Kissing Cousins: Incest and Sex Change in Tristan de Nanteuil
In this paper I re-examine Blanchandine‘s sex change in light of its relation to the issue of incest; as I will show, incest is directly related to the sex change and also punctuates the narrative at other points. Tristan de Nanteuil depicts two sexual and/or romantic relationships between cousins…
Worse than buggery? Incest discourses in the 12th and 13th centuries
In my paper today, I will not attempt the question why it was possible that the law developed in such an extreme way as to exclude such an excessive number of people as potential marriage partners, although my opinions on some recent approaches to this problem may become transparent in the course of this talk. Instead, my interest is focussed on what I call the incest discourses in the twelfth and thirteenth century.
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
Madness 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.