Books in the Gender in the Middle Ages series

Uncovers the female voices, lived experiences, and spiritual insights encoded by the imagery of textiles in the Middle Ages.

Sheds new light on how masculinity was understood, lived, performed and viewed during a period of huge change.

An interdisciplinary approach to the medieval manor pre- and post-Conquest.

Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker.

An examination of female same-sex desire in Chaucer and medieval romance.In both medieval and modern contexts, women who do not desire men invite awkward silences. Men's dissident sexual practices have been discussed energetically by writers of law and religion, medicine and morality; reams of medievaltexts are devoted to horrified or fascinated references to men's deviant intimacies with men. Yet women - despite the best efforts of recent scholars - remain at the margins of this picture, especially in studies of literature. This book aims to re-centre female desire. Identifying a feminine or lesbian hermeneutic in late-medieval English literature, it offers new approaches to medieval texts often denigrated for their omissions and fragmentation, their violence and uneven poetic texture. The hermeneutic tradition Chaucer inherited, stretching from Jerome to Jean de Meun, represents female bodies as blank tablets awaiting masculine inscription, rather than autonomous agents.In the Legend, Chaucer considers the unspoken problem of female desires and bodies that resist, evade, and orient themselves away from such a position. Can women take on hermeneutic authority, that phallic capacity,without rendering themselves monstrous or self-defeating? This question resonates through three Middle English romances succeeding the Legend: the alliterative Morte Arthure, the Sowdone of Babylon, and Undo YourDoor. With combative innovation, they repurpose the hermeneutic tradition and Chaucer's use of it to celebrate an array of audacious female desires and embodiments which cross and re-cross established categories of masculine and feminine, licit and illicit, animate and inanimate. Together, these texts make visible the desires and the embodiments of women who otherwise slip out of visibility, in both medieval and post-medieval contexts.

Ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach to the medieval manor pre- and post-Conquest.Medieval manors have long been the subject of academic study, though the ways in which these houses reflected and shaped - and were shaped by - their occupants to express social authority have not yet been fully explored. This book undertakes a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary examination of them, aiming to provide a fuller account of how concepts of space and domestic place were understood, represented, and used by their occupants in England and Normandy from c. 900 to c. 1200, and how this illuminates aspects of gender and authority in the period. Blending approaches from archaeology and history, it uses evidence from Anglo-Saxon wills, standing and excavated manorial sites inEngland and Normandy, and a variety of written texts from vitae to history to poetry, in order to delve into, deconstruct and reconstruct gendered notions of authority in the period. This book ultimately challenges ideas ofgendered objects and places through the medieval construction of authoritative personae, and the use and representation of medieval manors, focusing on the household as a place and space of performance in the age of the Norman Conquest. KATHERINE WEIKERT is Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester.

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.

A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world.The training and use of memory was crucial in medieval culture, given the limited literacy at the time, but to date, very little thought has been given to the complex and disparate ways in which the theory and practices of memoryinteracted with the inherently unstable concepts of time and gender at the time. The essays in this volume, drawing on approaches from applied poststructural and queer theory among others, reassess those ideologies, meanings and responses generated by the workings of memory within and over "e;time"e;. Ultimately, they argue for the inherent instability of the traditional gender-time-memory matrix (within which men are configured as the recorders of "e;history"e;and women as the repositories of a more inchoate familial and communal knowledge), showing the Middle Ages as a locus for a far more fluid conceptualization of time and memory than has previously been considered. Elizabeth Cox is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; Roberta Magnani is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University; Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Contributors: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Ayoush Lazikani, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Pamela E. Morgan, William Rogers, Patricia Skinner, Victoria Turner.

Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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