Jane Elizabeth Bonsall – författare

Explores the conventions and contradictions inherent in archetypes of magical femininity - from loathly ladies to monstrous mothers - in a range of popular late medieval English romances.The female characters in Middle English romances with particular power and agency are often portrayed as supernatural, possessing either magical abilities or identities. This book argues that a genre-focused reading of these supernatural women reveals romance's strategies for working through and articulating anxieties about the changing world of the late medieval period, as well as exposing their contemporary audiences' unexpectedly flexible attitudes toward feminine authority and moral ambiguity. It explores five distinct types of magical femininity: the Tristan tradition's marvelously gifted healers; the Muslim princess in Bevis of Hampton; the endlessly wealthy fairy imagined by Sir Launfal and Partonope of Blois; the monster-mother Melusine; and Morgan le Fay, the prototypical witch. By tracking the way each type first establishes then complicates generic patterns, this study highlights the tension between romance's persistent fascination with feminine power, and its simultaneous reiteration of the social and generic bounds on women's agency and authority. Interrogating generic expectations from an intersectional feminist perspective, it makes a case for a recuperative re-reading of romance, one that asks us to revise our assumptions about the potentialities of women's power in the medieval imaginary.

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.