Violence Against Women In Medieval Texts

This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on the role of habits of thought in shaping attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages. The essays range from Old English literature to the Spanish Inquisition and encompass such genres as romance, chronicles, hagiography, and legal documents.

''Challenges readers to acknowledge the extent to which violence figured in medieval texts and, with this recognition, to reconsider what the works teach us not only about the treatments and troping of victims in the medieval world but also how these patterns are a part of the social history of domestic violence.

"Challenges readers to acknowledge the extent to which violence figured in medieval texts and, with this recognition, to reconsider what the works teach us not only about the treatments and troping of victims in the medieval world but also how these patterns are a part of the social history of domestic violence."--Ann Dobyns, University of Denver Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts addresses a topic critical to our understanding of the medieval past--its notions of childhood and marital relations, its attitudes toward corporal punishment, and its contribution to the shaping of our present-day notions of family values. Using a wide range of late medieval narratives, including poetry, law, sermons, saints' lives, drama, and iconography, the authors explore the meaning and social effects of punitive violence within the domestic sphere. As the first collection to analyze such early manifestations of a problem still afflicting society today, it will be an insightful reference not only for medievalists but for students of literature, history, sociology, psychology, and law as well. Contents: Introduction, by Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price Part One. Domestic Violence and the Law 1. Interpreting Silence: Domestic Violence in the King's Courts in East Anglia, 1422-1442, by Philippa Maddern 2. The "Reasonable" Laws of Domestic Violence in Late Medieval England, by Emma Hawkes Part Two. Fictional Histories: Domestic Violence and Literary/Legal Texts 3. Chaucer's "Wife," the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays, by Eve Salisbury 4. Taboo and Transgression in Gower's Appollonius of Tyre, by Georgiana Donavin 5. Reframing the Violence of the Father: Reverse Oedipal Fantasies in Chaucer's Clerk's, Man of Law's, and Prioress's Tales, by Barrie Ruth Straus 6. Not Safe Even in Their Own Castles: Reading Domestic Violence Against Children in Four Middle English Romances, by Graham N. Drake 7. Domestic Violence in the Decameron, by Marilyn Migiel 8. Reading Riannon: The Problematics of Motherhood in Pwyll Pendeuic, by Christopher G. Nugent Part Three. Historical Fictions: Domestic Violence in Chronicle, Drama, Hagiography, and Illuminations 9. The "Homicidal Women" Stories in the Roman de Thebes, the Brut Chronicles, and Deschamps' "Ballade 285," by Anna Roberts 10. Noah's Wife: The Shaming of the "Trew," by Garrett P. J. Epp 11. Marriage, Socialization, and Domestic Violence in The Life of Christina of Markyate, by Robert Stanton 12. Imperial Violence and the Monstrous Mother: Cannibalism at the Siege of Jerusalem, by Merrall Llewelyn Price 13. The Feminized World and Divine Violence: Texts and Images of the Apocalypse, by Anne Laskaya Eve Salisbury is assistant professor of English at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Georgiana Donavin is associate professor of English at Westminster College, Salt Lake City. Merrall L. Price has written articles on violence in the Middle Ages and is currently pursuing research on anti-Semitism and reproductive politics in late medieval Europe and contemporary North America.

In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture. The volume has two purposes: first, to explore the resistance these pervasive representations generate and have generated for readers - especially for the female reader- and second, to explore what these representations tell us about social formations governing the relationships between men and women. More particularly, Rose and Robertson are interested in how representations of rape manifest a given culture's understanding of the female subject in society.

From devotional literature to political narratives, medieval texts propose that sexual violence victims have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. This book explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of medieval English texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal cases, romances, and legendary histories.

This pioneering work explores the theme of women and violence in the late medieval Mediterranean, bringing together medievalists of different specialties and methodologies to offer readers an updated outline of how different disciplines can contribute to the study of gender-based violence in medieval times. Building on the contributions of the social sciences, and in particular feminist criminology, the book analyses the rich theme of women and violence in its full spectrum, including both violence committed against women and violence perpetrated by women themselves, in order to show how medieval assumptions postulated a tight connection between the two. Violent crime, verbal offences, war and peace-making are among the themes approached by the book, which assesses to what extent coexisting elaborations on the relationship between femininity and violence in the Mediterranean were conflicting or collaborating. Geographical regions explored include Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. This multidisciplinary book will appeal to scholars and students of history, literature, gender studies, and legal studies.

The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

The Afterlives of Rape examines how medieval English texts--from devotional literature to Arthurian romance--imagine survivors of sexual violence to have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. This medieval history of survival as a site of spiritual transcendence and political critique continues to shape the terms of contemporary discussions about gender, rape, and survival