Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe

Transcending both academic disciplines and traditional categories of analysis, this collection illustrates the ways genders and sexualities could be constructed, subverted and transformed. Focusing on areas such as literature, hagiography, history, and art history, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early sixteenth century, the contributors examine the ways men and women lived, negotiated, and challenged prevailing conceptions of gender and sexual identity. In particular, their papers explore textual constructions and transformations of religious and secular masculinities and femininities; visual subversions of gender roles; gender and the exercise of power; and the role sexuality plays in the creation of gender identity. The methodologies which are used in this volume are relevant both to specialists of the Middle Ages and early modern periods, and to scholars working more broadly in fields that draw on contemporary gender studies.

Elizabeth L'Estrange is lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Birmingham, UK. Alison More is a researcher in the Department of History at Radboud University in the Netherlands

Chapter 1 Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation, and Subversion, 600-1530, Elizabeth L'Estrange, Alison More; Chapter 2 Multiple Performances of Male Virginity in Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives, Cassandra Rhodes; Chapter 3 Convergence, Conversion, and Transformation: Gender and Sanctity in Thirteenth-Century Liège, Alison More; Chapter 4 Constructing Political Rule, Transforming Gender Scripts: Revisiting the Thirteenth-Century Rule of Joan and Margaret, Countesses of Flanders, Francesca Canadé Sautman; Chapter 5 Violence on Vellum: St Margaret's Transgressive Body and its Audience, Jennifer Borland; Chapter 6 'Pourquoy appellerions nous ces choses differentes, qu'une heure, un moment, un mouvement peuvent rendre du tout semblables?': Representing Gender Identity in the Late Medieval French Querelle des femmes, Helen Swift; Chapter 7 Constructing Female Sanctity in Late Medieval Naples: The Funerary Monument of Queen Sancia of Majorca, Aislinn Loconte; Chapter 8, Elizabeth L'Estrange; Chapter 9 Fashioning Female Humanist Scholarship: Self-representation in Laura Cereta's Letters, Jennifer Cavalli; Chapter 10 Mightier than the Sword: Reading, Writing and Noble Masculinity in the Early Sixteenth Century, Fiona S. Dunlop;