Constructions Of Widowhood And Virginity In The Middle Ages
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Constructions Of Widowhood And Virginity In The Middle Ages
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Author : Cindy L. Carlson
language : en
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Release Date : 2000-01-06
Constructions Of Widowhood And Virginity In The Middle Ages written by Cindy L. Carlson and has been published by Palgrave Macmillan this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2000-01-06 with Psychology categories.
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. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages addresses many facets of these two female positions in medieval literature: gender constructions; the body and what it means to make it visible, whether in admiration, torture, or martyrdom; issues of physicality and abjection; creations of literary voice for women who write or create situations for them to be written about. A distinguished group of female scholars examine the meanings behind widowhood and virginity both individually and in relation to each other. The focus on both positions in the same volume makes Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages an unprecedented work.
Medieval Virginities
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Author : Ruth Evans
language : en
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Release Date : 2003-01-01
Medieval Virginities written by Ruth Evans and has been published by University of Toronto Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2003-01-01 with History categories.
The variety of subjects and disciplines represented here testify both to the elusiveness of virginity and to its lasting appeal and importance. Medieval Virginities shows how virginity's inherent ambiguity highlights the problems, contradictions and discontinuities lurking within medieval ideologies.
The Profession Of Widowhood
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Author : Katherine Clark Walter
language : en
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Release Date : 2018-09-21
The Profession Of Widowhood written by Katherine Clark Walter and has been published by Catholic University of America Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-09-21 with History categories.
The Profession of Widowhood explores how the idea of ‘true’ widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. The medieval figure of the Christian vere vidua or “good” widow evolved from and reinforced ancient social and religious sensibilities of chastity, loyalty and grief as gendered ‘work.’ The ideal widow was a virtuous woman who mourned her dead husband in chastity, solitude, and most importantly, in perpetuity, marking her as “a widow indeed” (1 Tim 5:5). The widow who failed to display adequate grief fulfilled the stereotype of the ‘merry widow’ who forgot her departed spouse and abused her sexual and social freedom. Stereotypes of widows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ served highly-charged ideological functions in pre-modern culture, and have remained durable even in modern times, even as Western secular society now focuses more on a woman’s recovery from grief and possible re-coupling than the expectation that she remain forever widowed. The widow represented not only the powerful bond created by love and marriage, but also embodied the conventions of grief that ordered the response when those bonds were broken by premature death. This notion of the widow as both a passive memorial to her husband and as an active ‘rememberer’ was rooted in ancient traditions, and appropriated by early Christian and medieval authors who used “good” widowhood to describe the varieties of female celibacy and to define the social and gender order. A tradition of widowhood characterized by chastity, solitude, and permanent bereavement affirmed both the sexual mores and political agenda of the medieval Church. Medieval widows—both holy women recognized as saints and ‘ordinary women’ in medieval daily life—recognized this tradition of professed chastity in widowhood not only as a valuable strategy for avoiding remarriage and protecting their independence, but as a state with inherent dignity that afforded opportunities for spiritual development in this world and eternal merit in the next.
Performing Virginity And Testing Chastity In The Middle Ages
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Author : Kathleen Coyne Kelly
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2002-11
Performing Virginity And Testing Chastity In The Middle Ages written by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2002-11 with History categories.
This study presents a compelling and provocative study of virginity, which challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified.
Medieval Single Women
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Author : Cordelia Beattie
language : en
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Release Date : 2007-09-13
Medieval Single Women written by Cordelia Beattie and has been published by OUP Oxford this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-09-13 with History categories.
