2009 Conference
Locating Gender

King’s College, London, January 2009.

Thursday 8 January 2009

Session 1: Textual Places and Spaces

  • Lisa Weston (Fresno): “Text, Sex, and Place in Aldhelm’s Prosa de Virginitate.”
  • Eileen Joy (SIU): “A Strangeness in Me: The Severalities and Conductible Affectivities of Guthlac’s Sex.”
  • Luke Sunderland (Cambridge): “Sovereignty and Territory in the Chanson de geste.”

Roundtable discussion: Archaeologies of Medievalism

  • John Arnold (Birkbeck)
  • Ruth Evans (University of Stirling)
  • Rosie Mills (Victoria and Albert Museum)
  • Gillian Overing (Wake Forest University)
  • Philippa Semper (University of Birmingham)

Friday 9 January 2009

Session 2A: Gendered Voices

  • Laura Bailey & Vicki Blud (KCL): “Locating the Voice: Ælfric, Irigaray and the Word of God – Whose Voice is it Anyway?”
  • Jennifer Borland (Oklahoma State University): “Negotiating the Boundaries of Space and Experience in Female Saints’ Lives.”
  • Jennifer Cavalli (Indiana): “Consoling the Marchessa: Letters to Isabella d’Este from Ferrarese Nuns.”

Session 2B: Memorials

  • Isabel Davis (Birkbeck): “Finding Female Agency: Lady Cobham’s Brasses and Families of Faith”
  • Jitske Jasperses (Amsterdam): “The tomb of Brunswick. A Demonstration of Female Importance.”
  • Sari Katajala-Peltomaa (University of Tampere): “Performative Space?: Gender and Votive Offerings in the Canonisation Process of Nicholas of Tolentino (AD 1325).”

Keynote 1 – James A. Schultz (UCLA), “Perfomance and Performativity in Minnesang”

Session 3: Locating Gender Through Archaeology

  • Eleanor Standley: “The role of dress-accessories in later- and post-medieval border regions: attraction and sexuality.”
  • Sally Smith: “Gendering power, resistance and identity in the medieval village: material and spatial contributions to the study of peasant women’s experience.”
  • Rupert Goulding: “Navigating Masculinity: Henry VIII, growing old and the experience of Whitehall Palace.”

Session 4A: Clerical Identities

  • Daisy Black (Manchester): “Secular Scepticism? Comic Performances of Male Chastity in Medieval Representations of the Knight and the Monk.”
  • Michelle Armstrong-Partida (UCLA): “Marriage Defines the Parish Priest: The Importance of a ‘Wife’ and Children to the Gender Identity of Secular Clergy.”
  • Jennifer Hammerschmidt (Santa Barbara): “Masculinity and Clerical Identity: The Social Function of Priestly Performance.”

Session 4B: Making and Remaking

  • Emma Campbell (Warwick): “The Epistemology of the Cloister: Saints’ Lives, Knowledge and Identity.”
  • Dominic Janes (Birkbeck): “Peter Brown and the Queer Boundary in Space, Time and Culture between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.”
  • Suzanne Fatta (York): “Subversion, Suffering and Gender Fluidity in the Mystical Writings of Francis of Assisi and Angela of Foligno.”

Saturday 10 January 2009

Session 5A: In the Wilderness

  • Jennifer N. Brown (Fordham University): “Women and Wilderness: Fleeing Man in the Middle English Lives of Women Saints.”
  • Susannah Mary Chewning (Union County College): “Spirituality in the Wasteland: Intersections of Monasticism and the Anchoritic Tradition.”
  • Paul Chandler (Institutum Carmelitanum, Roma): “Nature, the City, and the Eremitical Life in Nicholas Gallicus’ Ignea sagitta.”

Session 5B: Marital Space

  • Hannah Priest (Manchester): “Is Guinevere a Woman?: Gender and Queenship in Sir Launfal.”
  • Elizabeth Kinne (Pennsylvania State University): “Locating Folly: Eustache Deschamp’s Miroir de marriage and the Fate of a Nation.”

Keynote 2 – Diane Watt (Aberystwyth), “Locating Woman and Death in the Middle Ages”

Session 6A: Anchoritic Spaces

  • Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota): “(Re)Locating Gender within the Medieval English Anchorhold.”
  • Liz Herbert McAvoy (Swansea): “. . . schrapien . . . þe eorðe up of hare put:’ Locating the Female Anchorite in the Welsh Marches.”
  • Will Rogers (Cornell University): “Hanging by a Thread: Gender and Space in The Life of Christina of Markyate.”

Session 6B: Arthurian Literature

  • Elizabeth Fisher: “Sex, Speech and Spirits: Liminality and the Female Body in The Awntyrs Off Arthure.”
  • Arthur Lindley (University of Birmingham): “‘Noon oother incubus but [s]he’:The Wife of Bath’s Androgynous Hag and the Landscape of the Canterbury Tales.”
  • Laura Jose (Durham): “Locating Gender in Malory’s Palomides: Madness, Masculinity and Otherness.”

Session 7: Presence and Absence

  • Christopher Monk (Manchester): “Locating a ‘queer’ body in an early medieval context: notions of transgender or transsexual?”
  • Carl Taylor (University of Leeds): “Locating Gender in Dialectic: Roscelin, Abelard, and the Dialectic of Principal Parts.”
  • Susanne Hafner (Fordham University): “Private Puns and their Placement: On the Page, in Print, or Not.”