Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Editat de Karma Lochrie, Usha Vishnuvajjalaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 11 iul 2022
In Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala bring together established scholars and new voices to illuminate a previously understudied but consequential element of life in the Middle Ages. Contributors focus on representations of women’s friendships in medieval European literature and their afterlives both to historicize them and draw out the finer nuances of the multitude of forms, affects, values, and ethics that emerge within those friendships. This volume examines works by Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Marie de France, female saints, and late-Middle Scots poets alongside lesser-known late medieval lyrics and Middle English romances to chart women’s friendships and their many and sometimes conflicting affinities with the cultural categories of gender, religion, politics, and sexuality. In addition to exploring the parameters of female friendship across a range of texts and historical contexts, contributors evaluate the political, religious, and civic structures negotiated in public and private and engage with the long history of theory and philosophy on friendship. The result is a theoretical and historical rubric for the future study of women’s friendships in medieval texts and beyond. Contributors: Penelope Anderson, Andrea Boffa, Jennifer N. Brown, Christine Chism, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Laurie Finke, Carissa M. Harris, Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Clare A. Lees, Karma Lochrie, Gillian R. Overing, Alexandra Verini, Usha Vishnuvajjala, Stella Wang
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215159
ISBN-10: 0814215157
Pagini: 312
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
ISBN-10: 0814215157
Pagini: 312
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Recenzii
“This wonderful unification of female academic voices, spearheaded by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala, is profound, intriguing and often emotive. … A beautiful ode to female friendship, both modern and medieval. Lochrie and Vishnuvajjala have created the foundations for a whole new field of research, while also aiming to shape our understanding of ourselves and our histories in a post-pandemic world.” —Emma Bairstow, Forum for Modern Language Studies
“Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature is one of those rare collections in which each article not only stands on its own as a provocative piece of scholarship but also contributes to an integrated whole. The contributors, that is, have become collaborators in a shared argument, so that the volume models the social and textual work of women’s friendship that it explores.” —L.M.C. Weston, Modern Philology
“Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature offers the reader a range of innovative ways for identifying and analyzing textual evidence and representations of comradeship and camaraderie between women in the Middle Ages. These readings often involve being open to finding links between the past and the present and to reading the absences and gaps in the narratives.” —Diane Watt, Modern Language Review
“The significance of Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature cannot be overstated: it gathers some of the freshest voices in medieval literary studies to present some of the most transformative and inspiring work on women and gender to date.” —Holly A. Crocker, author of The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare
"This collection offers both accessible and theoretically complex iterations of female friendship that appeal to a broad readership, and each successive chapter builds on and often responds to the previous one such that we might best conceive of this book as a well-marked map of female friendship in medieval literature." —B. Skye Oliver, Medieval Feminist Forum
Notă biografică
Karma Lochrie is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. She is also the author Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t and Nowhere in the Middle Ages, among others. Usha Vishnuvajjala is Lecturer at Cardiff University. She is also the author of Feminist Medievalisms.
Extras
The only major study of medieval female friendship across history consists of a volume of essays edited by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge that includes “that still uncharted territory” of women and friendship in the Middle Ages along with essays devoted to masculine friendship. One of the reasons for the relative neglect of medieval studies of female friendship, we think, is that the topic was subsumed in the movement of queer studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, Lochrie’s essay in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, “Between Women,” included a discussion of female friendship within the larger discussion of female homoeroticism in medieval texts. Queer medieval studies co-opted female friendship studies before there was such a thing, and, as a result, we really do not have much groundwork, theoretical or historical, for talking about female friendship as friendship in the Middle Ages. At the same time, it might seem to us as though this topic has been fully vetted because of the scattered address of the topic under queer studies. A quick search of the topic, however, reveals a surprising dearth of studies other than those we have already cited.
Meanwhile, the interest in women’s friendship in other historical periods and in current popular writing continues apace without the Middle Ages. The 2017 nonfiction book Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, documents the largely unknown epistolary friendships these four major British women writers had with other female writers; feminist linguistics scholar Deborah Tannen’s 2017 book You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships considers, among many other things, the detrimental effect that negative social interactions—including those with friends—have on women’s health, despite the fact that they do not have a similar effect on men’s health. Reese Witherspoon, posting an Instagram picture of herself with her co-stars of the 2017 HBO series Big Little Lies (based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty), remarks of the series and her relationship to her fellow actresses: “The power of sisterhood and friendship is limitless!” Guardian writer Ellen E. Jones, who quotes Witherspoon, offers a somewhat different assessment of the series, if not the actresses’ bonds with one another, as “TV’s most compelling commercial opportunity yet: female friendship as a commodity.”