The single woman is a troubling and disruptive category. Does it denote all unmarried women, therefore creating a group which every female was part of at some stage in her life? Or, were the categories 'maiden' and 'widow' so culturally significant in late medieval England that 'single woman' was a residual category for women seen as anomalous? Was the category 'single man' used in an equivalent way and, if not, why? This study offers a way into the complex process of social classification in late medieval England. All societies use classifications in order to understand and impose order. In this book, Cordelia Beattie views classification as a political act, an act of power: those classifying must make choices about which divisions are most important or about who falls into which category, and such choices have repercussions. Defining how a group or an individual should be labelled, means variables such as social status, gender, or age, are prioritized. Rather than isolate gender as a variable, this book examines how it relates to other social cleavages. Using a variety of approaches, from social and cultural history, to gender history, and medieval studies, its original methodology offers an innovative approach to a range of historical texts, from pastoral manuals to tax returns, and guild registers.
Versions Of Virginity In Late Medieval England
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Author : Sarah Salih
language : en
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Release Date : 2001
Versions Of Virginity In Late Medieval England written by Sarah Salih and has been published by Boydell & Brewer this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2001 with History categories.
Medieval virginity theory explored through study of martyrs, nuns and Margery Kempe. This study looks at the question of what it meant to be a virgin in the Middle Ages, and the forms which female virginity took. It begins with the assumptions that there is more to virginity than sexual inexperience, and that virginity may be considered as a gendered identity, a role which is performed rather than biologically determined. The author explores versions of virginity as they appear in medieval saints' lives, in the institutional chastity of nuns, and as shown in the book of Margery Kempe, showing how it can be active, contested, vulnerable but also recoverable. SARAH SALIH teaches in the Department of English at King's College London.
Mental Health Spirituality And Religion In The Middle Ages And Early Modern Age
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Author : Albrecht Classen
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date : 2014-07-28
Mental Health Spirituality And Religion In The Middle Ages And Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and has been published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-07-28 with Literary Criticism categories.
This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.
Medieval Anchoritisms
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Author : Liz Herbert McAvoy
language : en
Publisher: DS Brewer
Release Date : 2011
Medieval Anchoritisms written by Liz Herbert McAvoy and has been published by DS Brewer this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with History categories.
An examination of the importance of anchoritism to social, cultural and religious life in the middle ages.
French Romance Of The Later Middle Ages
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Author : Rosalind Brown-Grant
language : en
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Release Date : 2008-11-13
French Romance Of The Later Middle Ages written by Rosalind Brown-Grant and has been published by OUP Oxford this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-11-13 with Literary Criticism categories.
Whilst French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have long enjoyed a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been largely neglected by modern scholars, despite their central role in the chivalric culture of the day. In particular, although this genre has been seen as providing a forum within which ideas about masculine and feminine roles were debated and prescribed, little work has been done on the gender ideology of texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This study seeks to fill this gap in the scholarship by analysing how the views of gender found in earlier romances were reassessed and reshaped in the texts produced in the moralising intellectual environment of the later medieval period. In order to explore these topics, this book discusses fifteen historico-realist prose romances written in the century from 1390, many of which were commissioned at the court of Burgundy. It addresses key issues in recent studies of gender in medieval culture including the construction of chivalric masculinity, the representation of adolescent desire, and the social and sexual roles of husbands and wives. In addition to offering close readings of these texts, it shows how the romances of the period were informed by ideas about gender which circulated in contemporary works such as manuals of chivalry, moral treatises, and marriage sermons. It thus aims not only to provide the first in-depth study of this little-known area of French literary history, but also to question the critical consensus on the role of gender in medieval romance that has arisen from an exclusive focus on earlier works in the genre.
Menacing Virgins
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Author : Kathleen Coyne Kelly
language : en
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Release Date : 1999
Menacing Virgins written by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and has been published by University of Delaware Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1999 with Literary Criticism categories.
The essays in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance examine the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity, and explore how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. As the title suggests, the virgin can be seen alternately or even simultaneously as menaced or menacing. To chart the history of virginity as a steady, evolutionary progression from a religious ideal in the Middle Ages toward a more secularized or sovereign ideal in the Renaissance would obscure how unstable a concept chastity is in both periods. What this collection demonstrates is that medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not general and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted.