This book provides an overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays speak to how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium.
Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. This publication illuminates these ideas through re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse. Contents: 1. Travelers and settled folk: women, honor, and shame in medieval Ireland / Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha: 2. Sex in the Civitas: early Irish intellectuals and their vision of women / Catherine Swift: 3. Looking for ‘Mr. Right’ in Tochmarc Becfhola / Joanne Findon: 4. Playing for power: Macha Mongrúad’s sovereign performance / Amy C. Mulligan: 5. Feasts for the eyes: visuality and desire in the Ulster Cycle / Sarah Sheehan: 6. They kept their skirts on: gender-bending motifs in early Irish hagiography / Judith L. Bishop: 7. Human frontiers in medieval Irish religious literature / Jennifer Karyn Reid: 8. Women, gender, and sexuality in late medieval Irish / Giselle Gos: 9. Speaking with forked tongues: gender and narrative in the Acallam / Ann Dooley