350:535                                                                                            

Index # - 52875

Distribution Requirement:  A1, C

Tuesday – 4:30 p.m.    

MU 207 / *Columbia University

Stacy Klein

Patricia Dailey – Columbia University

Theorizing Gender Before 1500

Team-taught by Stacy S. Klein (Rutgers) and Patricia Dailey (Columbia University)*  (with visiting talks by Clare Lees and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne)

This course will explore issues and questions generated by two recent developments in medieval studies: the increasingly central position of gender as a topic for critical analysis, and the use of contemporary theory as a means to explore the past. We will be concerned to trace out how medievalists have both used and produced gender theory, to examine fundamental changes in public attitudes toward gender from the fifth through the fifteenth centuries, and to develop a variety of working models for theorizing gender in medieval texts.  Key questions to be addressed include: To what extent is the production of gender theory dependent on access to lived experience, and what happens when that experience is either unavailable or heavily mediated?  Given that medieval studies has always been (at least to some extent) “historicist,” how has renewed interest in historicism and interdisciplinarity affected medieval gender studies?  How did medieval reform movements (Benedictine, Gregorian, Lollard), new legal structures (monetary reimbursement as a replacement for blood feud, the advent of military feudalism), and changing technologies of literacy and book production (transitions from oral performance to private reading, the rise of a middle-class lay readership) affect public attitudes toward gender?  How many genders were thought to exist in the Middle Ages?  How was Mary gendered?  Christ?  a virgin martyr’s severed breast?  Grendel’s mother?  the medieval eunuch?  the resurrected body?

In order to address these various strands of questioning and to have some common ground for assessing the productiveness of various kinds of gender theory for interpreting individual texts, we will focus most of our primary readings on hagiography and romance—the two most popular genres of medieval writing.  Both genres foreground gender, gendered bodies, sexuality, marriage, and family within highly formulaic and yet historically particularized narrative structures, and thus offer fruitful ground for mediating between theoretical issues and the claims of a particular historical period. A brief tour of Old English heroic poetry and Icelandic saga will offer additional perspectives on gender as well as new primary materials for trying out models of theorizing gender as we develop them in class. This course requires no previous background in medieval literature and will provide a solid foundation for students who may be asked to teach medieval texts at some point in their scholarly careers. All texts will be available in modern English translation. However, some course time will be reserved for increasing students’ facility with Old and Middle English.

Primary texts may include Augustine’s Confessions, Beowulf, Cynewulf’s Elene and Juliana, the Old English Apollonius of Tyre, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (selections), Njals Saga, Chretien de Troyes’ Yvain (The Knight with the Lion), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s Tale, and selections from Malory. Theoretical readings will be drawn from the work of Sarah Beckwith, Judith Butler, Caroline Bynum, Caroline Dinshaw, Michel Foucault, Louise Fradenburg, Allen Frantzen, Amy Hollywood, Clare Lees, Joan Scott, and others.

Requirements: two short papers (10-12 pp. each) or one longer paper (20-25 pp.), one or two short response papers, attendance and participation, and brief class presentations. Students will also be encouraged to attend one or two lectures or workshops organized in conjunction with our class by the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, the Rutgers Med/Ren Colloquium, and Columbia’s Medieval Conversations group.

*Please note that this course is team-taught and that half of the class meetings will be held at Rutgers and the other half at Columbia. The commute to Columbia takes approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, so students who wish to take this class should plan their schedules accordingly. Any student for whom commuting costs would present severe financial difficulties should contact either Klein or Dailey.