IMC 2016: Sessions
Session 125: (Re)Theorising Medieval Feast/Fast/Famine in the 21st Century, I: Consuming Narratives of Wife, Mother, Virgin, Harlot, Huntress
Monday 4 July 2016, 11.15-12.45
| Sponsor: | Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS) |
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| 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 125-a | Eating and Intimacy: Margery Kempe and the Power of Commensality (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Sexuality, Women's Studies |
| Paper 125-b | 'Mete for owyr Lady': Feeding the Virgin Mary (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Lay Piety, Sexuality, Women's Studies |
| Paper 125-c | Death Eaters: The Digby Magdalen, the N-Town Herod, and the Queer Feast (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Performance Arts - Drama, Sexuality, Women's Studies |
| Paper 125-d | Hunting with Diana and Queer Appetites (Language: English) Index terms: Daily Life, Gender Studies, Women's Studies |
| Abstract | Whilst the food practices of medieval women have elicited much discussion and debate in the last three decades, particularly within the genres of mystical writings and hagiography, far less attention has been given to the gendered ways in which such practices manifested themselves within other contexts. This session aims, therefore, to reassess the established primary relationship between medieval women and food, specifically by focusing on how gendered and gender-queer food consumption (or non-consumption) plays out within representations of primary medieval archetypes, including the wife, mother, V/virgin, harlot and huntress. The session will identify and re-theorise a range of complex paradoxes that simultaneously associate feast/fast/famine with life-giving and nurture as well as with dangerous consumption, bodily corruption, and death. |