This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed "unhomely" spaces. They inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality-the homely female space-to provide autonomy. While these methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan.

Interdisciplinary in approach, Tolkien the Medievalist provides a fresh perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien's Medievalism. In fifteen essays, eminent scholars and new voices explore how Professor Tolkien responded to a modern age of crisis - historical, academic and personal - by adapting his scholarship on medieval literature to his own personal voice. The four sections reveal the author influenced by his profession, religious faith and important issues of the time; by his relationships with other medievalists; by the medieval sources that he read and taught, and by his own medieval mythologizing.

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Articles which survey and map out the increasingly significant discipline of medievalism; and explore its numerous aspects. This latest volume of Studies in Medievalism further explores definitions of the field, complementing its landmark predecessor. In its first section, essays by seven leading medievalists seeks to determine precisely how tocharacterize the subjects of study, their relationship to new and related fields, such as neomedievalism, and their relevance to the middle ages, whose definition is itself a matter of debate. Their observations and conclusions are then tested in the articles second part of the book. Their topics include the notion of progress over the last eighty or ninety years in our perception of the middle ages; medievalism in Gustave Dore's mid-nineteenth-century engravings of the Divine Comedy; the role of music in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films; cinematic representations of the Holy Grail; the medieval courtly love tradition in Jeanette Winterson's The Passionand The.Powerbook; Eleanor of Aquitaine in twentieth-century histories; modern updates of the Seven Deadly Sins; and Victorian spins on Jacques de Voragine's Golden Legend. CONTRIBUTORS: Carla A. Arnell,Aida Audeh, Jane Chance, Pamela Clements, Alain Corbellari, Roberta Davidson, Michael Evans, Nickolas Haydock, Carol Jamison, Stephen Meyer, E.L. Risden, Carol L. Robinson, Clare A. Simmons, Richard Utz, Veronica Ortenberg West-Harling

" With New Line Cinema's production of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the popularity of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is unparalleled. Tolkien's books continue to be bestsellers decades after their original publication. An epic in league with those of Spenser and Malory, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, begun during Hitler's rise to power, celebrates the insignificant individual as hero in the modern world. Jane Chance's critical appraisal of Tolkien's heroic masterwork is the first to explore its "mythology of power"--that is, how power, politics, and language interact. Chance looks beyond the fantastic, self-contained world of Middle-earth to the twentieth-century parallels presented in the trilogy.

This book examines key points of J. R. R. Tolkien's life and writing career in relation to his views on humanism and feminism, particularly his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, deemed unimportant, or marginalized-namely, the Other. Jane Chance argues such empathy derived from a variety of causes ranging from the loss of his parents during his early life to a consciousness of the injustice and violence in both World Wars. As a result of his obligation to research and publish in his field and propelled by his sense of abjection and diminution of self, Tolkien concealed aspects of the personal in relatively consistent ways in his medieval adaptations, lectures, essays, and translations, many only recently published. These scholarly writings blend with and relate to his fictional writings in various ways depending on the moment at which he began teaching, translating, or editing a specific medieval work and, simultaneously, composing a specific poem, fantasy, or fairy-story. What Tolkien read and studied from the time before and during his college days at Exeter and continued researching until he died opens a door into understanding how he uniquely interpreted and repurposed the medieval in constructing fantasy.

" J.R.R. Tolkien's zeal for medieval literary, religious, and cultural ideas deeply influenced his entire life and provided the seeds for his own fiction. In Tolkien's Art, Chance discusses not only such classics as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, but focuses on his minor works as well, outlining in detail the sources and influences--from pagan epic to Christian legend-that formed the foundation of Tolkien's masterpieces, his "mythology for England."

Interdisciplinary in approach, Tolkien the Medievalist provides a fresh perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien's Medievalism. In fifteen essays, eminent scholars and new voices explore how Professor Tolkien responded to a modern age of crisis - historical, academic and personal - by adapting his scholarship on medieval literature to his own personal voice. The four sections reveal the author influenced by his profession, religious faith and important issues of the time; by his relationships with other medievalists; by the medieval sources that he read and taught, and by his own medieval mythologizing.

This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed 'unhomely' spaces. They inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality the homely female space to provide autonomy. While these methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan.

Christine de Pizan (1364-?1430) was the first French woman poet to make her living by the pen, and the first female interpreter of classical myths; she held enormous power in the French court and influenced late medieval culture in France and in England in a number of ways. The Letter of Othea to Hector, her most popular work, is a series of a hundred verse texts about a mythological figure or moment, with prose moral glosses explaining how to read the myth in order to improve human character. It is translated here with introduction, notes, and interpretative essay.

The concealment of embarrassing, often sexual, secrets and the burden of political alliances and strategies - in short, sexual politics - motivated Chaucer in much of his work. This concept, long suspected but mostly ignored by Chaucer critics, receives full treatment in "The mythographic Chaucer". Firmly placing Chaucer in the cultural politics of his time, this study shows how the author inverted the mythographic and textual conventions of the period for his own literary, social, and political purposes. Comparing significant mythological images, references, and figures in Chaucerian poems with those of other medieval mythographers, Chance discloses Chaucer's ironic use of mythographic tradition to disguise the scandalous and politically sensitive. Here we see, for instance, how Chaucer deployed the medieval model of poetic concealment to construct the fabulation (the narratio fabulosa, itself a medieval techne) of sexual politics. This analysis gives us a rich sense of the complexity of Chaucer's mythographic options and his playful employment of contextual material as he rewrote, and tried to resolve, tensions among vernacular, classical, and Christian (sometimes Hebraic) scriptural and textual traditions. Invaluable to an understanding of Chaucer, this book is also instructive in showing how mythographic analysis can combine "traditional" literary elucidation with the issues of contemporary cultural theory.