Although there were a number of women writers of the late Middle Ages, it was not thought that women composed lyric poetry. Classen's investigation, however, proves this to be a misconception, and presents a selection of secular love songs and religious hymns composed by 15th- and 16th-century German women poets.

The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

Explores the relationship between gender and identity in early medieval Germanic societies.

This fourth volume of entries, culled in the main from BBSIA, covers the years 1933 to 1998 inclusive. The cumulative volumes of the Bibliography offer an exhaustive author and title database of the burgeoning scholarship in this field.

These essays explore the place, function and meaning of women as characters, authors, constructs and symbols in Medieval epics from Persia, Spain, France, England, Germany and Scandinavia. Usually believed to narrate the deeds of men at war, this book looks at the key roles often played by women and the impact of this on the history of gender.

This collection focuses on a woman's point of view in love poetry, and juxtaposes poems by women and poems about women to raise questions about how femininity is constructed. Although most medieval 'woman's songs' are either anonymous or male-authored lyrics in a popular style, the term can usefully be expanded to cover poetry composed by women, and poetry that is aristocratic or learned rather than popular. Poetry from ancient Greece and Rome that resonates with the medieval poems is also included here. Readers will find a range of voices, often echoing similar themes, as women rejoice or lament, praise or condemn, plead or curse, speak in jest or in earnest, to men and to each other, about love.

This book explores how the principles and practices of Ignatian pedagogy overlap and intersect with contemporary feminist theory in order to gain deeper insight into the complexities of today's multicultural educational contexts. Drawing on a method of inquiry that locates individual and collective standpoints in relation to social, political, and economic structures, this volume highlights points of convergence and divergence between Ignatian and feminist pedagogies to explore how educators might find strikingly similarmethods that advocate common goals-including engaging with issues such as race, gender, diversity, and social justice. The contributors to this volume initiate a dynamic dialogue that will enliven our campuses for years to come.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. This volume examines Latin and vernacular writings that formed part of a flourishing culture of mystical experience in the later Middle Ages (ca. 1150–1400), including the ways in which visionaries within their literary milieu negotiated the tensions between personal, charismatic inspiration and their allegiance to church authority. It situates texts written in England within their wider geographical and intellectual context through comparative analyses with contemporary European writings. A recurrent theme across all of these works is the challenge that a largely masculine and clerical culture faced in the form of the various, and potentially unruly, spiritualities that emerged powerfully from the twelfth century onward. Representatives of these major spiritual developments, including the communities that fostered them, were often collaborative in their expression. For example, holy women, including nuns, recluses, and others, were recognized by their supporters within the church for their extraordinary spiritual graces, even as these individual expressions of piety were in many cases at variance with securely orthodox religious formations. These writings become eloquent witnesses to a confrontation between inner, revelatory experience and the needs of the church to set limitations upon charismatic spiritualities that, with few exceptions, carried the seeds of religious dissent. Moreover, while some of the most remarkable texts at the centre of this volume were authored (and/or primarily read) by women, the intellectual and religious concerns in play cut across the familiar and all-too-conventional boundaries of gender and social and institutional affiliation.