Essays using feminist approaches to offer fresh insights into aspects of the texts and the material culture of the middle ages. Feminist discourses have called into question axiomatic world views and shown how gender and sexuality inevitably shape our perceptions, both historically and in the present moment. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies advances that critical endeavour with new questions and insights relating to gender and queer studies, sexualities, the subaltern, margins, and blurred boundaries. The volume's contributions, from French literary studies as well as German, English, history and art history, evince a variety of modes of feminist analysis, primarily in medieval studies but with extensions into early modernism. Several interrogate the ethics of feminist hermeneutics, the function of women characters in various literary genres, and so-called "natural" binaries - sex/gender, male/female, East/West, etc. - that undergird our vision of the world. Others investigate learned women and notions of female readership, authorship, and patronage in the production and reception of texts and manuscripts. Still others look at bodies - male male, female, neither, and both - and how clothes cover and socially encode them. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies is a tribute to E. Jane Burns, whose important work has proven foundational to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Old French feminist studies. Through her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in co-founding the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, Burns has inspired a new generation of feminist scholars. Laine E. Doggett is Associate Professor of French at St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City; Daniel E. O'Sullivan is Professor of French at the University of Mississippi. Contributors: Cynthia J. Brown, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Kristin L. Burr, Madeline H. Caviness, Laine E. Doggett, Sarah-Grace Heller,Ruth Mazo Karras, Roberta L. Krueger, Sharon Kinoshita, Tom Linkinen, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Lisa Perfetti, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Elizabeth Robertson, Helen Solterer

This collection of 14 critical essays examines short comedic tales from the 13th and 14th centuries, commonly known as the medieval French fabliaux. Each essay focuses on a different aspect of common fabliaux humor, as illustrated by a scholarly analysis of one or several original texts. Topics covered include the frequent use of bacon as humorous symbolism (in Barat et Haimet, Aloul, and Le Sacristain II), the use of comedic rhyme (in Le Prestre comport???????????????? and Le Prestre et le chevalier), and the common "virgin miracle" tale (in La Nonete). Throughout the work, contributors attempt to provide a serious analysis of the fabliaux without losing sight of the tales' original comedic content and appeal.

The question of what medieval "courtliness" was, both as a literary influence and as a historical "reality", is debated in this volume. The concept of courtliness forms the theme of this collection of essays. Focused on works written in the Francophone world between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they examine courtliness as both an historical privilege and aliterary ideal, and as a concept that operated on and was informed by complex social and economic realities. Several essays reveal how courtliness is subject to satire or is the subject of exhortation in works intended for noblemen and women, not to mention ambitious bourgeois. Others, more strictly literary in their focus, explore the witty, thoughtful and innovative responses of writers engaged in the conscious process of elevating the new vernacular culture through the articulation of its complexities and contradictions. The volume as a whole, uniting philosophical, theoretical, philological, and cultural approaches, demonstrates that medieval "courtliness" is an ideal that fascinates us to this day. It is thus a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in its exploration of the prrofound and wide-ranging ideas that define her contribution to the field. DANIEL E O'SULLIVAN is Associate Professor of French at the University of Mississippi; LAURIE SHEPHARD is Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Contributors: Peter Haidu, Donald Maddox, Michel-Andre Bossy, Kristin Burr, Joan Tasker Grimbert, David Hult, Virgine Greene, Logan Whalen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Elizabeth W. Poe, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, William Schenck, Nadia Margolis, Laine Doggett, E. Jane Burns, Nancy FreemanRegalado, Laurie Shephard, Sarah White

This collection considers the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in numerous ways. The works analysed span genres-epic, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography, fabliaux-and historical periods from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. Contributors examine the complexity of the notion of self through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming. Studying a variety of texts-including Conte du Graal, Roman de la Rose, Huon de Bordeaux, and the Oxford Roland-they conceptualize the Other Within as an individual who simultaneously exists within a group while remaining foreign to it. They explore the complex interactions between and among individuals and groups, and demonstrate how identity can be imposed and self-imposed not only by characters but by authors and audiences. Taken together, these essays highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, and underscore both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they initially appear.