Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

The Merchant, pictured in the Ellesmere Manuscript (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9, f. 102v, detail). Image from Wikimedia Commons. Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale has a reputation for crude and explicit sexual content. An elderly bachelor, January, seeks out a much younger bride, May, in the fond belief that her youth will […]

Image from Wikimedia Commons How does a legend arise, and what purpose does it serve? Is myth the opposite of history, or can it elucidate the rather sparse hard facts that we inherit? And if the story of a noblewoman performing a highly unlikely action persists down through nearly a thousand years, what does that […]

Möðruvellir in Eyjafjörður. Photograph by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir  If you drive south from the seaside town Akureyri in North Iceland, you will go along the Eyjafjörður valley, a wide valley flanked by the sea to the north and tall, majestic mountains on other sides. The landscape is relatively gentle in a country known for its […]

The second workshop in the Leverhulme-funded international networks research project, “Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon,” met at Boston University this summer from July 26th to 28th for three full and exciting days of papers, discussion and planning for future research. Entitled “Gender and Genre,” the workshop was attended by ten member of the […]

Titian, Tarquinius and Lucretia, c. 1571. Image from Wikimedia Commons, used to illustrate the general entry on rape. In Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women – a project of dubious sincerity, in which Chaucer’s narrator claims to be telling stories of ‘good women’ and the men who betray them – there are no fewer than two […]