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IMC 2015: Sessions

Session 731: (Re)Forming Women: Fluid Femininities and Socio-Religious Reform, I

Tuesday 7 July 2015, 14.15-15.45

Sponsor:Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship
Organiser:Liz Herbert McAvoy, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea University
Moderator/Chair:Liz Herbert McAvoy, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea University
Paper 731-aReforming the Bride: The Significance of the Feminine Soul in Bernard of Clairvaux
(Language: English)
Lydia Hayes, St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of St Andrews
Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Latin, Sermons and Preaching, Theology
Paper 731-bReforming Hands: The Grief of St Clement's Mother in the South English Legendary
(Language: English)
Ayoush Sarmada Lazikani, Hertford College, University of Oxford
Index terms: Gender Studies, Hagiography, Language and Literature - Middle English
Paper 731-cEntertaining Exemplum: The Reformation of Female Sexuality in the Auchinleck Manuscript
(Language: English)
Emma Osborne, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Sexuality
Paper 731-dAuthority and Embodiment: Julian of Norwich and the Reshaping of Anchoritic Writing
(Language: English)
Madeleine Pepe, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English
Abstract

In her more recent writings, Luce Irigaray posits issues of sexual difference as the philosophical basis for cultural reform: legal, political, religious, and linguistic. The extent to which sexual difference was implicated in the various movements for reform that punctuated the Middle Ages is yet to receive full attention, however. Whilst scholars have begun to address this question in the contexts of queenship and female patronage or religious women's visionary activities during periods of upheaval and reform, there is clearly more to be said about the relation between medieval women, medieval femininities and socio-cultural/religious/linguistic reform. Both sessions I and II therefore seek to examine some of the ways in which medieval women effected/affected reform or the ways in which they were themselves repeatedly subject to imposed measures aimed at reforming – or re-forming – their bodies, behaviours, identities and subjectivities.