Inventing Women in the Middle Ages

Catalog description

How was the category woman constituted in the Middle Ages? Not assuming that women were the same then as now, this course, in dialogue with contemporary trans and genderqueer theory, will look at medieval gender in a new light. Considering works by women, like the Book of Margery Kempe, some primary texts about women, like the trial of Joan of Arc, and some scholarship about alternatives to the binary of women and men, like Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, this course will examine woman as a constructed category and The Middle Ages as one instance of the long work of making involved in issuing women into the common-sense category that they now occupy. (ENGL-PRE)