Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance

by Fenster, Thelma; Lees, Clare A.

• ISBN13: 9780312232443
• ISBN10: 0312232446
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-03-20
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This collection takes the view that authors like Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, often presented as unique, iconic promoters of a debate thought to have occurred primarily in England and France in the late medieval years, should in reality be considered participants in a larger conversation that served diverse political, social, and economic interests and took varied, culturally-determined forms; that greater frame and its contents are the emphasis of this volume. By exploring previously ignored areas, many present fresh material and produce reconceptualizations that use new methodologies.

Author Biography

Thelma Fenster no bio
Clare A. Lees is Professor of Medieval Literature and the History of Language at King’s College London.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Foreword	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
List of Illustrations	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
Thelma S. Fenster
Clare A. Lees
The Clerics and the Critics: Misogyny and the Social Symbolic in Anglo-Saxon England	19	(22)
Clare A. Lees
Gillian R. Overing
The Undebated Debate: Gender and the Image of God in Medieval Theology	41	(16)
E. Ann Matter
Refiguring the ``Scandalous Excess'' of Medieval Woman: The Wife of Bath and Liberality	57	(22)
Alcuin Blamires
Beyond Debate: Gender in Play in Old French Courtly Fiction	79	(18)
Roberta L. Krueger
Thinking through Gender in Late Medieval German Literature	97	(16)
Ann Marie Rasmussen
The Strains of Defense: The Many Voices in Jean LeFevre's	113	(22)
Livre de Leesce Karen Pratt
The Freedoms of Fiction for Gender in Premodern France	135	(30)
Helen Solterer
Debate about Women in Trecento Florence	165	(24)
Pamela Benson
A Woman's Place: Visualizing the Feminine Ideal in the Courts and Communes of Renaissance Italy	189	(18)
Margaret Franklin
``Deceitful Sects'': The Debate about Women in the Age of Isabel the Catholic	207	(30)
Barbara F. Weissberger
``¿Que demandamos de las mugeres?'': Forming the Debate about Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (with a Baroque Reponse)	237	(38)
Julian Weiss
Bibliography of primary Texts in Spanish, ca. 1430-1520	275	(8)
Biographies	283	(2)
Index	285