Glenn
Burger & Steven F. Kruger, eds.
Queering the Middle Ages.
University
of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Medieval Cultures 27.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback ISBN
0816634033, $49.95
Paperback ISBN 0816634041, $19.95
A look at
medieval
literature and society through a queer lens. The essays in this volume
present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized
conceptions
of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of
sexuality
in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not
denying
the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how
historical
work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in
medieval
sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such
instabilities.
At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to
re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture
from
our current set of vantage points within postmodernity.
The
authors focus
on particular medieval moments: Christine de Pizan's representation of
female sexuality; chastity in the Grail romances; the illustration of
"the
sodomite" in manuscript commentaries on Dante's Commedia; the complex
ways
that sexuality inflected English national politics at the time of
Edward
II's deposition; the construction of the sodomitic Moor by Reconquista
Spain. Throughout, their work seeks to disturb a logic that sees the
past
as significant only insofar as it may make sense for and of a
stabilized
present.
Contributors:
Kathleen Biddick, Michael Camille, Marilynn Desmond, Garrett P. J. Epp,
Gregory S. Hutcheson, Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, Francesca
Canadé
Sautman, Larry Scanlon, Susan Schibanoff, Pamela Sheingorn, and Claire
Sponsler.
|
|