Preface

Summary

Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme. In part, that may be owing to the difficulty of knowing when the optimal moment would be for such a collective summation, intervention, and/or foreshadowing. Perhaps no other area of research has expanded as widely, quickly, or fluidly as gender studies, both within and outside of medievalism. Not only scholars but also popularists, journalists, pundits, bloggers, and countless others in medievalism studies and beyond have surpassed the traditional taxonomies of gender to question its very possibility, not to mention its utility.

While there may be widespread, if not universal, agreement that gender is at least in part, and perhaps entirely, a construct, its possible sources are often in dispute, sometimes violently so. The ethics and history of a subject that has for millennia formed the foundation of persecution invite an overtly biased tone and subjective approach that depart from traditional academia's (pretense of) objectivity. Perhaps more than in any other area of the humanities, except perhaps studies of racism, authors assign and assess the motives as well as the nature and intention of sources.

Of course, this approach is also open to such assessments of it, as are those assessments, and as are those assessments, and so forth. In effect, a perception of gender in a medieval source can inaugurate a virtual mise en abyme of layered revelations as to how that instance, and perhaps larger dimensions of gender, have been perceived and operated since the Middle Ages. And since few areas within history and, by extension, academia are more saturated with gender assumptions than the Middle Ages, the invitation to adopt, adapt, question, resist, or reject those assumptions could hardly be richer than it is in medievalism, as suggested by this volume's call for papers:

From Sir Walter Scott's chivalrous knights and damsels in distress, through George R. R. Martin's bestial lords and serpentine queens, medievalism is often quite sexist. Sometimes these biases are defended as originating in the Middle Ages themselves, or at least being true to what is known about them. But do these prejudices actually represent medieval practices and/or perceptions? To what degree is that knowable, and does it matter? What about inevitable (albeit perhaps small) differences in those approaches, in their application, and among the contexts in which they are deployed?