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'Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds', eds. Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter

January 2019

Available free as Open Access Buy this book: print and eBook Open Access chapter-by-chapter via JSTOR

Description

Edited by Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter

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.

Published in 2019 as part of the IHR Conference Series

Individual chapters are available Open Access via JSTOR Open Access Books

Read a post about this book on the IHR's blog, 'On History'.

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Table of contents

About the contributors

Foreword. The Virgin of Bethlehem, gender and space

Anthony Bale

Introduction

Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Einat Klafter

Section 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

Section 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

Section 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

Section 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

Leonie V. Hicks