Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies

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. Contributors: MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER, KRISTIN L. BURR, DANIEL E. O'SULLIVAN, LISA PERFETTI, MADELINE H. CAVINESS, SARAH-GRACE HELLER, RUTH MAZO KARRAS, TOM LINKINEN, LAINE E. DOGGETT, SHARON KINOSHITA, HELEN SOLTERER, CYNTHIA J. BROWN, ROBERTA L. KRUEGER, ANN MARIE RASMUSSEN, NANCY FREEMAN REGALADO, ELIZABETH ROBERTSON