Gender in medieval places, spaces and thresholds
- Author(s)
- Edited by Victoria Blud, Diane Heath, and Einat Klafter
- Series
- IHR Conference Series Open access titles
Description
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.
Table of contents
Foreword. The Virgin of Bethlehem, gender and space
Anthony Bale
Introduction
Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter
I. Sacred space
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
II. Going places
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
III. A woman’s place?
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
IV. Watch this space!
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
Index
Reviews
"Across these chapters, the reader encounters archaeology, dramaturgy and memorialisation in the gendered spaces of childbirth; tombscape; dramatic and artistic space, and soundscape. Like the array of outstanding contributors to this collection, this prestigious volume is aimed as much at postgraduate and early career researchers, as it is those long established and highly esteemed scholars, or those who are new to the field of scholarship."
-Nottingham Medieval Studies
-Nottingham Medieval Studies