Rape, Violence, and Consent: The Medieval Pastourelle
Sponsoring Organization(s)
English Dept., Temple Univ.
Organizer Name
Carissa M. Harris, Elizaveta Strakhov
Organizer Affiliation
Temple Univ., Northwestern Univ.
Presider Name
Sarah Baechle
Presider Affiliation
Univ. of Notre Dame
Paper Title 1
The Many Voices of the Shepherdess: Resistance and Fantasy in the Pastourelle
Presenter 1 Name
Anne McCreary
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Texas-Austin
Paper Title 2
Declawing the Pastorale: Margaret of Flanders and Her House at Germolles
Presenter 2 Name
Scott Miller
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Northwestern Univ.
Paper Title 3
"Experience" versus "Auctorite" in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and the French Pastourelle
Presenter 3 Name
Elizaveta Strakhov
Paper Title 4
"Ye hurt my lytyl fynger": Subjectivity, Rape, and Resistance in the Middle English Pastourelle
Presenter 4 Name
Carissa M. Harris
Start Date
14-5-2015 1:30 PM
Session Location
Sangren 1720
Description
Our panel will explore how poets in the late Middle Ages deployed the genre of the pastourelle to negotiate tensions surrounding class, gender, and national difference. For some poets, the genre is a vehicle for mediating conflicting ideas about violence, sexuality, and consent, often exploring issues of victimization and culpability. For others, the pastourelle serves to dramatize class tensions between gentry and peasants or clerics and laypeople. For poets such as Jean Froissart, writing in Francophone Europe during the Hundred Years' War, the pastourelle became a valuable tool for articulating the human toll of armed conflict and for expressing burgeoning ideals of regionalism and protonationalism.
In exploring the rich variety of uses for this genre, our panel aims to revitalize interest in the medieval pastourelle across Europe as an important means of understanding, negotiating, and revising notions of social and sexual difference in the late medieval period.
Carissa M. Harris
Rape, Violence, and Consent: The Medieval Pastourelle
Sangren 1720
Our panel will explore how poets in the late Middle Ages deployed the genre of the pastourelle to negotiate tensions surrounding class, gender, and national difference. For some poets, the genre is a vehicle for mediating conflicting ideas about violence, sexuality, and consent, often exploring issues of victimization and culpability. For others, the pastourelle serves to dramatize class tensions between gentry and peasants or clerics and laypeople. For poets such as Jean Froissart, writing in Francophone Europe during the Hundred Years' War, the pastourelle became a valuable tool for articulating the human toll of armed conflict and for expressing burgeoning ideals of regionalism and protonationalism.
In exploring the rich variety of uses for this genre, our panel aims to revitalize interest in the medieval pastourelle across Europe as an important means of understanding, negotiating, and revising notions of social and sexual difference in the late medieval period.
Carissa M. Harris