Elizabeth L'Estrange – författare

This study brings images of holy motherhood and childbearing into the centre of an art-historical enquiry, showing how images worked not only to script and maintain gender and social roles within patriarchal society but also to offer viewers ways of managing those roles. Some of the manuscripts discussed are relatively unknown and their images and texts are made available to readers for the first time. Through an adaptation of Baxandall’s ‘period eye’, the study considers the many ‘cognitive habits’ acquired by aristocratic lay women – and men – through familiarity with prayers for childbirth, the lying-in ceremony, and the rite of churching. It then uses this methodology to interpret the images and prayers in six bespoke manuscripts, including the Fitzwilliam Hours and the Hours of Marguerite of Foix. The book will appeal to advanced students, academics and researchers of art history, illuminated manuscripts, medieval history and gender studies.

Transcending both academic disciplines and traditional categories of analysis, this collection illustrates the ways genders and sexualities could be constructed, subverted and transformed. Focusing on areas such as literature, hagiography, history, and art history, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early sixteenth century, the contributors examine the ways men and women lived, negotiated, and challenged prevailing conceptions of gender and sexual identity. In particular, their papers explore textual constructions and transformations of religious and secular masculinities and femininities; visual subversions of gender roles; gender and the exercise of power; and the role sexuality plays in the creation of gender identity. The methodologies which are used in this volume are relevant both to specialists of the Middle Ages and early modern periods, and to scholars working more broadly in fields that draw on contemporary gender studies.

Transcending both academic disciplines and traditional categories of analysis, this collection illustrates the ways genders and sexualities could be constructed, subverted and transformed. Focusing on areas such as literature, hagiography, history, and art history, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early sixteenth century, the contributors examine the ways men and women lived, negotiated, and challenged prevailing conceptions of gender and sexual identity. In particular, their papers explore textual constructions and transformations of religious and secular masculinities and femininities; visual subversions of gender roles; gender and the exercise of power; and the role sexuality plays in the creation of gender identity. The methodologies which are used in this volume are relevant both to specialists of the Middle Ages and early modern periods, and to scholars working more broadly in fields that draw on contemporary gender studies.

First detailed reconstruction of Anne de Graville's library, establishing her as one of the most well-read and erudite poets of the period.WINNER: 2024 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Book AwardIn the 1520s, the French noblewoman Anne de Graville composed two poetic works, based on older, canonical, male-authored texts: Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida and Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy. The first, the Beau roman, she offered to Claude, queen of France and wife of Francis I, and the second, the Rondeaux, to the king's mother, Louise of Savoy. With the pro-feminine spin of her rewritings, Anne developed the legacy of another woman writer from 100 years earlier, Christine de Pizan, by entering the on-going debate known as the querelle des femmes. Like Christine, Anne sought to redress the negative view of women found in much contemporary popular literature and to offer role models for both men and women at the court of Francis I. This book is the first detailed reconstruction and interpretation of Anne's library and her collecting practice, showing how they relate to her own writings and her literary milieu. It also teases out her links to other women writers of the time interested in the querelle, such as Catherine d'Amboise and Margaret of Navarre. Paying close attention to literary, manuscript, and artistic sources, it establishes Anne's reputation as one of the most erudite poets of the period, and one keenly attuned to the position of women in society as well as to the political sensitivities of the French court.