Medieval Mobilities

Basil Arnould Price is Wolfson Scholar at the University of York, UK. His research focuses on later medieval Iceland and in particular, the queer politics of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Old Norse-Icelandic sagas. He has previously published articles on colony, race, and queerness in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English literature.Jane Bonsall is Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on gender in late medieval English romance, with a focus on intertextuality and popular reception theories. Her recent publications concern gendered materiality, consent and coercion, and the role of the supernatural in Middle English romance.Meagan Khoury is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, USA, in Art History with a minor in Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation centers questions of women’s communal living and cultural production in early modern Italy.

“Basil Arnould Price, Jane Elizabeth Bonsall, and Meagan Khoury have edited an exciting new anthology that brings issues of gender into scholarship on mobility. The anthology contains three sections, each introduced by a more senior scholar. … Every essay references other essays and makes connections across the volume as a whole. Many collections end up feeling like a miscellany, but this collection has a coherence and shared sense of purpose … .” (Erik Wade, Speculum, Vol. 100 (2), April, 2025)

• 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