Women and Other Beasts: A Feminist Perspective on Medieval Bestiaries

Gender and species intersect in the subject-matter, readership, and authorship of medieval beast-books. First, androcentric norms result in inconsistent gender references to species: the grammatically feminine eagle (Aquila) is represented as a stern father, the masculine turtledove (Turtura) as a clinging wife. More broadly, male exemplars represent nearly all species regardless of grammatical gender. Second, both discursive norms and bibliographic practice presumed an exclusively male readership for the bestiary, but external and internal evidence suggest that bourgeois mothers used bestiaries in educating their children. Third, a more radical intervention in androcentric bestiary norms is an instance of female authorship. I argue that the four animal sections of Hildegard of Bingen’s Subtilitates diversarum naturam creaturm (“Subtleties of the different natures of creature”), or Physica, constitute a beast-book, structurally similar to Physiologus (the ancestral bestiary) but very different in effect. The animals in Physiologus are fundamentally textual; those of Physica are material. The telos of bestiary animals is human understanding and instruction; the explications in Physica concern bodily healing, supported by representations of interspecies analogy and reciprocity. The creatures of Physiologus are signifiers; those of Physica are agents. They are, moreover, gendered agents—predominantly gendered female, explicitly and by default. But they remain materially non-human. As an alternative to both androcentrism and speciest humanism, Physica offers genuine ecofeminism

Introduction: Does It Have to Be About Women?

The six essays on medieval texts in the Gender and Species cluster (or Special Issue) demonstrate the power of combining feminist analysis with critical animal studies

The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits

What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, “Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems” — Christopher Roman, “Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul” — Jennie Friedrich, “Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde” — Robert Stanton, “Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe” — Carolynn Van Dyke, “Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor” — Sarah Breckenridge Wright, “Building Bridges to Canterbury” — Thomas R. Schneider, “Chaucer’s Physics: Motion in The House of Fame

Practicing women: the matter of women in medieval England

This essay provides a survey of women in medieval English literature through the lens of the various ways matter signifies for an understanding of the representation of women in literature of the period and their identity as authors. The Aristotelian cultural assumption that women are associated with matter rather than form profoundly influences the ways in which women are represented in medieval literary works. That cultural assumption is unsettled by the changing material conditions of women in late medieval England and even further complicated when women become authorial subjects. Finally, textual representations are materially influenced by the increasingly prominent role women play in the production and consumption of texts