Essay Collection on Grief and Gender in the Middle Ages
Dr. Lee Templeton, North Carolina Wesleyan College
[email protected]
The proposed collection seeks to explore the intersections of grief and gender in the Middle Ages across a variety of texts and disciplines, including literature, history, medicine, law, art, and religion.
Perhaps the most commonly held assumption about the expression of grief by men and women in the Middle Ages is that men express their grief through violence or stoicism, while women grieve in a much more emotional manner, namely, through the shedding of tears. While these two representations of gendered grief reflect, to a certain degree, well-established gender norms, they are too reductive of the human experience of loss and its attendant grief. The expression of grief in the Middle Ages, as one would expect, assumed a variety of forms, some of which conformed to established gender norms and some of which did not. This collection will examine the question of how grief relates to gender identity in the Middle Ages and how men and women perform this grief within the seemingly rigid gender framework constructed by medieval culture. Of interest are papers that explore not only how men and women grieve in medieval texts, but also how this grief affects their gender identity.
Middle Ages = 1000-1500
Proposal length of 300 words.
Due Monday, March 17, 2014.
Send to: [email protected]
For the full CFP see UPenn’s site.