2002 Conference
King’s College, London

Seeing Gender Perspectives
King’s College London in January 2002.

Friday 4 January 2002

Session 1A: Observing Women’s Lives in Medieval Paris

  • Janice Archer (Art Institute of Portland, Oregon), “Watching Women Work in Late Thirteenth-Century Paris: Official and Unofficial Visibility”
  • Mark P. O’Tool (Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara), “Seeing Gender in the House of the Blind: Charitable Practices at the Quinze-Vingts”
  • Tanya Stabler (Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara), “Women’s Choices, Women’s Charities: Gender and Testamentary Practice in High Medieval Paris”

Session 1B: Gendering the Body Politic: Visions of Racial and Communal Identity

  • Noreen Giffney (Department of Medieval History, University College Dublin), “Racially Queer: The Mongols in Mid-Thirteenth Century Eastern European Propaganda”
  • Catherine Keen (Italian Department, University of Leeds), “Sex and the City: Desire, Distance and Politico-Erotic Manoeuvres in Early Italian Verse”
  • Anke Bernau (Department of English, University of Wales, Cardiff), “ ‘Authors of our owne mischiefe’: Albina, Boadicea and the Writing of Nation”

Session 2 – Vision and its Discontents: Reading, Looking and the Gaze

  • Simon Gaunt (Department of French, King’s College London), “The Look of Love: The Gender of the Gaze in Troubadour Lyric”
  • Miranda Griffin (St Hilda’s College, Oxford), “Too Many Women: Reading Freud, Derrida and Lancelot”

Saturday 5 January 2002

Session 3A: Regarding Gendered Identities in Medieval French Literature

  • Francesca Nicholson (Christ’s College Cambridge), “Seeing Women Troubadours Without the ‘-itz’ and ‘-isms’ ”
  • Ben Ramm (St Catherine’s College Cambridge), “ ‘Por Coi La Pucele Pleure’: A Misogynistic Quest of the Holy Grail?”
  • Sandra Bialystok (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford), “Men Who Are Friends, and the Women Who Deceive Them: Cross-Gender Communication in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles ”

Session 3B: Writing, Reading, Looking: Reviewing Medieval Literature and Gendered Response

  • Heather Arden (D epartment of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Cincinnati), “Women Who Love Too Much: Christine de Pizan’s Deconstruction of Courtly Love”
  • Catherine Batt (School of English, University of Leeds), “Gendered Patronage and the Metatextual in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series ”
  • Anne Simon (Department of German, University of Bristol), “Reading Reading Women: Double-Mirroring the Dame in the German Book of the Knight of the Tower (1493)”

Session 4 Images That Matter: Illuminating Women in Medieval Text and Image

  • Sylvia Huot (Pembroke College, Cambridge), “Visualizing the Feminine in the Roman de Perceforest ”
  • Laura Rinaldi Dufresne (Department of Art History, Winthrop University), “From Goddess to Amazon: Christine de Pizan and the Fifteenth-Century Miniatures of Might”

Session 5A: Medieval Gender Through a Modern Lens Katherine

  • J. Lewis (Department of History, University of Huddersfield), “Odin I Await Thee, Your True Son Am I: Seeing Medieval Masculinity in Heavy Metal”
  • Melissa Douglas (Peterhouse, University of Cambridge), “The Medieval Hero Through a Modernist Painter’s Eyes: David Jones and the Pictorial Re-presentation of Lancelot”
  • Bettina Bildhauer (Pembroke College, Cambridge), “Seeing Heroes and Ladies in Medieval Romance and Contemporary Mainstream Cinema”

Session 5B: The Body in View: (In)visible Genders in Medieval Text and Image

  • Kate Currey (Department of Lifelong Learning, University of Exeter), “Re-presenting Joan of Arc: The Embodiment of Female Identity in Late-Medieval Literature”
  • Catherine Franc (Department of French Studies, University of Manchester), “Beastly Pagan Men and Christian Virgin Martyrs: Rape in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography”
  • Cecily Hennessy (Independent Scholar, London), “Visibility/Invisibility: Young Male Byzantine Saints”
  • Elizabeth L’Estrange (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds), “Incarnations and Confinements: The (In)visibility of Childbirth in some Late-Medieval Sources”

Session 6 Seeing Sodomy

  • Diane Wolfthal (School of Art, Arizona State University), “Picturing Same-Sex Love: Images by Petrus Christus and the Housebook Master”
  • Bill Burgwinkle (King’s College, Cambridge), “Visible and Invisible Selves in Peter Damian”
  • Robert S. Sturges (University of New Orleans), “Sodomy and Sense: Bodily (In)visibility in The Gast of Gy ”

Meeting: Deciding the theme and venue for next year’s conference

Sunday 6 January 2002

Session 7 Unveiling Bodies, Organs, and Desires: Looking at the Overlooked in the History of Medicine and Natural Philosophy

  • Monica H. Green (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University), “Hard-core Philology: Notes from the Trenches of the History of Women’s Medicine”
  • Amy Lindgren (History Department, University of California, Davis), “Violent Erections and Suffocating Wombs: Gendered Sexual Dysfunctions in Medieval Spain”
  • Joan Cadden (History Department, University of California, Davis), “Are Sodomites Feminine? A View From Natural Philosophy”

Session 8A: The Lady Vanishes? The Visibility of Women of Rank J

  • Janet Cowen (Department of English, King’s College London) (in collaboration with Jennifer Ward , formerly at Goldsmith’s College London ), “ ‘Al myn array is bliew, what nedith more?’: Signs too visible to read in The Assembly of Ladies ”
  • Tracy Chapman Hamilton (Department of Art History, Sweet Briar College), “The Fabrication of Gendered Memory: Queenship, Topography and Scholastic Patronage of the Colleges of Navarre and Bourgogne in Fourteenth-Century Paris”
  • Amanda Richardson (King Alfred’s College, Winchester), “Seeing Gender in Architecture: A Study of Queens’ Apartments in English Royal Palaces c.1160-1547”

Session 8B: Looking for Love: Eros, Gender and Holiness

  • Sarah Salih (School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia), “When Is A Bosom Not A Bosom? Interpreting Medieval Eroticism”
  • Cary Howie (Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University), “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Inside Jacopone’s Bedroom”
  • Jennifer Borland (Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University), “Subverting Tradition: The Transformed Female in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias”