Gender Transgressions (PDF)

This collection, comprising nine critical essays from prominent and emerging medievalists, seeks to explore the different ways in which French authors of the Middle Ages transgress normative social and cultural gender codes in their literary works Offering fresh approaches to texts that have long been subjected to polarized critical analyses, the essays challenge traditional interpretations of gender roles in Old French literature, especially in the thematic areas of sexual deviation and transgression. This corpus emerges as possessing multiple shades and subtleties of meaning, long buried or ignored by conventional approaches to these texts. This is a conclusion much more in accord with what we know about the ability of the medieval imagination to grasp multiple meaning from a single word or act. The collection provides many examples of this multi-layering of transgressive meaning. Through the detailed studies of gender transgressions such as incest, cross-dressing, rape and homoeroticism, the reader will come to understand the many facets of the literary expression of sexuality in selected Old French texts, products of a society that was at least as diverse and complex as our own. These studies will be of particular value to those interested in Old French and gender studies by dint of accessible analyses of texts both familiar and arcane. The provocative subject matter makes the studies original and eminently readable.