Constructions of widowhood and virginity in the Middle Ages
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Bibliographic Information
Constructions of widowhood and virginity in the Middle Ages
（The new Middle Ages）
Macmillan, 1999
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Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
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. For example, chastity is an apparent given for both positions, but the chastity involved may have a number of possible cultural meanings or uses. This study addresses facets of these two female positions in medieval literature: gender constructions of the body and what it means to make it visible, whether in admiration, torture, or martyrdom; issues of physicality and abjection; and creations of literary voices for women who write or create situations for them to be written about. A group of female scholars examine the meanings behind widowhood and virginity both individually and in relation to each other.
Table of Contents
- Appealing to ecclesiastical chivalry - the widowed queen in the "Encomium Emmae", R.S. Hollis
- a widow's chaste vow - mapping the influence of Marie's "La Vie de Sainte Audree" on Isabella, Countess of Suffolk, V. Blanton-Whetsell
- closed doors - an epithalamium for Queen Edith, widow and virgin, M. Otter
- performing virginity - sex and violence in the Katherine Group, S. Salih
- the paradox of virginity with the Anchoritic tradition - the masculine gaze and the feminine body in the Wohunge Group
- S. M. Chewning
- unrepresentable rape and the represented Church in medieval saints' lives, K. C. Kelly
- widowed virgins, viragos, and authority in "The Man of Law's Tale", C. C. Baswell
- the violent violation of virginia - family violence in "The Physician's Tale", S.P. Prior
- between the living and the dead - widows as heroines of medieval romance, R. Hayward
- the disorder of violence - the violence of order - abjection in "The Prioress' Tale", K. M. Hobbs
- a fountain sealed, a garden enclosed - literary constructions of the Virgin Mary in medieval French story, drama, and lyric, J. M. Davis
- virginity at court - the trials of the virgin in the N-Town cycle, C. L. Carlson
- helpful widows, virgins in distress - women's friendship in French romances of the 13th and 14th centuries, A. Roberts
- the widow as virgin - desexualized narrative in the "Livre de la Cite des Dames", A.J. Weisl
- transgressive tears - the pedagogy of grief and the image of the grieving widow in medieval French culture, L. A. Callahan.
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