This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires.

Always considering sexuality in relation to gender, the gender, the body, and indentity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of that period. Topics include the medieval understanding of sodomy, the historical construction of heterosexuality, and the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, and religion.

Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic BookIn "Covert Operations," Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas--confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse--Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the "Parson's Tale," the "Miller's Tale," the "Secretum Secretorum," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" as well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past--and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.

Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh Karma Lochrie "A feminist analysis of the writing of the fifteenth-century English mystic, showing how Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text, violated taboos, and responded to the constraints of her time."--Book News, Inc. Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads "The Book of Margery Kempe," demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. "Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh" will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory. New Cultural Studies 1992 268 pages 6 x 9 4 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-1557-1 Paper $26.50s 17.50 World Rights Biography, Literature Short copy: "A feminist analysis of the writing of the fifteenth-century English mystic, showing how Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text, violated taboos, and responded to the constraints of her time."--Book News, Inc.

Literary and cultural historians typically cite Thomas More's 1516 Utopia as the source of both a genre and a concept. Karma Lochrie rejects this origin myth of utopianism along with the assumption that people in the Middle Ages were incapable of such thinking. In Nowhere in the Middle Ages, Lochrie reframes the terms of the discussion by revealing how utopian thought was, in fact, "somewhere" in the Middle Ages. In the process, she transforms conventional readings of More's Utopia and challenges the very practice of literary history today. Drawing on a range of contemporary scholarship on utopianism and a broad premodern archive, Lochrie charts variant utopian strains in medieval literature and philosophy that diverge from More's work and at the same time plot uncanny connections with it. Examining works such as Macrobius's fifth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Mandeville's Travels, and William Langland's Piers Plowman, she finds evidence of a number of utopian drives, including the rejection of European centrality, a desire for more egalitarian politics, and a rethinking of the division between animals and humans. Nowhere in the Middle Ages insists on the relevance and transformative potential of medieval utopias for More's work and positions the sixteenth-century text as one alternative in a broader historical phenomenon of utopian thinking. Tracing medieval utopianisms forward in literary history to reveal their influences on early modern and modern literature and philosophy, Lochrie demonstrates that looking backward, we might extend future horizons of utopian thinking.