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.
The holy and the faithful -- The sinful and the spectral -- Daily life and its fictions -- Death and its aftermath
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...
This book is about the objects people owned and how they used them.
René Roques, Günter Heil, and Maurice de Gandillac, Sources chrétiennes 58 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), ch. 2, sections 3–4 (140C –141D ), pp. 78–81. See the introduction, p. 48. I thank Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty, pp.
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 ...
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.
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, ...
... Niall Garbh: see Niall Garbh O Domhnaill O Malley, Grainne: see Grainne O Malley O Neill, Aodh Buidhe: see Aodh Buidhe O Neill O Neill, Catriona: see Catriona Neill O'Cullane, Catherine: see Catherine O'Cullane Oda (fl. ca. 9th c.) ...
Daybell, J. (2012) The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke). Deutermann, A.K. and A. Kiséry eds. (2013) Formal Matters: Reading the ...
This volume reveals how women's networks were widespread and instrumental in shaping political, familial and spiritual legacies.