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Explores the conventions and contradictions inherent in archetypes of magical femininity - from loathly ladies to monstrous mothers - in a range of popular late medieval English romances.
The female characters in Middle English romances with particular power and agency are often portrayed as supernatural, possessing either magical abilities or identities. This book argues that a genre-focused reading of these supernatural women reveals romance's strategies for working through and articulating anxieties about the changing world of the late medieval period, as well as exposing their contemporary audiences' unexpectedly flexible attitudes toward feminine authority and moral ambiguity.
It explores five distinct types of magical femininity: the Tristan tradition's marvelously gifted healers; the Muslim princess in Bevis of Hampton; the endlessly wealthy fairy imagined by Sir Launfal and Partonope of Blois; the monster-mother Melusine; and Morgan le Fay, the prototypical witch. By tracking the way each type first establishes then complicates generic patterns, this study highlights the tension between romance's persistent fascination with feminine power, and its simultaneous reiteration of the social and generic bounds on women's agency and authority. Interrogating generic expectations from an intersectional feminist perspective, it makes a case for a recuperative re-reading of romance, one that asks us to revise our assumptions about the potentialities of women's power in the medieval imaginary.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Reading Genre, Reading Gender
1. Healing Women in the English
Tristan texts: Age, Agency, and Morality
2.Foreign Queenship in
Bevis of Hampton: Pleasure, Peril, and Split Perspectives
3. Reconfiguring Space, Gender and Authority in the Fairy Mistress Romances
4. Monstrous Maternity,
Melusine, and the Threat of the Mature Female Body
5. Reflection, Reiteration, Distortion: Re-Reading Morgan le Fay
Coda: Feeling Genre, Touching Romance
Bibliography
Index
About the author
JANE BONSALL is a postdoctoral researcher at St Andrews University. Her research focuses on genre, gender, medieval and modern affect, and storytelling practices.
Summary
Explores the conventions and contradictions inherent in archetypes of magical femininity - from loathly ladies to monstrous mothers - in a range of popular late medieval English romances.
