Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns

Description

Feminist discourses have called into question axiomatic world views and shown how gender and sexuality inevitably shape our perceptions, both historically and in the present moment. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies advances that critical endeavour with new questions and insights relating to gender and queer studies, sexualities, the subaltern, margins, and blurred boundaries. The volume's contributions, from French literary studies as well as German, English, history and art history, evince a variety of modes of feminist analysis, primarily in medieval studies but with extensions into early modernism. Several interrogate the ethics of feminist hermeneutics, the function of women characters in various literary genres, and so-called "natural" binaries - sex/gender, male/female, East/West, etc. - that undergird our vision of the world. Others investigate learned women and notions of female readership, authorship, and patronage in the production and reception of texts and manuscripts. Still others look at bodies - male male, female, neither, and both - and how clothes cover and socially encode them. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies is a tribute to E. Jane Burns, whose important work has proven foundational to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Old French feminist studies. Through her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in co-founding the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, Burns has inspired a new generation of feminist scholars. Frontcover Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: The Work of E. Jane Burns and the Feminisms of Medieval Studies E. Jane Burns: A Bibliography Part I: Debating Gender Natural and Unnatural Woman: Melusine Inside and Out Nurturing Debate in Le Roman de Silence The Man Backing Down from the Lady in Trobairitz Tensos Having Fun with Women: Why a Feminist Teaches Fabliaux Part II: Sartorial Bodies Hats and Veils: There’s No Such Thing as Freedom of Choice, And It’s a Good Thing Too When the Knight Undresses, his Clothing Speaks: Vestimentary Allegories in the Works of Baudouin de Condé (c. 1240–1280) John/Eleanor Rykener Revisited Part III: Mapping Margins Women’s Healing: From Binaries to a Nexus Silk in the Age of Marco Polo Another Land’s End of Literature: Honorat Bovet and the Timbuktu Effect Part IV: Female Authority: Networks and Influence Anne de Bretagne and Anne de France: French Female Networks at the Dawn of the Renaissance Staging Female Authority in Chantilly MS 522: Marguerite de Navarre’s La Coche Babies and Books: The Holy Kinship as a Way of Thinking About Women’s Power in Late Medieval Northern Europe Page Layout and Reading Practices in Christine de Pisan’s Epistre Othea: Reading with the Ladies in London, BL, MS Harley 4431 Afterword: A Response to the Volume Feminism and Medieval Studies: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Now, and Where Are We Going? Or, What Has Happened to Women in Feminist Studies of the Middle Ages? Index Tabula Gratulatoria