Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays dedicated to her work examines gender in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliaux, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. This collection asks, how do imagined bodies frame literary explorations of philosophical categories such as nature, the will, and emotion? What can accounts of specific historical medieval women-as authors, patrons, interlocutors-tell us about such representations? In what ways do devotional practices and texts intersect with the representations of gender? The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies.
Jennifer Jahner is professor of English at Caltech. Ingrid Nelson is associate professor of English at Amherst College.
Introduction: The Form of Thought Jennifer Jahner (Caltech) and Ingrid Nelson (Amherst College) Part 1: Form and Knowing Chaucerian Insomnia and the Hospitality of Sleeplessness in Late Medieval Dream Visions Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr College) Cloudy Thoughts: Cognition and Affect in Troilus and Criseyde Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) Voluntarism and the Self in Piers Plowman Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) Margery Kempe and the Paradoxical Presence of God Kate Crassons (Lehigh University) Part 2: Material Poetics Both 'Gostly Sense' and 'Amerouse Sentensce': The Nightingale's Resurrection as Hybrid Text Amy N. Vines (University of North Carolina, Greensboro) Middle English Verse Acrostics: A Survey Julia Boffey (Queen Mary University) and A.S.G. Edwards (University of Kent) The Landscapes of Pearl: Poetry and Theology Ad Putter (University of Bristol) Part 3: Historicizing Gender Disrupting Medieval Marriage in Anglo-Norman Women's Writing: Clemence Barking's Vie de Sainte Catherine, Marie's Life of Saint Audrey and Marie de France's Eliduc Roberta Krueger (Hamilton College) Three Medieval Visitors to Rome and the Women They Found There C. David Benson (University of Connecticut, Storrs, emeritus) and Pamela J. Benson (University of Connecticut, Storrs, emerita) The Anagogic Wife of Bath James Simpson (Harvard University)
