Tale”: Mobile Narratives in Fragment III of the Canterbury Tales
This paper focused on the 12 lines from fragment 3 of the Canterbury Tales of The Wife of Bath.
Reading about Lancelot in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
This book is the central one of Troilus and Criseyde’s five books, with the sexual union of Troilus with Criseyde forming the climax and turning-point of the entire plot-structure, condensed at the start of the work by Chaucer in the words “fro woe to wele and after out of joie.”
“Kan he speke wel of love?”: Luf talk and Chivalry
In my view, Criseyde’s inquiry about Troilus’s verbal skill in “luf talk” highlights more a problematic issue of Criseyde’s concern about a man’s “loves craft” than that of his class in society. As Chaucer’s narrator remarks in the proem of Book II (22-42), every human activity in love is governed by language conventions, expressive shortcuts that a community agrees to understand and honor…
The Harsh Life on the 15th Century Croatia-Ottoman Empire Military Border: Analyzing and Identifying the Reasons for the Massacre in Cepin
Turkish intrusions into what is today the continental part of Croatia began in 1391 and continued throughout the 15th, and the beginning of the 16th century when a large part of continental Croatia was incorporated into the Turkish Empire.
The Economics of Lady Mede’s Agency in The Vision of Piers the Plowman
This paper will argue that rather than being controlled by the process of sexual commodification Lady Mede uses the correlation of gender, money, and sex to counter Conscience’s attempts to discount her place in the court and, in so doing, her agency.
VAGANTES: Necessary Imperfection: The Body of Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne
This paper seeks to examine the role of the body and its relationship to the world around it in the “vie de sainte” of Marie l’Egyptienne, who is an excellent example of a female saint who begins life as a sinner and transforms her body into something holy. This presentation will focus on the version of Marie l’Egyptienne’s life written by Rutebeuf in the 13th century, but will also bring in elements of other versions and of the stories of other female saints who transform their bodies for comparison.
Temptation and Redemption: A Monastic Life in Stone
The monks who wrote the legend of Eugenia and those of the other transvestite women/monks were explicitly including a female in an all male monastic milieu. Women, as a rule, were not allowed in male monastic enclosures; the Rule at Cluny strictly forbade any women to enter the grounds.
Convents, Courts and Colleges: The Prioress and the Second Nun
Pilgrimage, after Whitby, and before Vatican II, was a secular activity, a performance of piety by the laity, not by the clergy; although there were a few exceptions.7 Chaucer’s Monk, Friar, Prioress, Nun, Priest, Summoner, Pardoner and Parson ought not to be here. Their presence is outrageous comedy. Inns were forbidden to the cloistered clergy who, if they had to travel, were enjoined to stay in other monastic establishments along their route.
Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem: Isolda Parewastell, 1365
Isolda Parewastell from Somerset, who was in Jerusalem in 1365, fitted into this fourteenth-century pattern. Despite the risks involved, women pilgrims were inspired by an instinct for travel and change, as well as by a sense of religious obligation and the hope of spiritual reward.