IMC 2005: Sessions

Session 813: Ex-Temporal Rule: Time, Age, and Women's Status in the 14th Century

Tuesday 12 July 2005, 16.30-18.00

Sponsor:	University of California, Santa Barbara
Organiser:	Jeanne Provost, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
Moderator/Chair:	Bonnie Wheeler, Department of English, Southern Methodist University, Texas
Paper 813-a	Transvestites, Whores, Wives and Martyrs: Saintly Role Models for Florentine Women (Language: English) Lisa Kaborycha, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley Index terms: Gender Studies, Hagiography, Religious Life, Women's Studies
Paper 813-b	Letter Collecting: Catherine of Siena and the Creation of a Teaching Saint (Language: English) Stephanie Green, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley Index terms: Hagiography
Paper 813-c	The Loathly Lady and the Right to Make Promises in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Language: English) Jeanne Provost, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara Index terms: Language and Literature - French or Occitan, Law, Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Women's Studies
Abstract	Age, for a fourteenth-century woman, granted access to newly complex modes of existing in time. This complex relationship to time allowed women to accrue social status by negotiating more fluently the strictures of their historical moments. Delphine de Puimichel’s widowhood gained her a sainthood based on the power of healing by touch. The mature Margery Kempe garnered authority on the basis of her lived experience in worldly time. And, in John Gower’s Tale of Florent, the wizened loathly lady acquires power by teaching Florent to understand time in terms of monastic technologies of memory.