Books in the Gender in the Middle Ages series

A gendered reading of monster and the monstrous body in medieval literature.

Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries.

New research into medieval women from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period demonstrates their energy, defiance and wit.

Essays offering new approaches to the changing forms of medieval religious masculinity.

An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.

An investigation of the motif of the unspeakable as manifested in a wide range of medieval texts, from the Exeter Book to Chaucer.

An exploration of the influence of gender on the workings of memory in the Middle Ages, focussing on the non-elite.

An investigation of the public image of women as presented in contemporary drama.

Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it withquestions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislationand chronicles, it illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the politicalarena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England. E. AMANDA MCVITTY is a Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities, Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand.