Gender, Materiality, and Movement in Medieval French Literature and Lyric
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Rachel May Golden; Katherine Kong
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville; Independent Scholar
Presider Name
Katherine Kong
Paper Title 1
Singing Stasis: Mourning, Gender, and Non-Normative Motions in Northern French Song
Presenter 1 Name
Rachel May Golden
Paper Title 2
Blanche de Castile Lyricised: A Case of Political Contrafacture in Thirteenth-Century France
Presenter 2 Name
Meghan Quinlan
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Oxford
Paper Title 3
Movements of the Female Voice in Ars Antiqua Motet Manuscripts
Presenter 3 Name
Anna Kathryn Grau
Presenter 3 Affiliation
DePaul Univ.
Paper Title 4
Mobility and Meaning in Aucassin et Nicolette
Presenter 4 Name
Jacqueline Victor
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Chicago
Start Date
11-5-2018 3:30 PM
Session Location
Schneider 1325
Description
This session employs gender as a critical category of analysis to interpret aspects of materiality and movement in medieval French literature, lyric, and song. In particular, we construe materiality and movement broadly—as they manifest within, between, and beyond the texts themselves— to include human bodies, material objects and culture, specific manifestations of a work or corpus, and related phenomena of travel, circulation, or transmission. Writing, performance, and travel were profoundly gendered and often embodied activities in medieval France, and we hope to consider how lyric and literary repertories demonstrate these inflections.
The shifting geopolitical landscape of medieval France— from the First Crusade, through the Hundred Years’ War—constantly generated and engaged songs, stories, and manuscripts in contexts predicated on movement, travel, and re-invention. Quite fittingly, scholarship on medieval French literature and lyric has focused on sounds and stories as materials in motion, involving oral transmission, bodily performance, theories of mouvance, studies of manuscripts, and notions of songbook. In this session we seek to consider these works and ideas through the lens of gender.
While studies of gender often focus on women’s experiences, this session proposes an inclusive examination of gender, to consider masculinities, femininities, their intersections, marked absences, and realizations. This kind of analysis is particularly apt for medieval French literatures because of the explicitly voiced and often explicitly gendered quality of these repertories and texts. In particular we aim to examine how writers, texts, and songs encode or shape gendered positions, variously complying with or subverting cultural expectations.
Rachel M. Golden
Gender, Materiality, and Movement in Medieval French Literature and Lyric
Schneider 1325
This session employs gender as a critical category of analysis to interpret aspects of materiality and movement in medieval French literature, lyric, and song. In particular, we construe materiality and movement broadly—as they manifest within, between, and beyond the texts themselves— to include human bodies, material objects and culture, specific manifestations of a work or corpus, and related phenomena of travel, circulation, or transmission. Writing, performance, and travel were profoundly gendered and often embodied activities in medieval France, and we hope to consider how lyric and literary repertories demonstrate these inflections.
The shifting geopolitical landscape of medieval France— from the First Crusade, through the Hundred Years’ War—constantly generated and engaged songs, stories, and manuscripts in contexts predicated on movement, travel, and re-invention. Quite fittingly, scholarship on medieval French literature and lyric has focused on sounds and stories as materials in motion, involving oral transmission, bodily performance, theories of mouvance, studies of manuscripts, and notions of songbook. In this session we seek to consider these works and ideas through the lens of gender.
While studies of gender often focus on women’s experiences, this session proposes an inclusive examination of gender, to consider masculinities, femininities, their intersections, marked absences, and realizations. This kind of analysis is particularly apt for medieval French literatures because of the explicitly voiced and often explicitly gendered quality of these repertories and texts. In particular we aim to examine how writers, texts, and songs encode or shape gendered positions, variously complying with or subverting cultural expectations.
Rachel M. Golden