Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse.

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse.

This thesis examines early Irish ideas of sexual difference through five thematic studies of the construction of gender in Irish saga texts. Its readings analyze the representation of femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and corporeality in a range of sagas from the mythological and Ulster cycles. A brief introductory survey of historical and literary scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality in early medieval Ireland opens the thesis. The first chapter reads two foretales to the central text of the Ulster cycle, Tain Bo Cuailnge [The Cattle-Raid of Cooley], De Chophur in Da Muccida [On the Quarrel of the Two Swineherds] and Noinden Ulad [The Debility of the Ulstermen], for their representation of gender and corporeality; a preliminary discussion of gender in sagas classified as foretales contextualizes the analysis of the place of gendered bodies in originary saga narratives. The second chapter focuses on Irish literature's militant women, surveying female warriors in texts including the Law of Adomnan, a learned poem by Flann Mainistrech, and early Irish classical adaptations as context for a reading of the women warriors in Tochmarc Emire [The Wooing of Emer]. The third chapter examines the representation of bodies and sexuality in the mythological saga Cath Maige Tuired [The Battle of Mag Tuired], concentrating on the carnivalesque sequence that relates the sexual encounter between the Dagda and the daughter of the enemy leader, Indech; the discussion contrasts the sequence's subversive, scatological comedy with the conservative portrayal of gender and sexuality elsewhere in the narrative. The fourth chapter traces the differences of gender ideology between the two medieval versions of Tain Bo Cuailnge by analyzing their representation of masculinity, particularly in the Fer Diad episode. The final chapter reads the corporeal signification of the heroes of Scela Mucce Meic Datho [The Story of Mac Datho's Pig] through the concept of inscription in flesh, drawing on Old Irish legal texts and twentieth-century theorists to examine the function of mutilated male bodies in the saga's ironic, parodic discourse. The prominence of bodies in the texts considered suggests that early Irish saga privileges corporeality over gender as an index of power and difference.

"This book disperses the shadows in an obscure but important landscape. Lisa Bitel addresses both the history of women in early Ireland and the history of myth, legend, and superstition which surrounded them. It is a powerful and exact book and an invaluable addition to our expanding sense of Ireland through the eyes of Irish women."--Eavan Boland, author of In a Time of Violence: Poems"It is refreshing to read in a book by a woman on medieval women that not all clerics hated women and that not all men were oversexed villains consciously bent on exploiting women. [Bitel] challenges not only the medieval Irish male construct of female behavior, but she is also courageous enough to question constructs of medieval women invented by modern Irish medieval historians."--Times Higher Education Supplement

An examination of how the feminine was viewed in early medieval Ireland, through a careful study of a range of texts.

Examines depictions of grief in the Middle Ages by exploring how grief relates to gender and identity, as well as how men and women perform grief within the various constructions of both gender and grief established by medieval culture.

"This volume of essays, which includes papers first given at a conference of the Irish Association for Research in Women's History, represents a fresh approach to the discussion of the position of women in Ireland in the Middle Ages: it attempts to set the experience of Irish women into a wider, European context. This comparative approach makes it possible to shake off the image of isolation and idiosyncrasy that has for too long clung to many aspects of medieval Irish society, and especially to the subjects of women and marriage." "A secondary theme of the volume is the extent to which women, in Ireland and outside, were able to take the initiative and make their interests and wishes count in the societies in which they lived. A number of the essays discuss the sources for the history of women and use them in new ways to recover what is possible of the lives and experiences of medieval women." "A combination of essays by established academics and younger scholars, covering literary topics as well as political, social and legal conditions as they affected women, the volume presents the results of recent research and represents very much the 'cutting edge' of scholarly work on medieval women, especially, but not exclusively, in Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Focusing on England but covering a wide range of European and global traditions and influences, this authoritative volume examines the central role of medieval women in the production and circulation of books and considers their representation in medieval literary texts, as authors, readers and subjects, assessing how these change over time. Engaging with Latin, French, German, Welsh and Gaelic literary culture, it places British writing in wider European contexts while also considering more distant influences such as Arabic. Essays span topics including book production and authorship; reception; linguistic, literary, and cultural contexts and influences; women's education and spheres of knowledge; women as writers, scribes and translators; women as patrons, readers and book owners; and women as subjects. Reflecting recent trends in scholarship, the volume spans the early Middle Ages through to the eve of the Reformation and emphasises the multilingual, multicultural and international contexts of women's literary culture.

A History of Irish Women's Poetry is a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women's poetry from earliest times to the present day. It reads Irish women's poetry through many prisms – mythology, gender, history, the nation – and most importantly, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures, such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women's poetry has been produced and received, from the anonymous work of the early medieval period, through the bardic age, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, and the advent of modernity. As capacious as it is diverse, this book is an essential contribution to scholarship in the field.

Transcending both academic disciplines and traditional categories of analysis, this collection illustrates the ways genders and sexualities could be constructed, subverted and transformed. Focusing on areas such as literature, hagiography, history, and art history, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early sixteenth century, the contributors examine the ways men and women lived, negotiated, and challenged prevailing conceptions of gender and sexual identity. In particular, their papers explore textual constructions and transformations of religious and secular masculinities and femininities; visual subversions of gender roles; gender and the exercise of power; and the role sexuality plays in the creation of gender identity. The methodologies which are used in this volume are relevant both to specialists of the Middle Ages and early modern periods, and to scholars working more broadly in fields that draw on contemporary gender studies.