Professor Myra Seaman
*Fulfills the British Literature before 1800 requirement
Meets at the College of Charleston, Wednesday, 6-8:45
The Middle Ages lacked a women’s movement—there were no protests in the streets, no proposals of an Equal Rights Amendment, no calls for women to find self-fulfillment through working outside the home. And yet, women appear everywhere in the writings of the British Middle Ages. Artists, philosophers, and theologians regularly investigated the experiences of women and did so in terms of structural factors like religion, politics, economics, and the family—as feminist theorists do today. Indeed, perhaps unexpectedly, many literary texts of medieval England turn out to be largely shaped by women: the Wife of Bath may loom largest, but two women weave the narrative of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Grendel’s mother proves a formidable foe, Margery Kempe represents herself in our first English autobiography as a medieval Nasty Woman, Julian of Norwich explains the aims and methods of a maternal God, and Marie de France’s morally edgy fantasy liberates trapped women. That’s just for starters. This course will spend time with the women of medieval Britain to see what happens when we move them to the center of our literary history, and we’ll do so with the assistance of methodologies and theories promoted by medieval and modern thinkers.
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