Carolyn Dinshaw – författare

In Chaucer's texts amatory acts are often correlated with literary acts; for him, literary activity is always a gendered activity. Writing in the context of a resolutely patriarchal culture, Chaucer's acts of interpretation are masculine activities. Carolyn Dinshaw's work is based on the idea that gendered relations such as courtship, marriage and betrayal do not simply provide plot elements in Chaucer's work but are in fact central to an understanding of Chaucer's poetics. In her readings of Chaucer's texts, Dinshaw argues that he demonstrates both his investment in patriarchal discourse and his awareness of its limitations. Dinshaw traces Chaucer's explorations of writing and gender in his major works. In ""Troilus and Criseyde"" and the ""Legend of Good Women"" Chaucer creates an emphatically masculine narrator who atttempts to control - and finally rejects - the unruly feminine in all its textual forms: he rejects both earthly love and the ""carnal"" letter of the pagan text. In ""The Canterbury Tales"", the Man of Law also tries to control the feminine, whch emerges in the contradictions and problematic gaps that open up in his narrative. The Wife of Bath, who responds energetically to the Man of Law's performance, represents everything the Man of Law tries to suppress. The Clerk, and finally the Pardoner, point toward a profound critique of a patriarchal hermeneutic model, especially of its gender distinctions. In bringing together modern theory and a medieval writer, Dinshaw demonstrates the existence of a long tradition of patriarchal thinking - and a long tradition of feminist critique.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing seeks to recover the lives and particular experiences of medieval women by concentrating on various kinds of texts: the texts they wrote themselves as well as texts that attempted to shape, limit, or expand their lives. The first section investigates the roles traditionally assigned to medieval women (as virgins, widows, and wives); it also considers female childhood and relations between women. The second section explores social spaces, including textuality itself: for every surviving medieval manuscript bespeaks collaborative effort. It considers women as authors, as anchoresses 'dead to the world', and as preachers and teachers in the world staking claims to authority without entering a pulpit. The final section considers the lives and writings of remarkable women, including Marie de France, Heloise, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and female lyricists and romancers whose names are lost, but whose texts survive.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing seeks to recover the lives and particular experiences of medieval women by concentrating on various kinds of texts: the texts they wrote themselves as well as texts that attempted to shape, limit, or expand their lives. The first section investigates the roles traditionally assigned to medieval women (as virgins, widows, and wives); it also considers female childhood and relations between women. The second section explores social spaces, including textuality itself: for every surviving medieval manuscript bespeaks collaborative effort. It considers women as authors, as anchoresses 'dead to the world', and as preachers and teachers in the world staking claims to authority without entering a pulpit. The final section considers the lives and writings of remarkable women, including Marie de France, Heloise, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and female lyricists and romancers whose names are lost, but whose texts survive.

In Getting Medieval Carolyn Dinshaw examines communities-dissident and orthodox-in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century England to create a new sense of queer history. Reaching beyond both medieval and queer studies, Dinshaw demonstrates in this challenging work how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to current issues in cultural studies. In the process, she makes important connections between past and present cultures that until now have not been realized. In her pursuit of historical analyses that embrace the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of sex and sexuality, Dinshaw examines canonical Middle English texts such as the Canterbury Tales and The Book of Margery Kempe. She examines polemics around the religious dissidents known as the Lollards as well as accounts of prostitutes in London to address questions of how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were proscribed. By exploring contemporary (mis)appropriations of medieval tropes in texts ranging from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to recent Congressional debates on U.S. cultural production, Dinshaw demonstrates how such modern media can serve to reinforce constrictive heteronormative values and deny the multifarious nature of history. Finally, she works with and against the theories of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, Roland Barthes, and John Boswell to show how deconstructionist impulses as well as historical perspectives can further an understanding of community in both pre- and postmodern societies.This long-anticipated volume will be indispensible to medieval and queer scholars and will be welcomed by a larger cultural studies audience.