2005 Conference
Gender and Sexualities

The annual conference was held at the University of Leeds in January 2005.

Session 1: Masculinities, secular and religious

  • Pat Cullum, University of Huddersfield – ‘Gender, identity and status: the late medieval English clergy’
  • Fiona Dunlop, University of York – ‘Mightier than the sword: reading, writing and noble masculinity in the early sixteenth century’
  • Ben Ramm, St Catharine’s College Cambridge – ‘A rose by any other name? Queering desire in Jean Renart’s Le Roman de la Rose, ou Guillaume de Dole ‘

Session 2:

  • Plenary lecture by Jacqueline Murray, University of Guelph – ‘One Sex, Two Genders/One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?’

Session 3: Domestic practices and communities

  • Kate Jackson, University of Leeds – ‘”Al the bridel in myn hond”: T he Wife of Bath’s Prologue and medieval marriage law’
  • Sally Smith, University of Sheffield – ‘Practices and Power: Women’s experience in the medieval English village’
  • Katarina Altpeter-Jones, Lewis & Clark College, Portland – ‘Inscribing gender: marital violence in late medieval and early modern German text and image’
  • Session 4: Roundtable discussion – Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002 .

Friday 7 January 2005

Session 5: Gendered poetics

  • Thelma Fenster, Fordham University – ‘Christine de Pizan’s poetics of gender and ethnicity’
  • Clare Lees, King’s College London – ‘Identities, ideologies and Anglo-Saxon poetry’
  • Maria-Kristina Perez, University of Cambridge – ‘Oral Mother as Fairy Mistress’

Session 6: Clerical genders

  • Cassie Green, University of Manchester – ‘What, after all, is a male virgin? Anglo-Saxon male virgin saints: defying the theorists’
  • Joanna Kazik, University of Lodz – ‘”Of all creatures women be best,/ Cuius contrarium verum est”: gendered perception of laughter in medieval carols of women’
  • Alison More, University of Bristol – ‘Transforming Men: Conversion and Hagiographic Constructions of Masculinity in Thirteenth-Century LiËge ‘

Session 7: Cultural materialism and humanism

  • Jennifer Cavalli, Central Michigan University – ‘Self-representation and the assertion of intellectual authority in the writings of Laura Cereta’
  • Elizabeth L’Estrange, University of Liège – ‘Deschi da parto and Gender Relations in Fifteenth-Century Italian Households ‘
  • Rosie Mills, University of East Anglia – ‘Gendered imaginations? Questioning the imagery and audience of some medieval prayer books’