The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women’s bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women’s possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires. The opening section looks at how medieval authors imagined fictional and legendary women using particular objects in ways that reinforce or challenge gender roles. These women bring objects into the orbit of gender identity, employing and relating to them in a literal sense, while also taking advantage of their symbolic meanings. The second section focuses on the use of texts both as objects in their own right and as mechanisms by which other objects are defined. The possessors of objects in these essays lived in the world, their lives documented by historical records, yet like their fictional and legendary counterparts, they too used objects for instrumental ends and with symbolic resonances. The final section considers the objectification of medieval women’s bodies as well as its limits. While this at times seems to allow for a trade in women, authorial attempts to give definitive shapes and boundaries to women’s bodies either complicate the gender boundaries they try to contain or reduce gender to an ideological abstraction. This volume contributes to the ongoing effort to calibrate female agency in the late Middle Ages, honoring the groundbreaking work of Carolyn P. Collette.
On the dating and production of the Hereford Map, see Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: An English Mappa Mundi, c. 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), esp. 18. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ...
Featuring over one hundred illuminations depicting medieval women from England to Ethiopia, this book provides a lively and accessible introduction to the lives of women in the medieval world.
This book argues that the impressive range of belongings that can be connected to Matilda Plantagenet, duchess of Saxony-textiles, illuminated manuscripts, coins, chronicles, charters, and literary texts-allows us to perceive elite women's ...
The holy and the faithful -- The sinful and the spectral -- Daily life and its fictions -- Death and its aftermath
Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material ...
Romantic love as we know it today was invented in the Middle Ages. Many ideas about love and the focus on the female as the object and the male as...
An accessible and clear snapshot of the life and work of women in medieval times from the nunnery to the town to the castle.
For Caviness, an awareness of historical context places pressure upon contemporary theories like that of the "male gaze," changing their shapes and creating even richer dialogues with the past."--BOOK JACKET.
With contributions on topics ranging from medieval leprosy to boyhood behaviors, this interdisciplinary collection highlights the various ways “status” can be interpreted relative to gender, and what these two interlocked concepts can ...
Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts Patricia Dailey. McGuckin, John Anthony. ... In The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience: The Role of the Humanity of Jesus, 163–188. Leuven: Peeters, 2003. ——.