GENDER IN DEBATE FROM THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE

Transcription

1 GENDER IN DEBATE FROM THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE

2 THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages presents transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures. It includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio's Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W Rosemann For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances Underhill Constructions ofwidowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canade Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Listen Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Scimce, The Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr.

3 GENDER IN DEBATE FROM THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE Edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees Palgrave

4 * GENDER IN DEBATE FROM THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE Copyright Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd. (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd.). ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender in debate from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance / edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees. p. cm - (The new Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sex role in literature. 2. Women in literature. 3. Literature, Medieval-History and criticism. 4. European literature-renaissance, I. Fenster, Thelma S. II. Lees, Clare A. III. New Middle Ages series (Palgrave (Firm)) PN56.S52 G ' dc A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: March

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Series Editor's Foreword Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Vll lx Xl Introduction Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees 1. The Clerics and the Critics: Misogyny and the Social Symbolic in Anglo-Saxon England Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing 2. The Undebated Debate: Gender and the Image of God in Medieval Theology E. Ann Matter 3. Refiguring the "Scandalous Excess" of Medieval Woman: The Wife of Bath and Liberality 57 Alcuin Blamires 4. Beyond Debate: Gender in Play in Old French Courtly Fiction 79 Roberta L. Krueger 5. Thinking through Gender in Late Medieval German Literature 97 Ann Marie Rasmussen 6. The Strains ofdefense: The Many Voices in Jean LeFevre's Livre de Leesce Karen Pratt 7. The Freedoms of Fiction for Gender in Premodern France Helen Solterer 8. Debate about Women in Trecento Florence Pamela Benson

6 VI 9. A Woman's Place:Visualizing the Feminine Ideal in the Courts and Communes of Renaissance Italy Margaret Franklin 10. "Deceitful Sects":The Debate about Women in the Age of Isabel the Catholic Barbara F Weissberger 11. "~Que demandamos de las mugeres?": Forming the Debate about Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (with a Baroque Reponse) Julian Weiss Bibliography of Primary Texts in Spanish, ca Biographies Index

7 SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD T he New Middle Ages contributes to lively transdisciplinary conversations in medieval cultural studies through its scholarly monographs and essay collections. This series provides focused research in a contemporary idiom about specific but diverse practices, expressions, and ideologies in the Middle Ages; it aims especially to recuperate the histories of medieval women. Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, a model collection of essays edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, is the twenty-fourth volume in this series. These essays range widely over medieval Western experiences but keep focused squarely on one central issue: how were women, as individuals and as a group, objects of interpretation in the Middle Ages? How was the status of women-a favorite topic-debated? What purposes were achieved by "thinking through gender," and invoking the full apparatus of the conventional "woman question"? These vivid essays by noted scholars provide sophisticated yet accessible responses to these questions. Bonnie Wheeler Southern Methodist University

8 In memory if Jack Lees ( )

9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS W e wish to thank Fordham University, and former Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science Robert F. Himmelberg in particular, for generous funding of the March 1999 conference at Fordham University, at which most contributors to this volume were able to exchange ideas and perspectives. We thank too Roland Greene, and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, for their support. We would also like to express our gratitude to the contributors to this volume, both for their willingness to think through the difficult issues raised by focusing on medieval "debate" and gender and for their expertise at wrestling the subject to the ground, for now. We hope that their efforts will inspire further investigation, as the best writing often does. Jim Craddock has continued to lend his strong support. Cora Maude and Jacob Lees Weiss provided welcome distraction (sometimes even at the right moments).

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11 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Andrea del Castagno, Uomini Jamosi I donne illustri cycle from the Villa Carducci, , Galleria degli Ufiizi, Florence Andrea del Castagno, Queen Tomyris, , Galleria degli Ufiizi, Florence Andrea del Castagno, The Cumaean Sibyl, , Galleria degli Ufiizi, Florence Ercole de'roberti, Portia and Brutus, c , Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Ercole de'roberti, Lucretia, Brutus and Collatinus, c , Galleria Estense, Modena, Italy Ercole de'roberti, The Wife of Hasdrubal and Her Children, c , National Gallery of Art, Washington 201