1999 Conference
University of Southampton

Gender and Play
Wessex Medieval Centre, University of Southampton
7 to 9 January 1999.

Thursday 7 January 1999

  • Welcome – what is ‘gender and play’? (Trish Skinner)
  • Gender and Play in Medieval Biblical Drama (Lynn Forest-Hill, Wessex Medieval Centre)
  • Playing quietly: women’s participation in the Corpus Christi cycles (Katie Normington, Royal Holloway London)
  • The Trouble with Gender in the “Siege of Jerusalem” (Bonnie Millar, Nottingham)
  • “Some jape I trowe is this”: Wooing and Winning the woman in some Medieval Debate Poems (Rosemary Appleton, Oxford)

Friday 8 January 1999

  • Masculinity in the Tristan Stories: the Feminisation of Tristan (Katie Stevenson, Edinburgh)
  • Reversing the Frog Prince: Gender and the Grotesque in Gríms saga loðinkinna (Phil Cardew, KAC Winchester)
  • Five variations on the ludic in medieval Chinese court lyrics (Anne Birrell, Cambridge)
  • Playing with Humour and Gender in Liutprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis (Ross Balzaretti, Nottingham)
  • “Whatever you do is a delight to me!”: Masculinity, Masochism and ‘Queer’ Play in the Iconography of Male Martyrdom (Robert Mills, Cambridge)
  • Against Boccaccio: Justifying the Three Book Structure of Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies (Jessica Weinstein, Rice University, Texas)
  • Anglo-Saxon children’s grave goods: adult toys for girls and boys (Sally Crawford, Birmingham)
  • Gender and play in Anglo-Saxon childhoods (Barbara Yorke, King Alfred’s College Winchester)
  • Round table – crossing the disciplinary divide. Dawn Hadley (Sheffield) will kick off with a short paper on ‘Masculinity and performance in the later middle ages’
  • Business meeting

Saturday 9 January

  • Playing with Gender: the Mother and the Whore in the Book of Margery Kempe (Liz Herbert McAvoy, Aberystwyth)
  • ‘Bot I trowe whoso had grace to do & fele as I sey, he schuld fele [God] gamesumli pley wiÞ hym’ (The Cloud of Unknowing): Gender, Language and Play in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich and in the Book of Margery Kempe (Annie Sutherland, Oxford)
  • Gender Roles and Repression in Late Medieval German Society (Bill McCann, Wessex Medieval Centre)
  • Men and women at play – some meanings of chess in the middle ages (Richard Eales, Kent)