Violence Against Women 
in Medieval Texts

Edited by Anna Roberts

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This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on the role of habits of thought in shaping attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages. The collection is unusual in the breadth of its coverage and diversity of its critical approaches. The essays range from Old English literature to the Spanish Inquisition and encompass such genres as romance, chronicles, hagiography, and legal documents. In its use of well-known authors (Chaucer and Christine de Pizan) and lesser-known writers, this collection provides a rich and useful survey for researchers in women’s studies and medieval literature.

• Introduction: Violence against Women and the Habits of Thought, by Anna Roberts
• The Violence of Exegesis: Reading the Bodies of Ælfric's Female Saints, by Shari Horner
• Women, Power, and Violence in Orderic Vitalis's Historia Ecclesiastica, by Jean Blacker
• The Mont St. Michel Giant: Sexual Violence and Imperialism in the Chronicles of Wace and Lazamon, by Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman
• Consuming Passions: Variations on the Eaten Heart Theme, by Madeleine Jeay
• The Rhetoric of Incest in the Middle English Emaré, by Anne Laskaya
• "Quiting" Eve: Violence against Women in the Canterbury Tales, by Angela Weisl
• Rivalry, Rape, and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer, by Carolyn Dinshaw
• Gender Subversion and Linguistic Castration in Fifteenth-Century English Translations of Christine de Pizan, by Jane Chance
• Domesticating the Spanish Inquisition, by Deborah Ellis
• Violence, Silence, and the Memory of Witches, by Jody Enders
  

Anna Roberts, assistant professor of French at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, has written several book chapters and published articles in Romance Languages Annual.

1998. 304 pp. 6 X 9.

12 b&w illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

ISBN 0-8130-1566-9 

   Cloth, $55.00s

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"This is a very accessible and exciting collection. . . . Literary scholars and gender historians alike will be wise to invest in this important and powerful contribution to the understanding of medieval texts and the place of women in medieval society." -- Medieval Review

"A stimulating collection which eschews any easy, reductive conclusions. Its interest reaches far beyond the limits of gender studies. At at time when interest in Christine de Pizan is growing in multiple disciplines, this concise and well-wrought volume could well serve as a model." -- Oxford Art Journal

"A valuable collection that makes an important contribution to a topic very current in medieval feminist scholarship. . . . The articles successfully combine close readings with critical sophistication." -- Nancy A. Jones, College of the Holy Cross and Brandeis University

"Will appeal to the growing number of medievalists in English, history, French, and Spanish who are interested in the study of women in the Middle Ages."-- Elizabeth Robertson, University of Colorado