Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature
Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, edited by Elaine Treharne, University of Leicester
ISBN: 0859917606 First published November 2002 £30.00 / US$60.0
The essays gathered in this volume provide both a summary sample of the current state of play in Medieval Gender Studies – an indication of the range and scope of the ways in which an interest in or awareness of gender can transform conventional approaches to literary texts and genres – and an opportunity for a moment’s reflection in the variety of possible roads ahead.
The essays provide useful examples of how the conventions behind and the expectations evoked by literary modes and genres help to shape what purports to be an entirely essential and/or socially constructed aspect of identity for the ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘I’ of the literary text.
Ranging across material from Old English Biblical poetry and hagiography to the late Middle English romances and fabliaux, the essays are united by a commitment to a variety of traditional scholarly methodologies. But each examines afresh an important aspect of what it means to be man or woman, husband, son, mother, daughter, wife, devotee or lover in the context of a particular kind of medieval literary text.
Contents
Introduction, Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker
Gender and Heroism in the Old English Judith, Hugh Magennis
Remembering Veronica in Anglo-Saxon England, Mary Swan
‘Born to Thraldom and Penance’: Wives and Mothers in Middle English Romance, David Salter
Rough Girls and Squeamish Boys: The Trouble with Absolon in The Miller’s Tale, Greg Walker
The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Elaine Treharne
“Cursed folk of Herodes al new”: Supersessionist Typology and Chaucer’s Prioress, Anne Marie D’Arcy
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