We argue that this supposedly new interest in women’s friendship as a topic of art, scholarship, cinema, and even consumerism actually continues a long tradition of writing that has been neglected in scholarship until now. We can see how thoroughly a periodized understanding of women’s friendship has pervaded popular thinking in examples like an NPR review of the book Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship that begins with the sentences “Women in the Middle Ages were excluded from many realms: the law, universities, and surprisingly, from friendship, writes author Kayleen Schaefer. The term ‘friend’ was reserved for the half of humanity that purportedly possessed superior morals—men—and only used to describe other men.” While the recent interest in women’s friendship is a positive development in fiction and scholarship and nonfiction, it often relies on a false sense of periodization. With this volume, we aim to put to rest the idea that women’s friendships are a particularly modern development, and with it the oversimplified narrative of historical progress between the Middle Ages and today, especially with respect to gender.
This volume is designed not only to remedy the absence of scholarly work on female friendship in the Middle Ages, therefore, but also to begin to articulate the multiform ways in which women’s friendships appear in medieval literary texts, culture, and even in modern Wiccan derivatives of medieval craft societies. Like the knight in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, who searches for an answer to the question of what it is that women most desire only to receive multiple and varied answers, we were delighted to discover in the course of assembling this collection that women’s friendships in medieval literature and culture are not homogenous; nor do they necessarily track with the philosophical parameters of masculine friendships.
Meanwhile, the interest in women’s friendship in other historical periods and in current popular writing continues apace without the Middle Ages. The 2017 nonfiction book Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, documents the largely unknown epistolary friendships these four major British women writers had with other female writers; feminist linguistics scholar Deborah Tannen’s 2017 book You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships considers, among many other things, the detrimental effect that negative social interactions—including those with friends—have on women’s health, despite the fact that they do not have a similar effect on men’s health. Reese Witherspoon, posting an Instagram picture of herself with her co-stars of the 2017 HBO series Big Little Lies (based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty), remarks of the series and her relationship to her fellow actresses: “The power of sisterhood and friendship is limitless!” Guardian writer Ellen E. Jones, who quotes Witherspoon, offers a somewhat different assessment of the series, if not the actresses’ bonds with one another, as “TV’s most compelling commercial opportunity yet: female friendship as a commodity.”
We argue that this supposedly new interest in women’s friendship as a topic of art, scholarship, cinema, and even consumerism actually continues a long tradition of writing that has been neglected in scholarship until now. We can see how thoroughly a periodized understanding of women’s friendship has pervaded popular thinking in examples like an NPR review of the book Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship that begins with the sentences “Women in the Middle Ages were excluded from many realms: the law, universities, and surprisingly, from friendship, writes author Kayleen Schaefer. The term ‘friend’ was reserved for the half of humanity that purportedly possessed superior morals—men—and only used to describe other men.” While the recent interest in women’s friendship is a positive development in fiction and scholarship and nonfiction, it often relies on a false sense of periodization. With this volume, we aim to put to rest the idea that women’s friendships are a particularly modern development, and with it the oversimplified narrative of historical progress between the Middle Ages and today, especially with respect to gender.
This volume is designed not only to remedy the absence of scholarly work on female friendship in the Middle Ages, therefore, but also to begin to articulate the multiform ways in which women’s friendships appear in medieval literary texts, culture, and even in modern Wiccan derivatives of medieval craft societies. Like the knight in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, who searches for an answer to the question of what it is that women most desire only to receive multiple and varied answers, we were delighted to discover in the course of assembling this collection that women’s friendships in medieval literature and culture are not homogenous; nor do they necessarily track with the philosophical parameters of masculine friendships.
Cuprins
Introduction Part 1 Varieties of Spiritual Friendship Chapter 1 Female Friendships and Visionary Women Chapter 2 The Foundations of Friendship: Amicitia, Literary Production, and Spiritual Community in Marie de France Chapter 3 Friendship and Resistance in the Vitae of Italian Holy Women Chapter 4 Sisters and Friends: The Medieval Nuns of Syon Abbey Part 2 Feminine Space, Feminine Voices Chapter 5 “Amonge maydenes moo”: Gender-Based Community, Racial Thinking, and Aristocratic Women’s Work in Emaré Chapter 6 Women’s Communities and the Possibility of Friendship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur Chapter 7 Female Friendship in Late Medieval English Literature: Cultural Translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory Part 3 New Modes of Female Friendship Chapter 8 Cultivating Cummarship: Female Friendship, Alcohol, and Pedagogical Community in the Alewife Poem Chapter 9 “All These Relationships between Women”: Chaucer and the Bechdel Test for Female Friendship Chapter 10 The Politics of Virtual Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies Chapter 11 Prosthetic Friendship and the Theater of Fraternity Chapter 12 Conversations among Friends: ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the Arts of Storytelling Afterword Friendship at a Distance
Descriere
Charts the understudied topic of women’s friendship in medieval literature across a range of texts and historical contexts, with attention to gender, religion, politics, sexuality, and civic structures.