Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe

by Hotchkiss,Valerie R.

• ISBN13: 9780815337713
• ISBN10: 081533771X
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this book, the author explores medieval society's fascination with the cross-dressed woman, examining a wide variety of religious, literary, and historical sources that recordedinterpretations of sartorial attempts to overcome gender hierarchy and also illustrate, mainly through the device of inversion, a remarkabley sustained desire to examine an reexamine the nature of social gender identities. Included in the study are investigations of the symbolism underlying the lives of popular transvestite saints; the confluence of hagiography and biography in the historical case of Hildegund von Schonau; the juridical and theological arguments for and against the transvestism of Jeanne d'Arc; the legend of the female pope; the phenomenon of the abandoned wife in male disguise; and the characterization of female protagonists in courtly romance who experience a crisis of sexual identity.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Foreword	ix
Author's Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	3	(10)
``Female Men of God'': Cross Dressing in Medieval Hagiography	13	(20)
The Lives and Death of Hildegund Von Schonau (†1188)	33	(16)
Transvestism on Trial: The Case of Jeanne D'arc	49	(20)
The Female Pope and the Sin of Male Disguise	69	(14)
The Disguised Wife: Gender Inversion and Gender Conformity	83	(22)
Cross Dressing and Sexuality	105	(20)
Conclusions	125	(6)
Hagiographic Appendix The Lives of the Transvestite Saints	131	(12)
Notes	143	(34)
Bibliography	177	(16)
Index	193