"Collective identity vs individual identity through rituals and images of dying in female nunneries in Medieval Iberia" at the Gender, Identity, Iconography. Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2018, 8-10 January, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. (original) (raw)
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Medieval people considered "man" the human standard and "woman" peculiarly capable of both extraordinary good, as with the Virgin Mary, and evil, as exemplifi ed by Eve. For many centuries aft er the close of the Middle Ages, historians echoed these assumptions, treating medieval women as the marked gender-as opposed to men whose gender went unnoticed-and characterizing women as both revered (ladies on pedestals) and maligned (witches at the stake). But no longer. Since the 1970s, historians of medieval women have written more oft en about variety and opportunity than pedestals or stakes, and since the 1990s, gender historians have unpacked the many genders and gendered languages of medieval Europe.
Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography
Spencer-Hall, Alicia and Gutt, Blake. Eds. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press), 2021
Now available Open Access ---> https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61200 This volume presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory — yet these works explored questions of gender almost exclusively through a prism of sexuality, rather than gender identity. This volume moves beyond such limitations, foregrounding the richness of hagiography as a genre integrally resistant to limiting binaristic categories, including rigid gender binaries. The collection showcases scholarship by emerging trans and genderqueer authors, as well as the work of established researchers. Working on the vanguard of historical trans studies, these scholars demonstrate the vital and vitally political nature of their work as medievalists. This volume enables the recreation of a lineage linking modern trans and genderqueer individuals to their medieval ancestors, providing models of queer identity where much scholarship has insisted there were none, and reestablishing the place of gender non-conformity in history.
The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
This book maps out what we now firmly know—and what we are just beginning to know--after four decades of scholarship on women and gender in medieval Europe. Medieval gender rules seem both foreign and familiar today. Medieval people understood religion, law, love, marriage, and sexual identity in distinctive ways that compel us today to understand women and gender as changeable, malleable, and unyoked from constraints of nature or biology. Yet some medieval views are echoed in modern traditions, and those echoes tease out critical tensions of continuity and change in gender relations. The essays collected here also speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women’s and gender history—that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on western Europe in the Mi...
Gendered Action in Medieval Narrative, History, and Art
Medieval Feminist Forum, 2010
his issue of Medieval Feminist Forum furthers what the editors and the contributors see as the central project of gender studies: to reconsider monolithic or overarching conceptions of gendered behavior and to offer more complicated, nuanced, and contextualized explanations for the way that medieval people considered themselves and their contemporaries in gendered terms. The study of gender in this issue might be considered in terms of stages: first revealing that medieval gender models are often different from modern ones, but then going further to explore gender and identity in terms of multiple and coexisting models in any period and place. The articles in this issue accomplish this by offering readings of identity-building actions and activities within their specific historical, cultural, and literary contexts. Furthermore, this issue considers gender not just in terms of performance, but also in terms of more conscious and deliberate actions by which medieval people might concretize, re-imagine, or redefine both their own gendered identities and those which they encountered. Thus, in this issue we focus on the narration of action, all the while remaining cognizant that, in many cases, narration itself is often an action that also engages the very structures of gender and identity.
While literary scholars have delved into the nuances of each pronoun used to narrate their lives, art historians have hardly acknowledged the phenomena of transvestite saints, as individual figures or as a categorical topic. This imbalance in attention among the various scholarly fields derives logically from the material available—transvestite saints figure prominently in numerous textual sources while they are markedly scarce in medieval art—but it has unintentionally affected contemporary understanding of how medievals recieved these figures and interpreted their meaning. Taking an art historical perspective, this essay demonstrates that the popularity of transvestite saints in hagiographic or ecclesiastic writings belies the disruptive threat they posed to medieval visual representation and the stability of the symbolic order. Only by understanding why these stories were acceptable within textual narrative but problematic as artistic subjects can we fully appreciate how they operated within the medieval context, what social needs they served, and what reactionary restrictions they provoked.