The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England - Softcover

"A volume of the first importance to the scholarship of medieval women writers. . . . An ambitious attempt to understand what 'gender' and 'text' might have meant in the Middle Ages from the perspective of the woman writer and reader rather than through the more usual androcentric lens. . . . [The] collection brings together for the first time in one place essays about a whole range of women writers from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries and from places as distant as Spain and Sweden, as well as the more well-known French and English writers."--Laurie Finke, Kenyon College

"Brings together, under three main categories, diverse methodologies from . . . some of the foremost scholars and interpreters of each type of material and approach."--Nadia Margolis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The women who spoke or wrote in the margins of the Middle Ages--women who were oppressed and diminished by social and religious institutions--often were not literate. Or, if they could read, they did not know how to write. Transforming or subverting Western and patristic traditions associated with the clergy, they also turned to Eastern and North African traditions and to popular oral theater, and focused in their choice of genre on lyric, romance, and confessional autobiography. These essays analyze their texts and reconstruct a medieval feminine aesthetic that begins a rewriting of cultural and literary history.

Contents
Part I. M/F: Authority, Domination, Misogyny
1. Muliebriter: Doing Gender in the Letters of Heloise, by Catherine Brown
2. The Use of Gender and Gender-Related Imagery in Hadewijch, by Saskia Murk-Jansen
3. Gender and Prophetic Authority in Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations, by Claire L. Sahlin
4. Rejecting Essentialism and Gendered Writing: The Case of Christine de Pizan, by Earl Jeffrey Richards
Part II. Autohagiography and Self-Mimesis: The Construction of Female Subjectivity
5. Marie de France and the Body Poetic, by Rupert T. Pickens
6. Rewriting Romance: Courtly Discourse and Auto-Citation in Christine de Pizan, by Kevin Brownlee
7. A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe, by Sarah Beckwith
8. The Autohagiography and Medieval Women's Spiritual Autobiography, by Kate Greenspan
Part III. Speaking the Body: Transhumanization and Subversion
9. On the (Un)Representability of Woman's Pleasure: Angela of Foligno and Jacques Lacan
10. "God fulfylled my bodye": Body, Self, and God in Julian of Norwich, by Maria R. Lichtmann
11. Writing (in) Fear, by Claire Nouvet
12. The Discourse of Ecstasy: Late Medieval Spanish Women and Their Texts, by Mary E. Giles

Jane Chance is professor of English at Rice University. She has written or edited 13 books on Old and Middle English literature, mythography, medieval women, and modern medievalism, including Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433-1177 (UPF, 1994), Woman as Hero in Old English Literature, and Christine de Pizan, The Letter of Othea to Hector, Translated, with Introduction and Interpretative Essay. She is the editor of the Pagasus Library of Medieval Women.