Feminist Intersectionality: Centering the Margins in 21st-Century Medieval Studies

Description

This book gathers contributions negotiating feminism's place within medieval studies. It is about overlaps and twists, about the inseparability of multiple means of critique – ecocriticism and disability studies, art history and race studies, legal history and modern activism – from a feminist perspective. The feminist scholarship in this book moves in many different directions and examines the medieval past (and its role in the present) from many different angles. What remains consistent throughout is the dedication to reconfiguring medieval studies, a commitment not to be content simply with adding women on as an extra in conventional European patriarchal accounts, or with analyzing gender in history or literature without fundamentally re-envisioning the intellectual foundations upon which those fields of study have been built. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019 Contents Feminist intersectionality: Centering the margins in 21st- century medieval studies References References Antisemitism and female power in the medieval city Abstract Acknowledgements References Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket's resilient, Muslim, Arab mother in the South English Legendary Abstract References ‘Albyon, thorn at thorn o was an Ile’: Feminist materiality and nature in the Albina narrative Abstract Nature’s agency in Albion Queer nature in Albion Nature, giants, and nonhuman cultivation Acknowledgements References By the skin of its teeth: Walrus ivory, the artisan, and other bodies Abstract A meeting in the flesh Porosity Skin on skin Giving flesh Fleshing out Acknowledgements References ‘Woful womman, confortlees’: Failed maternity and maternal grief as feminist issues Abstract Introduction: Mary, the Crucifixion, and the poetics of maternal grief The silencing of maternal grief Pregnancy failure as maternal failure Antithesis and the Crucifixion, grieving mothers’ version The social control of grief Margery Kempe, Planctus reader and re–interpreter The spatial control of grief Conclusion: Tears as power Acknowledgements Acknowledgements References Disability and consent in medieval law Abstract References Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney’s search for St Edmund Abstract Acknowledgements References New feminisms and the unthinkable References