Distributed for University of London Press
Gender in medieval places, spaces and thresholds
This collection addresses the concept of gender in the middle ages through the study of place and space, exploring how gender and space may be mutually constructive and how individuals and communities make and are made by the places and spaces they inhabit. From womb to tomb, how are we defined and confined by gender and by space? Interrogating the thresholds between sacred and secular, public and private, enclosure and exposure, domestic and political, movement and stasis, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection draw on current research and contemporary theory to suggest new destinations for future study.
Table of Contents
Foreword. The Virgin of Bethlehem, gender and space Anthony Bale Introduction Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter I. Sacred space 1. Religious women in the landscape: their roles in medieval Canterbury and its hinterland Sheila Sweetinburgh 2. Space and place: archaeologies of female monasticism in later medieval Ireland Tracy Collins 3. Making space for leprous nuns: Matthew Paris and the foundation of St. Mary de Pré, St. Albans Philippa Byrne 4. On the threshold? The role of women in Lincolnshire’s late medieval parish guilds Claire Kennan 5. Beyond the sea: medieval mystic space and early modern convents in exile Victoria Blud II. Going places 6. Men on pilgrimage – women adrift: thoughts on gender in sea narratives from early medieval Ireland Eivor Bekkhus 7. ‘Yfallen out of heigh degree’: Chaucer’s Monk and crises of liminal masculinities Martin Laidlaw 8. The feminine mystic: Margery Kempe’s pilgrimage to Rome as an imitatio Birgittae Einat Klafter III. A woman’s place? 9. ‘Unbynde her anoone’: The Lives of St. Margaret of Antioch and the lying-in space in late medieval England Róisín Donohoe 10. Gendered spaces and female filth: Auda Fabri’s mystical heresy Kathryn Loveridge 11. Shopping or scrimping? The contested space of the household in Middle English devotional literature Louise Campion 12. Tombscape: the tomb of Lady Joan de Mohun in the crypt of Canterbury cathedral Diane Heath IV. Watch this space! 13. Women’s visibility and the ‘vocal gaze’ at windows, doors and gates in vitae from the thirteenth-century Low Countries Hannah Shepherd 14. Women in the medieval wall paintings of Canterbury cathedral Jayne Wackett 15. Commanding un-empty space: silence, stillness and scopic authority in the York Christ before Herod Daisy Black Afterword Leonie V. Hicks Index