Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds

by Victoria Blud (Editor), Diane Heath (Editor), Einat Klafter (Editor)

This collection addresses the concept of gender in the middle ages through the study of place and space, exploring how gender and space may be mutually constructive and how individuals and communities make and are made by the places and spaces they inhabit. From womb to tomb, how are we defined and confined by gender and by space? Interrogating the thresholds between sacred and secular, public and private, enclosure and exposure, domestic and political, movement and stasis, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection draw on current research and contemporary theory to suggest new destinations for future study.

Chapters
Foreword. The Virgin of Bethlehem, gender and space / Anthony Bale
Introduction / Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter
1. Religious women in the landscape: their roles in medieval Canterbury and its hinterland / Sheila Sweetinburgh
2. Space and place: archaeologies of female monasticism in later medieval Ireland / Tracy Collins
3. Making space for leprous nuns: Matthew Paris and the foundation of St. Mary de Pré, St. Albans / Philippa Byrne
4. On the threshold? The role of women in Lincolnshire’s late medieval parish guilds / Claire Kennan
5. Beyond the sea: medieval mystic space and early modern convents in exile / Victoria Blud
6. Men on pilgrimage – women adrift: thoughts on gender in sea narratives from early medieval Ireland / Eivor Bekkhus
7. ‘Yfallen out of heigh degree’: Chaucer’s Monk and crises of liminal masculinities / Martin Laidlaw
8. The feminine mystic: Margery Kempe’s pilgrimage to Rome as an imitatio Birgittae / Einat Klafter
9. ‘Unbynde her anoone’: The Lives of St. Margaret of Antioch and the lying-in space in late medieval England / Róisín Donohoe
10. Gendered spaces and female filth: Auda Fabri’s mystical heresy / Kathryn Loveridge
11. Shopping or scrimping? The contested space of the household in Middle English devotional literature / Louise Campion
12. Tombscape: the tomb of Lady Joan de Mohun in the crypt of Canterbury cathedral / Diane Heath
13. Women’s visibility and the ‘vocal gaze’ at windows, doors and gates in vitae from the thirteenth-century Low Countries / Hannah Shepherd
14. Women in the medieval wall paintings of Canterbury cathedral / Jayne Wackett
15. Commanding un-empty space: silence, stillness and scopic authority in the York Christ before Herod / Daisy Black
Afterword / Leonie V. Hicks

ebook

First published January 3, 2019

Reviews

[Ans Schapendonk · Rating 1 out of 5]

A good book, but without mentioning the real sources (i.c. the universal soundhelix - klankhelix, Lauthelix) one can speak of plagiarism!