Product Description: To the Glory of Her Sex presents an account of medieval women's activities as correspondents, readers, writers, and literary patrons from antiquity through the fourteenth century. The writings explored here represent a cross-section of virtually every field in historical and literary studies, including Latin literature, romance literature in French, political and religious correspondence, theological and moral treatises written for women, and histories and biographies commissioned by or addressed to women...read more

Product Description: This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed 'unhomely' spaces...read more

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Product Description: Gendering the Master Narrative asks whether a female tradition of power might have existed distinct from the male one, and how such a tradition might have been transmitted. It describes women's progress toward power as a push-pull movement, showing how practices and institutions that ostensibly enabled women in the Middle Ages could sometimes erode their authority as well...read more

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. For example, chastity is an apparent given for both positions, but the chastity involved may have a number of possible cultural meanings or uses. This study addresses facets of these two female positions in medieval literature: gender constructions of the body and what it means to make it visible, whether in admiration, torture, or martyrdom; issues of physicality and abjection; and creations of literary voices for women who write or create situations for them to be written about. A group of female scholars examine the meanings behind widowhood and virginity both individually and in relation to each other. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Why did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as "apostles to the dead" and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around 1300 venerate a woman as the Holy Spirit incarnate and another as the Angelic Pope?In From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Barbara Newman asks these and other questions to trace a gradual and ambiguous transition in the gender strategies of medieval religious women...read more

Product Description: The predominant cultural expectation for women in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as propagated and institutionalized by both the literate aristocracy and the medieval Church, was quite straightforward. The ideal woman was to be chaste and obedient, busy in the home and silent outside it...read more