Full Description
This collection explores the intersection of gender and mobility across the Global Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities questions how medieval people, texts, images, and ideas move across physiological, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries. In what ways do these movements afford new configurations of gender, sexuality, and being? Enacting a dialogue between medieval studies, feminist thought, and queer theory, Medieval Mobilities proposes that attending to the undulations of premodern gender and sexuality may help destabilize unstated assumptions about ways of being and loving in the Middle Ages. This volume also brings together emergent and established scholars to challenge an increasingly static academy and instead envision a scholarly practice focused on intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing upon wide range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks, the resultant essays unsettle the imagined fixity ofgender and propose alternative conceptualizations of embodiment, identity, and difference in the medieval world.
Contents
Introduction.- Part I Bodies.- Introducing Bodies.- Where Do We Go from Here: Transitivity and Journey Narratives in Eleanor Rykener.- Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen's Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy.- Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary Identification in Late Medieval Sources.- Part II Spaces.- Troubling Spaces: Taking up Space and Being Taken by Generative Scholarship.- "Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now": Encountering and Observing Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān's Risala.- Disorienting Masculinity: Movement, Emotion and Chivalric Identity in Partonope of Blois.- Part III Transcendence.- Troubling Mobilities: Transcendence.- Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression and Agency in the Katherine Group's Seinte Margarete.- Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies.- Greenland as a Horizon: Approaching Queer Utopianism in FlóamannaSaga.- Afterword; Afterwards
