Karen J. Taylor, ed., Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature. Garland Publishing, 1998 (original) (raw)
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Performing Medieval Sexuality e notion of gender as performance has enabled scholars to examine the constant and consequential work that people put into constructing their sexual identities. Rather than treating the roles of women and men as biologically determined absolutes, gender theorists stress the social forces involved in establishing and maintaining gender norms. Two recent additions to this ongoing discussion approach the performance of gender in the Middle Ages at different levels of detail. While the articles collected in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives address large-scale questions of how gender and religion intersected in medieval Europe, those in Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook scrutinize specific medieval treatments of gender-in-performance, in public as well as in the bedroom. In so doing, both collections challenge Michel Foucault's contention that sexual identity is a distinctly modern concept.
French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire
2008
Whilst French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have long enjoyed a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been largely neglected by modern scholars, despite their central role in the chivalric culture of the day. In particular, although this genre has been seen as providing a forum within which ideas about masculine and feminine roles were debated and prescribed, little work has been done on the gender ideology of texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This study seeks to fill this gap in the scholarship by analysing how the views of gender found in earlier romances were reassessed and reshaped in the texts produced in the moralizing intellectual environment of the later medieval period. In order to explore these topics, this book discusses fifteen historico-realist prose romances written in the century from 1390, many of which were commissioned at the court of Burgundy. It addresses key issues in recent studies of gender in medieval culture including the construction of chivalric masculinity, the representation of adolescent desire, and the social and sexual roles of husbands and wives. In addition to offering close readings of these texts, it shows how the romances of the period were informed by ideas about gender which circulated in contemporary works such as manuals of chivalry, moral treatises, and marriage sermons. It thus aims not only to provide the first in-depth study of this little-known area of French literary history, but also to question the critical consensus on the role of gender in medieval romance that has arisen from an exclusive focus on earlier works in the genre. This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of medieval French literature but also to students and specialists of other medieval European languages, as well as to medieval historians, and those working in gender studies.
Images of adultery in twelfth and thirteenth-century Old French literature
2003
This thesis examines literary images of masculinity and femininity, their function and depiction in marriage roles and homo-social relationships in the context of crisis: wifely adultery. The study is heavily reliant upon vernacular texts, especially Old French works from the twelfth and thirteenth century including works from the genres of romance, lais, fables, and fabliaux. Latin works including historia and prescriptive texts such as customaries, penitentials, etiquette texts and medical and canon law treatises are also used to contextualise themes in the Old French literature. The introduction summarises modern literary and historical criticism concerning sexuality in the Middle Ages. It then discusses the influences of the Church, philosophy, medicine, natural theory and society on medieval definitions of sexuality to contextualise the literature which is focal to this thesis. The following four chapters each consider a single character in the adulterous affair: the adulteress, the husband, the lover and the accuser. The literary images of each character are analysed in detail revealing the diversity of depictions between and also within genres. This enables the identification of medieval sexual constructs, challenging some previous critiques of representations of sexuality in the Middle Ages. The final chapter explores the language by which the sexual act is presented. Furthermore, it shows how language is used and occasionally abused in committing, prosecuting and evading punisliment for adultery and how it can be wielded as a weapon of women. Through the focus of a body of literature rich in depictions of sexuality, this thesis questions the misogynist overtones often attributed to medieval literature. The diversity of images shows that the literature illustrates a wide range of opinions and ideas reflective of the complexity of sexuality in medieval society. I would like to thank my supervisor, John Hudson for his invaluable support over the last four years. Other members of the Department of Medieval History at St Andrews have also given of their time, providing advice and guidance, particularly Rob Bartlett and Simone Macdougall. For their help in teaching me Old French and for specific language advice I would like to thank Clive Sneddon and Norris Lacy. Several others have also contributed greatly to my research and their assistance has made the process not only easier but more enjoyable-1 would therefore like to thank the librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Library and above all, the secretaries of the Department of Mediaeval History, Anne Chalmers, and Berta Wales who has been an inspiration and who, in particular, has given support and guidance far exceeding any secretarial duties. I would like to thank Bob and Julie Kerr-my fairy-godpeoplewhose quiet strength and support and unexpected help and generosity saw me through difficult times impossible to enumerate. During the course of my Ph. D., I have been privileged to be part of an active and close postgraduate community: I am thankful to all its members, in particular Angela Montford, Bjorn Weiler, Caroline Proctor, Sumi David and Lindsay Rudge. I would like to thank Michele Mason for long talks, her friendship and her ability to make me smile and Brian Briggs for the good times, bad times and back again. Finally, I would like to thank those people who have constantly come to my aid and given unwavering support by rescuing hard drives, giving advice and offering their support over cups of coffee, pints of Guinness, around campfires, atop Munroes and in canoes: David Green, Iona McCleery and Kris Towson. For peppercorns of knowledge and understated but immeasurable generosity, I would like to thank Angus Stewart. It remains to thank one person in particular-Sally Crumplin. It strikes me that during the course of writing a work that focuses on themes of distrust and betrayal, I have been given the gift of unwavering, unconditional trust, faith and support. For this and all else, I thank her. This thesis is dedicated to my father. He would have claimed not to have understood it, on account of its lack of engine, gears and grease and yet he did all that was in his power to make sure that I could attain my goal, providing endless faith, support and love. I hope that in some way the completion of this work proves that his faith and years of hard work were not in vain and that I am as proud of him and all he did as he was of me.
Medieval Feminist Forum
~ his collection of 11 essays focuses, as the title suggests, on the interplay of sexuality and spirituality in medieval literature and culture. With the exception of Alexandra Barratt's '''The Woman Who Shares the King's Bed': The Innocent Eroticism of Gertrud the Great of Helfta," the essays deal with English texts, and with the exception of David Salomon's "Corpus Mysticum: Text as Body / Body as Text," which deals with sixteenthcentury recusant writings, the essays treat texts dating from the 13'" through the 15'" centuries.
Queer Theory and the Middle Ages
French Studies, 2006
Though it might surprise many, the Middle Ages are emerging as a kind of queer utopia, a historical period in which institutional state regulation as we know it hardly existed, in which marriage practices were not yet controlled entirely either by state or church and varied widely by class and region, in which same-sex segregation was a norm, particularly in intellectual communities, and in which love stories between men were common, if covert. 1 Texts, both literary and historical, actually spoke of same-sex eroticism, albeit it in a derogatory way, referring to such relations as sodomy, bougrerie, or heresy. Over the course of 1000 years, (c. 500-1500), when almost any sexual act or impulse which did not focus on sex exclusively in terms of procreative potential was branded as sodomitical, all readers conveniently find themselves in the same crowded boat, cast out one and all as sodomites. When that sodomite's every thought is ripe for interrogation, as we see in many of the major penitentials and theological works, we arrive, however proleptically, at that magic moment when the inviolable modern status of hetero and homo as polar opposites simply dissolves. 2 This perversely satisfying scenario finally promises a degree of equality in rejection and it requires a redefinition of the parameters within which we read medieval texts. When all readers get to play at being marginal and subversive, without ever having actually done anything other than that which seemed natural, it redefines the literary landscape. Like Perceval at his chess board competing against an invisible opponent, we feel what it is to confront an autonomous social force that claims to play by the rules, even when those rules are always of its own making. 3 Such a scenario is particularly satisfying to scholars. What other period offers such fertile ground for the investigation of power and language, duplicity as the very essence of speech, heteroglossia as norm? I suppose many would spring to mind, at least in political terms; but when we add to the mix sex as an essential marker of culpability, then we have found