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Table of Contents:
Abstract
Dedication
Note to the Reader
Introduction: Soundings/Sightings
Chapter 1: Writing Women: Problematics of History
and Language
Chapter 2: Norman Knights, Anglo-Saxon Women,
and the "Third Sex:" The Masculinization of England After the
Conquest
Chapter 3: Hedging in Men and Women: The Margins
as Agents of Gender Construction
Chapter 4: Edging Out Difference: Revisiting
the Margins as a Postmodern Project
Afterword: Social Control through Multivalent
Images
Reader Comments
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Abstract
Outlines the project: The analysis of sex/gender arrangements at different
moments that bracket the high middle ages, providing an index for the
changing status of women in lay society. The relationship of feminism
to Freud and to Marxism, and a brief overview of modern and postmodern
theories of gender. This book develops a dialogic relationship between
medieval works of art, their cultural context, and feminism.
An excursus to underline the fact that the nineteenth-century construction
of "medieval history" coincided with losses in women's rights, colluding
with their silencing in history, and the ways in which modern academic
discourses are enmeshed in gender asymmetries in language. In the first
part, two stories are told: of Agnes of Braine who as a landed widow rebuilt
and important Abbey Church in northern France around 1200, and of Mary
Richardson whose endowments to Tufts University around 1900 included the
chair I hold. Both women's achievements had been silenced in the historical
record, a process that I examine along the way. A guide to the literature
on the intersection of gender and language, and a practical table of m/f/neutral
terms follows.
The masculinization of England after the Conquest. The point of departure
is an analysis of the concept of exclusion of absence as used in deconstruction theory, especially the notion that non-presence
is a structuring term of presence. Scrutiny of the Bayeux "Tapestry" renamed Embroidery to recognize women's stitchery),
which recounts the Norman conquest of England in 1066, reveals that women
are denigrated as attributes of the defeated Anglo-Saxons, and that with
their virtual exclusion (there are only six versus hundreds of men), their
position in the gender hierarchy is taken by a "third sex," the defeated
Anglo-Saxon men. This enemy other is not feminized, except in their longish
hair; rather, their representation accords with the Old Norse and Norman-French
epithets for unmanly men. The exclusion of women from representation in
this version of political history presages their real loss of visibility
in post-conquest England.
The chapter opens with an overview of ancient and medieval theories of
sex difference and gender construction, as revealed by Aristotle and in medieval manuals of instruction for
royal and aristrocratic children and adolescents. I return to my earlier
study of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, in which I claimed that many of
the marginal elements had sexual connotations that were grotesque
and anti-erotic. A dozen manuscripts, almost all made in Paris in the
early fourteenth century, are examined for similar elements, and distinctions
are found between books made for men, books made for married women, and
books made for nuns; there are for instance no fecundity symbols in the nun's books. The insistence
on gender differentiation appears as a corrective to the prevalent concept
of biological sex difference operating on a continuum; difference is a
social imperative, as Braudrillard perceived.
"Thick" history and modern and postmodern gender construction theory
are brought to bear on the same manuscripts. Their moralizing discourse
is placed in relation to the tightening of morals at the French court
in the face of the several disasters that earned the name "the cursed
kings" for a generation of Capetian rulers. The theoretical framework
is developed from a critical overview of the concept of gender from Margaret
Mead to Judith Butler. Modern analyses after Mead had tended to align
gender as a binary difference in parallel with polar sex difference, a
way of thinking now charged with essentialism. Acknowledging the multivalence
of many of the element sin the margins, they are deconstructed as variously colluding with dominant
moralities or allowing subversive glimpses of creatures that defied m/f
polarization.
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