2004 Conference
Goldsmiths College, University of London

Constructing Gender Making and Marking Gender in Medieval Culture
Goldsmiths College, University of London, January 2004

Monday 5 January 2004

Session one: Historical and historiographical issues in gender studies

  • Christopher Fletcher, Wadham College, Oxford – The language of Manhood in the reign of Richard II
  • Sue Harrington – Peace Weavers and Warriors in Early Anglo-Saxon burial
  • Andrea Oliver, University of East Anglia – Masculinity as a spectacle in the 1390s Smithfield tournaments
  • Shanon Lewis Simpson – Construction of Male and female identity in Norse society

Session two: Gender and Sacred Space

  • Mary Suydam, Kenyon College, Ohio – Envisioning and inhabiting sacred space in Northern Europe
  • Paulette Barton, University of Maine – The use of Gender in the monastic quire Nira Pancer, University of Haifa Is Gender relevant in the context of early medieval monasticism?

Session three: Dynamics of gender in Old English texts

  • Melanie Heyworth Royal Holloway College, London and University of Sydney – Constructing Gender in the Old English Exeter Book Riddles
  • Pirkko Koppinen Royal Holloway College, London – Hildeburg as the signifier of failure: Readers constructing gender in Beowulf
  • Beatriz Hernandez, Universidadde la Laguna, Canary Isles – Spain ‘Ic nan gast ne eom ac aemerge and axe and eall flaesc’: Saint Mary of Egypt and the powers of holy flesh

MEETING: Deciding the themes for the 2006 conference (all welcome! Wine will be served)

Tuesday 6 January 2004

Session four: Unstable dynamics of gender in literature and law

  • Melanie Meier, University of Leicester – Sexuality and gender discourse in late medieval: investigations of the third sex
  • Matthew Howard – ‘I fond theryn a naked man’: Observations of maturity in law and literature
  • Gail Ashton, University of Manchester – The perverse dynamics of the green knight

Session five: Speaking, singing shouting: the gendered voice

  • Helen Swift, Magdalen College, Oxford – ‘Je suis dame en conclusion!’: Constructing Gender through the voice in the late medieval ‘querelle des femmes’
  • Antje Frotscher, Christ Church College Oxford – Flyting females: (Un)Gendered speech in Old Norse verbal duels
  • E Leach – Constructing the female singer as a women-bird hybrid: sirens in music theory

Session six: Explorations of the gendered body

  • Merrall Llewelyn Price, University of Alabama, Huntsville – Corporeal anti-Semitism in the miracles of the virgin
  • J Kazik – Christ’s bleeding robe: images of Christ’s ‘woundes wrynging-wete’ in the English cycle plays and late medieval crucifixion carols
  • Marie Hughes-Edwards, University of York – Filth, fornication and female flesh: Normative rhetoric and the Anchorhold in late medieval England
  • Shona Harrison, University of York – ‘Blood bitokeneth gold’: Remembering Alisoun’s coporeality in the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale
  • Michael Amey – The beautiful, the ugly and the invisible: Contesting Female bodies in the ‘Didot-Perceval’
  • Katie Walker – Constructing Jesus as mother: the problem of biology in the Prickynge of Love