Description

Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays, dedicated to her work, examines gender as a construct of language, a mode of embodiment, and a critical framework for thinking about the past. Its eleven contributors approach the figure of the gendered body in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. The volume focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliau, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies. Taken together, they celebrate the scholarly career of Elizabeth Robertson while also presenting a coherent and multifaceted investigation of the intersections of gender and medieval literary practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Form of Thought
Jennifer Jahner (Caltech) and Ingrid Nelson (Amherst College)

Part 1: Form and Knowing
1.Chaucerian Insomnia and the Hospitality of Sleeplessness in Late Medieval Dream Visions
Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr College)
2.Cloudy Thoughts: Cognition and Affect in Troilus and Criseyde
Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)
3.Voluntarism and the Self in Piers Plowman
Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder)
4.Margery Kempe and the Paradoxical Presence of God
Kate Crassons (Lehigh University)

  Part 2: Material Poetics
5.Both 'Gostly Sense' and 'Amerouse Sentensce': The Nightingale's Resurrection as Hybrid Text
Amy N. Vines (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
6.Middle English Verse Acrostics: A Survey
Julia Boffey (Queen Mary University) and A.S.G. Edwards (University of Kent)
7.The Landscapes of Pearl: Poetry and Theology
Ad Putter (University of Bristol)

Part 3: Historicizing Gender
8.Disrupting Medieval Marriage in Anglo-Norman Women's Wr

Product details

Published 09 Feb 2022
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 250
ISBN 9781611463323
Imprint Lehigh University Press
Illustrations 3 b/w illustrations;
Dimensions 228 x 159 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Jennifer Jahner

Anthology Editor

Ingrid Nelson

Contributor

C. David Benson

Contributor

Julia Boffey

Contributor

Kate Crassons

Contributor

Jennifer Jahner

Contributor

Roberta Krueger

Contributor

Ingrid Nelson

Contributor

Robert Pasnau

Contributor

Ad Putter

Contributor

James Simpson

Contributor

Stephanie Trigg

Contributor

Amy N. Vines

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