Anthologizing women : medieval genre, gender and genital poetics

This study investigates three medieval manuscript collections – compiled in the 14th and 15th centuries in Herefordshire, Derbyshire and East Anglia, respectively – that are significant in their similarly implied female readerships, their thematic treatment of the “problem of women,” and their vocalization of the perspectives, and indeed often complaints, of female characters. At the intersection of feminist and bibliographic and textual methodologies, this project traces the interpretive effects of reading gendered, and specifically genital, discourse in the context of the medieval household books and literary anthologies that contain them, investigating representations of the body in various generic texts – from the speaking “Daun Cun” of the Anglo-Norman fabliau to the metaphorical “purs” of the Chaucerian complaint ballad, and lastly, to the saint’s “castle” in East Anglian religious drama. We will find, for example, that the variant of the raunchy fabliau “Le Chevaler qui fist les Cons Parler” in MS Harley 2253 resonates with the editorial concerns of the manuscript, namely a dialogic critique of misogyny and a commitment to unveiling societal injustice and gendered violence. In the case of the Findern manuscript, we posit a gendered reading of Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse” in the context of the “feminist sequence” of canonical texts as well as the original female-voiced lyric poems contained in the collection, one that draws parallels between the “feminization” of the pregnant female, the (masculine) poet, and the courtly subject. Finally, I investigate the representation of the saint’s body in the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene as a gendered edifice, in all its vulnerability as well as spiritual power. Ultimately, I argue that this poetics of the body is employed in a range of genres as disparate as fabliau, complaint and religious drama in order to expose the inherent violence against women that props up the patriarchal ideology of chastity, marriage and courtly culture. According to this poetics, political poems written by male artists for the king become allegories for love, sexual rather than political union, and pregnancy; and religious dramas about devout women ring with unruly resonances of prostitution and rape.