Author: Elizabeth Ann Robertson
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870496417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
After the NOrman conquest, women and the lower classes became the primary audiences for English, as opposed to Latin or French, literature. Among the works written for female audiences are the hitherto neglected AB texts: three female saints' lives, a tract on virginity, a homily, and a guide for anchoresses. In this lucid, innovative study, Elizabeth Robertson shows that the AB texts were written in an effective experiential style that distinguished them from other spiritual works of the period.Key characteristics of this special style--nonteleological structre, pervasive use of concrete imagery, and thematic focus on the female body--have been viewed by some as hallmarks of women's writing more generally. Combining feminist theory with critical skill and an impressive command of Old and Middle English materials, the author argues, to the contrary, that in the thirteenth-century England this style was created by educated male writers in accord with their beliefs about nature and needs of marginal social groups.Beginning with the history and motivations of female anchorites and surveying medieval philosophy and theology in relation to gender theory, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the AB texts and then details their debt to earlier English vernacular works and to the continental theological movements that increasingly emphasized physical experience and matter. The result is an exciting, learned account of the feminization of early English prose.
Author: Margaret Schaus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415969441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 986
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Book Description
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Author: Hetta Elizabeth Howes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846128
Category : Literature, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.
Author: Corinne J. Saunders
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859916103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
"The study then considers the treatment of rape and ravishment in a range of literary genres: in hagiography, female saints are repeatedly threatened with rape; the stories of Lucretia and Helen underpin legendary history; the acts of rape and ravishment challenge and shape chivalric order in romance; otherworldly rapes result in the conception of romance heroes. The final two chapters examine the ways in which Malory and Chaucer write and rewrite rape and ravishment."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Elizabeth L. Ewan
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 1788854454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
This collection of essays addresses women in Scotland in the medieval and early modem period, drawing on archival sources from Court of Session records to Middle Scots poetry. The editors argue persuasively that it is important to know about Scotswomen from all social levels. The book includes a time line and introductory bibliographical essay. The twenty essays in the collection are arranged under the themes of religion, literature, legal history, the economy, politics and the family. They demonstrate the connections between Scottish women's experience and those in England and the continent, as well as highlighting what was unique for the history of Scottish women. Through this comprehensive review of the feminine situation during more than six hundred years of Scottish history, the reader will discover how women really lived and what they really thought, whatever their place in society.
Author: Julie Bond Hassel
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415937849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
This study concerns the earliest English literature encouraging women not to marry, the Katherine Group. It is a set of five early thirteenth-century devotional texts, a sermon called "Hali Meidhad" ("Holy Virginity"), the lives of three early Christian virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana, and an allegory "Sawles Warde" ("Care of the Soul"). All of the texts celebrate virginity, but they do so in a novel way. Unlike other virginity literature, which focuses on the sacred benefits that come to women who do not marry, these texts argue that marriage harms women, and they focus on the material advantages of not marrying. They are profoundly non-mystical, articulating the values of self-sufficiency and self determination. Placing the Katherine Group within the male clerical tradition of Jerome and Peter Abelard, a tradition whose concerns about marriage and domesticity have not been much appreciated before, the author shows how the texts of the Katherine Group operate not as part of a female mystical tradition, but within the male clerical tradition of anti-matrimonial literature.
Author: S. Chaganti
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230615384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.
Author: William F. Pollard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Essays on the ways in which the mystical writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth century responded to and influenced each other.
Author: E. Jane Burns
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812214055
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey.
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.
