Medieval Virginities

Medieval Virginities PDF Author: Ruth Evans
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802086372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The variety of subjects and disciplines represented here testify both to the elusiveness of virginity and to its lasting appeal and importance. Medieval Virginities shows how virginity's inherent ambiguity highlights the problems, contradictions and discontinuities lurking within medieval ideologies.

Medieval Virginities

Medieval Virginities PDF Author: Ruth Evans
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802086372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The variety of subjects and disciplines represented here testify both to the elusiveness of virginity and to its lasting appeal and importance. Medieval Virginities shows how virginity's inherent ambiguity highlights the problems, contradictions and discontinuities lurking within medieval ideologies.

Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England

Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Sarah Salih
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0859916227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Medieval virginity theory explored through study of martyrs, nuns and Margery Kempe. This study looks at the question of what it meant to be a virgin in the Middle Ages, and the forms which female virginity took. It begins with the assumptions that there is more to virginity than sexual inexperience, and that virginity may be considered as a gendered identity, a role which is performed rather than biologically determined. The author explores versions of virginity as they appear in medieval saints' lives, in the institutional chastity of nuns, and as shown in the book of Margery Kempe, showing how it can be active, contested, vulnerable but also recoverable. SARAH SALIH teaches in the Department of English at King's College London.

Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages

Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134737556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified. Kelly analyses a variety of medieval Western European texts - including medical treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historical and legal documents. The main focus is the representation of both male and female virgins in saints' legends and romances. The author also makes a comparative study of examples from contemporary fiction, television and film in which testing virginity is a theme. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages presents a compelling and provocative study of the parodox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence.

Virgin Whore

Virgin Whore PDF Author: Emma Maggie Solberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
In Virgin Whore, Emma Maggie Solberg uncovers a surprisingly prevalent theme in late English medieval literature and culture: the celebration of the Virgin Mary’s sexuality. Although history is narrated as a progressive loss of innocence, the Madonna has grown purer with each passing century. Looking to a period before the idea of her purity and virginity had ossified, Solberg uncovers depictions and interpretations of Mary, discernible in jokes and insults, icons and rituals, prayers and revelations, allegories and typologies—and in late medieval vernacular biblical drama. More unmistakable than any cultural artifact from late medieval England, these biblical plays do not exclusively interpret Mary and her virginity as fragile. In a collection of plays known as the N-Town manuscript, Mary is represented not only as virgin and mother but as virgin and promiscuous adulteress, dallying with the Trinity, the archangel Gabriel, and mortals in kaleidoscopic erotic combinations. Mary’s "virginity" signifies invulnerability rather than fragility, redemption rather than renunciation, and merciful license rather than ascetic discipline. Taking the ancient slander that Mary conceived Jesus in sin as cause for joyful laughter, the N-Town plays make a virtue of those accusations: through bawdy yet divine comedy, she redeems and exalts the crime. By revealing the presence of this promiscuous Virgin in early English drama and late medieval literature and culture—in dirty jokes told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, Malory’s Arthurian romances, and the double entendres of the allegorical Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn—Solberg provides a new understanding of Marian traditions.

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Ruth Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

Sexuality in Medieval Europe

Sexuality in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000859274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Now in its fourth edition, Sexuality in Medieval Europe provides a lively account of a society whose attitudes toward sexuality both were ancestral to, and differed from, contemporary ones. The volume is structured not by types of sexual interactions or deviance, but to reflect the difference in gendered experiences when sex is seen as an act one person does to another. Sexual activity, within and outside of marriage, as well as sexual inactivity, had different meanings based on gender, social status, religious affiliation, and more. This book considers these iterations of medieval sexuality in its effort to show there was no single medieval attitude towards sexuality. With an emphasis on Christian Western Europe over the entire course of the Middle Ages, it also includes comparative material on neighboring cultures at the time. Alongside being reworked for further clarity and readability, the fourth edition offers substantial new material on trans scholarship and methodological attempts to recoup a trans past; changes in the treatment of sex work and its terminology; and new material on Byzantine and Muslim culture. Sexuality in Medieval Europe is an essential resource for all those who study medieval history, medieval culture, and the history of sexuality in Europe.

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Robert Mills
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616912X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Challenging the view that ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form in the Middle Ages, the author demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period - and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took.

Forgetful of Their Sex

Forgetful of Their Sex PDF Author: Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226740544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
Invaluable for what they tell us about early medieval society and the Church, the Lives of these early saints also afford rare insight into the private world of medieval men and women, the special bonds of family and friendship, and the collective mentalities of the period. This book constitutes a major contribution to the study of medieval history, gender, and religion.

Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love

Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love PDF Author: R. Howard Bloch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226059901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are. Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era. This startling study will be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to historians of culture and gender.

Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages

Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Cindy L. Carlson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312211363
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
To be a virgin or a widow never promised a stable, uniform status to a woman during the Middle Ages. Rather, these positions were areas open to debate, constructions that did and still do create and question notions of gender roles, areas of power, and areas of disability. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages addresses many facets of these two female positions in medieval literature: gender constructions; the body and what it means to make it visible, whether in admiration, torture, or martyrdom; issues of physicality and abjection; creations of literary voice for women who write or create situations for them to be written about. A distinguished group of female scholars examine the meanings behind widowhood and virginity both individually and in relation to each other. The focus on both positions in the same volume makes Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages an unprecedented work.