Fragments and Foundations: Medieval Texts and the Future of Feminism

Abstract

This article examines the development of feminist criticism and gender studies within medieval literary studies and the limited impact that feminist treatments of texts from the Middle Ages have had on the field of feminist theory and criticism more generally. I survey the past achievements by feminists working with medieval texts, noting that they focused primarily on concepts of femininity, representations of characters, or women writers. Then I explore the conflicting assessments of the present status of feminism within medieval literary studies. Finally, I argue that there are three primary areas for future research: the expansion of the feminist 'canon', interactions within and between texts, and the intersections of language and gender. Feminism has achieved many of its original goals and now has been largely supplanted by gender and sexuality studies, including queer theory. However, I conclude that medieval texts offer new directions for feminist inquiry because they contain the origins of gendered language in English; medieval texts reveal that the meanings of words like womanhood, femininity, and wifehood have been disparate and contested from their first usages and thereby defamiliarize our modern usages of those same terms.

Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of the Field

“…Bennett is by no means alone in this omission, however; historians and critics of the High Middle Ages routinely ignore the early medieval period, as Eileen Joy has meticulously documented. As Joy notes, Tara Williams's 2007 essay in this very journal merely remarks in a footnote that the field of Anglo‐Saxon studies is ‘outside the scope of this article’, while purporting to examine ‘the development of feminist criticism and gender studies within medieval literary studies’ 1 . Similarly, the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature begins after 1066; Beowulf is thus referenced only once in this sweeping survey of the field (in Seth Lerer's essay ‘Old English and its Afterlife’).…”