The contributores consider diverse literary genres, including Lives, legal texts, romances, Arabic narratives and Indian devotional texts: some contributors examine specific women, such as Hildegard of Bingen.
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
Articles that bring to light how gender is put into debate in Anglo-Saxon, German, Spanish, and Italian cultures, and that re-examine French and Middle English debate literature. By exploring previously ignored areas, many present fresh material and produce reconceptualizations that use new methodologies.