Henpecked Husbands, Unruly Wives, And Royal Authority In Lydgate's <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Mumming At Hertford</span>
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This article has two purposes: the first is to survey new approaches to gender studies in scholarship on Middle English literature; the second is to outline the continuing marginalization of gender studies in the field of Middle English scholarship and the consequences of this, both for the future of the discipline and for gender studies. , two paper sessions were devoted to gender studies themes, out of a total of approximately 40 panels. And yet, closer examination reveals that it is only in the field's most prestigious venues that feminism's fortunes have declined. Outside of these realms, there continues to be a strong interest in questions of gender and sexuality and considerable scholarly activity. Indeed, the overall production of gender-based analyses of Middle English literature has remained remarkably consistent from the mid-1990s right up to the present day. A year-by-year search for articles and books on Middle English texts in the MLA bibliography using the keyword 'gender' gives us a graduallyincreasing number of returns, beginning with four articles in 1986. In 1994, during the brief time when feminism was favored by the field's elites, the yearly total reaches 16. 4 By 2000, when the prestige value of feminism was on the decline, enthusiasm for gender-based analysis was still growing, as reflected in the 21 articles on the subject published that year. Since 2000, the number of gender studies articles has remained in the mid-twenties every year (peaking with 29 articles in 2003) until 2006, the most recent year for which complete records are available.Moreover, the study of gender in Middle English literature has proven remarkably fertile, diversifying into a wide variety of approaches over the last two decades. The movement that began with a second-wave feminist interest in examining treatments of the feminine and female characters in medieval texts and in recovering lost works by women writers (Williams 1005-6) has grown into a vigorous subfield that includes studies inflected with psychoanalysis, historicism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, cultural studies, and queer theory. When we expand an MLA search of Middle English scholarship from 2000 to 2006 to include terms relating to sexuality and queer theory as well as gender and feminism, the results are even more numerous, amounting to 285 entries, or an average of 40 articles a year. 5 The size and diversity of the field is such that it is no longer accurate to speak of feminism alone. Rather, we must speak about a broader field of gender studies. As different as the various areas subsumed under this title might be, they are bound not only by their common interest in gender, but by the contradictory condition of being popular areas of inquiry that are persistently marginalized by the field's elites. The purpose of this article is similarly divided. I wish first to do justice to gender studies' vigor and its exciting intellectual future by highlighting initiatives that I believe promise to yield fascinating scholarship in the coming years....
This article has two purposes: the first is to survey new approaches to gender studies in scholarship on Middle English literature; the second is to outline the continuing marginalization of gender studies in the field of Middle English scholarship and the consequences of this, both for the future of the discipline and for gender studies. , two paper sessions were devoted to gender studies themes, out of a total of approximately 40 panels. And yet, closer examination reveals that it is only in the field's most prestigious venues that feminism's fortunes have declined. Outside of these realms, there continues to be a strong interest in questions of gender and sexuality and considerable scholarly activity. Indeed, the overall production of gender-based analyses of Middle English literature has remained remarkably consistent from the mid-1990s right up to the present day. A year-by-year search for articles and books on Middle English texts in the MLA bibliography using the keyword 'gender' gives us a graduallyincreasing number of returns, beginning with four articles in 1986. In 1994, during the brief time when feminism was favored by the field's elites, the yearly total reaches 16. 4 By 2000, when the prestige value of feminism was on the decline, enthusiasm for gender-based analysis was still growing, as reflected in the 21 articles on the subject published that year. Since 2000, the number of gender studies articles has remained in the mid-twenties every year (peaking with 29 articles in 2003) until 2006, the most recent year for which complete records are available.Moreover, the study of gender in Middle English literature has proven remarkably fertile, diversifying into a wide variety of approaches over the last two decades. The movement that began with a second-wave feminist interest in examining treatments of the feminine and female characters in medieval texts and in recovering lost works by women writers (Williams 1005-6) has grown into a vigorous subfield that includes studies inflected with psychoanalysis, historicism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, cultural studies, and queer theory. When we expand an MLA search of Middle English scholarship from 2000 to 2006 to include terms relating to sexuality and queer theory as well as gender and feminism, the results are even more numerous, amounting to 285 entries, or an average of 40 articles a year. 5 The size and diversity of the field is such that it is no longer accurate to speak of feminism alone. Rather, we must speak about a broader field of gender studies. As different as the various areas subsumed under this title might be, they are bound not only by their common interest in gender, but by the contradictory condition of being popular areas of inquiry that are persistently marginalized by the field's elites. The purpose of this article is similarly divided. I wish first to do justice to gender studies' vigor and its exciting intellectual future by highlighting initiatives that I believe promise to yield fascinating scholarship in the coming years....
Scholars have recently begun to reconsider the importance of emotions, suggesting that they are cultural constructions integral to human identity and social life.Most of these studies, however, have ignored the medieval period, focusing instead on the "civilizing process"-that is, the supposed development of social etiquette and selfrestraint-that is assumed to have begun in the early modern period. This dissertation demonstrates that emotion was in fact a complex identity discourse well before the Renaissance and was fundamental to the construction of pre-modern social categories like gender. Exploring four masculine communities-clergymen, knights, university students, and merchants-I show that each community was shaped and constrained by a particular emotional ethos. Middle English poets were keenly aware of these constraints and their work often challenged the culture's emotional regimes.I focus on literary texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries because they were created during a time of heightened emphasis on the role of the emotions in shaping selves and communities. In the years after the Black Death, England witnessed significant demographic shifts and economic volatility that resulted in dramatic transformations in the nation's social landscape. Peasant rebellion, labor shortages, migrant clergy, and an influx of foreign merchants radically altered the structure of English society during these years. As a result, the institutions and ideologies that defined English masculine identity began changing in ways not seen before. Poets not surprisingly turned to the lexicon of emotion to negotiate these disruptions; in so doing, they offered English men new ways of understanding themselves in the face of rapid cultural change. The chapters examine a range of Middle English poems-the Alliterative Morte Arthure, St. Erkenwald, Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, and Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache-that illuminate particular emotions (anger, compassion, grief, and sorrow) and their significance to codes of masculinity. I argue that these four 2011 All Rights Reserved Graduate College ___________________________________ Glenn Ehrstine ii For Liam and Ophelia iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to offer my sincere thanks to all who shaped and contributed to this dissertation. Claire Sponsler, Jonathan Wilcox, and Kathy Lavezzo have each influenced my scholarly development and I am grateful for their generosity and support over the past six years. I also wish to thank Glenn Ehrstine and Adam Hooks for their insightful readings, questions, and critiques along the way. I am particularly grateful to Claire Sponsler, who has been an extraordinary mentor throughout the dissertation process. Her critical insight and ongoing support for my project has proven to be invaluable. She is also the best writing coach I have ever had. The University of Iowa"s Department of English supported my project with the Frederick F. Seely Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship, which not only allowed me to focus on research and writing for ...
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