Fall 2025 | ENGL 588: Proseminar in Cultural Studies—Medieval Feminisms

Today, the Middle Ages bring to mind armored knights fighting to the death, kings abusing peasants, and priests burning heretics at the stake–with women offering passive inspiration to male heroism, suffering abuse, or worse. Yet women shape much of the literature of medieval Britain, as we’ll discover by reading about the formidable foe who is the mother of Grendel (Beowulf); that fast-talking critic of patriarchy, the Wife of Bath (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales); the two women who weave the narrative of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the trapped women that author Marie de France sets free through magic and fantasy; and the knight Silence, assigned female at birth, who saves their king from sure death. We’ll consider, too, how modern artists have adapted their stories (Catherine Called Birdie, The Green Knight, Spear, feeld, The Wife of Willesden, and more).

This course investigates what happens when we move women to the center of our literary history—and what it means to do that for a period when very few women had the resources to write their stories. To assist that process, we’ll focus on methodology, deploying tools of feminist and queer theory to fill in the archival gaps for those whose experiences and ideas we can’t access directly. We’ll consider how current conceptions of medieval gender norms can serve to deny disparities in our own culture. And we’ll see what we might learn from the past about how to pursue more equitable futures.