This collection explores the intersection of gender and mobility across the Global Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities questions how medieval people, texts, images, and ideas move across physiological, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries. In what ways do these movements afford new configurations of gender, sexuality, and being? Enacting a dialogue between medieval studies, feminist thought, and queer theory, Medieval Mobilities proposes that attending to the undulations of premodern gender and sexuality may help destabilize unstated assumptions about ways of being and loving in the Middle Ages. This volume also brings together emergent and established scholars to challenge an increasingly static academy and instead envision a scholarly practice focused on intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing upon wide range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks, the resultant essays unsettle the imagined fixity of gender and propose alternative conceptualizations of embodiment, identity, and difference in the medieval world.
Author(s): Basil Arnould Price, Jane Elizabeth Bonsall, Meagan Khoury
Series: The New Middle Ages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 259
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
Questions Posed
Why Medieval Mobilities Now?
Contributions
Part I: Bodies
Part II: Spaces
Part III: Transcendence
Conclusion
Works Cited
Part I: Bodies
Introducing Bodies
Where Do We Go from Here: Transitivity and Journey Narratives in Eleanor Rykener
Introduction
Early Rykener (1995–2006)
Late Rykener (2014–2021)
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy
Introduction
Theoretical Framework
Scivias
Richardis Letters
Symphoniae
Virgo
Mulier
Feminae
Quia Ergo Femina: A Case Study
Rupertsberg
Conclusions
Appendix
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary Identification in Late Medieval Sources
Introduction
Defining Non-Binary
Toward Non-Binary Medieval Sex/Gender
Gendering Christ’s Wounds
Looking at Genitalia
Serving Cunt on the Crucifix
Christ as Trans Icon
Conclusion: Fluidity and Futurity in Scholarship
Works Cited
Part II: Spaces
Troubling Spaces: Taking up Space and Being Taken by Generative Scholarship
“Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now”: Encountering and Observing Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala
Ibn Faḍlān Out of Place
Intrusions and Observational Complicity
Women in the Risala
Noticing Women
Rūs Women
A Funerary Observer
A Funerary Interpreter?
Where Were the Women?
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Disorienting Masculinity: Movement, Emotion and Chivalric Identity in Partonope of Blois
Lost in the Wood: Romance’s Expected Disorientation
Still as Any Stone: Stasis, Sex, and Embodied Disorientation
Losing the Plot: Madness and Narrative Disorientation
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Part III: Transcendence
Troubling Mobilities: Transcendence
Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression and Agency in the Katherine Group’s Seinte Margarete
Policing the Anchoritic Body: Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad
Anchoritic Writings: Seinte Margarete, Hali Meiðhad and Ancrene Wisse
Old and Middle English Versions of the Life of St Margaret
Visual Depictions of Margaret
Conclusion
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies
On Trans Animacy
Trans Animacy and Alchemical Stones
Mercurial Matter
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Greenland as a Horizon: Approaching Queer Utopianism in Flóamanna Saga
Works Cited
Primary
Secondary
Afterword; Afterwards
Index
