Böcker i Interventions: New Studies Med-serien

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

Bestiaries. Lapidaries. Lunaries. Inventories and household vocabularies. Lists are everywhere in medieval and early modern texts--evidence of the need to manage and order knowledge and experience. Yet until now, listing as a formal practice has received scant scholarly attention. In Enlistment, foremost medievalists and early modernists from both the Anglo-American and German traditions investigate the humble list as a platform for better understanding how and why lists captivated period audiences. From epic catalogues of trees in Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to genealogies and the names of the divine, the lists in question come from a variety of periods, languages, and genres. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how lists have the curious capacity to challenge our categories of thinking and ordering of the world. The lists we encounter in medieval and early modern literature can thus be seen as seismographs of cultural knowledge and also as testing grounds for defining the ineffable, or unfathomable, or that which would be dangerous if otherwise expressed. Contributors: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Ingo Berensmeyer, Eva von Contzen, Alex Davis, Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller, Alexis Kellner Becker, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Martha Rust, James Simpson

While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. Sara Petrosillo's Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.