Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women’s roles and lives. Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including “womanhood” and “femininity,” and refashioned others, such as “motherhood.” These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women’s relationships to different kinds of authority—generally masculine and frequently religious. By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages. In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williams investigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women's roles and lives.Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including "womanhood" and "femininity," and refashioned others, such as "motherhood." These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women's relationships to different kinds of authority--generally masculine and frequently religious.By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages. -- From publisher's website Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction: The Origins of Womanhood 10 Chapter 1. Amazons and Saints: Chaucer’s Tales of Womanhood 20 Chapter 2. Beastly Women and Womanly Men: Gower’s Confessio Amantis 60 Chapter 3. Lydgate’s Lady and Henryson’s Whore: Womanhood in the Temple of Glas and the Testament of Cresseid 95 Chapter 4. Vernacularity, Femininity, and Authority: Reinventing Motherhood in The Shewings of Julian of Norwich and The Book of Margery Kempe 123 Conclusion: The Evolution of Womanhood in Fifteenth-Century Discourse 158 Notes 166 Works Cited 200 Index 214 The Origins Of Womanhood -- Amazons And Saints: Chaucer's Tales Of Womanhood -- Beastly Women And Womanly Men: Gower's Confessio Amantis -- Lydgate's Lady And Henryson's Whore: Womanhood In The Temple Of Glas And The Testament Of Cresseid -- Vernacularity, Femininity, And Authority: Reinventing Motherhood In The Shewings Of Julian Of Norwich And The Book Of Margery Kempe -- The Evolution Of Womanhood In Fifteenth-century Discourse. Tara Williams. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.