Burns, E. Jane (Editor)
McCracken, Peggy (Editor)
University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date: 2013
Language: English
Physical Details: ix + 270 pp.; ill.; bibl.; index
The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and animal elements that allow movement between, and even confusion of, components of each realm. From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe raises the issues of species and gender in tandem, asking readers to consider more fully what happens to gender in medieval representations of nonhuman embodiment. The contributors reflect on the gender of stones and the soul, of worms and dragons, showing that medieval cultural artifacts, whether literary, historical, or visual, do not limit questions of gender to predictable forms of human or semi-human embodiment. By expanding what counts as the body in medieval cultural studies, the essays shift our understanding of gendered embodiment and articulate new perspectives on its range, functions, and effects on a broader theoretical spectrum. Drawing on depictions of differently bodied creatures in the Middle Ages, they dislodge and reconfigure long-standing views of the body as always human and the human body as merely male and female. The essays address a number of cultural contexts and academic disciplines: from French and English literature to objects of Germanic and Netherlandish material culture, from theological debates to literary concerns with the soul. They engage with issues of gender and embodiment located in stones, skeletons, and snake tails, swan-knights, and werewolves, along with a host of other unexpected places in a thought-provoking addition to somatic cultural history.
...MoreDescription Contents:
Review Williams, Tara (2014) Review of "From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe". Renaissance Quarterly (p. 669).
Chapter Cohen, Jeffrey J. (2013) The Sex Life of Stone. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 17).
Chapter Guynn, Noah D. (2013) Hybridity, Ethics, and Gender in Two Old French Werewolf Tales. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 157).
Chapter Rasussen, Ann Marie (2013) Moving beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 221).
Chapter Robertson, Elizabeth (2013) Kissing the Worm: Sex and Gender in the Afterlife and the Poetic Posthuman in the Late Middle English “A Disputacion betwyx the Body and Wormes”. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 121).
Chapter Burns, E. Jane; McCracken, Peggy (2013) Introduction: Gendered Bodies in Unexpected Places. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 1).
Chapter McCracken, Peggy (2013) Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 39).
Chapter Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn (2013) The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien's Chevalier au lion. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 65).
Chapter Elliott, Dylan (2013) Rubber Soul: Theology, Hagiography, and the Spirit World of the High Middle Ages. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 89).
Chapter Burns, E. Jane (2013) A Snake-Tailed Woman: Hybridity And Dynasty in the Roman de Mélusine. In: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (p. 185).
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