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"Looking closely at the meanings--literal and figurative--of the complex relationship of medieval women to material possessions. The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women's bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women's possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires. The opening section looks at how medieval authors imagined fictional and legendary women using particular objects in ways that reinforce or challenge gender roles. These women bring objects into the orbit of gender identity, employing and relating to them in a literal sense, while also taking advantage of their symbolic meanings. The second section focuses on the use of texts both as objects in their own right and as mechanisms by which other objects are defined. The possessors of objects in these essays lived in the world, their lives documented by historical records, yet like their fictional and legendary counterparts, they too used objects for instrumental ends and with symbolic resonances. The final section considers the objectification of medieval women's bodies as well as its limits. While this at times seems to allow for a trade in women, authorial attempts to give definitive shapes and boundaries to women's bodies either complicate the gender boundaries they try to contain or reduce gender to an ideological abstraction. This volume contributes to the ongoing effort to calibrate female agency in the late Middle Ages, honoring the groundbreaking work of Carolyn P. Collette"--Publisher description Dedication to Carolyn P. Collette / Arlyn Diamond -- Introduction: Medieval Women and Their Objects / Jenny Adams and Nancy Mason Bradbury -- Part 1. Objects and Gender in a Material World -- The "Thyng Wommen Loven Moost" : The Wife of Bath's Fabliau Answer / Susanna Fein -- Zenobia's Objects / Nancy Mason Bradbury -- The Object of Miraculous Song in "The Prioress's Tale" / Howell Chickering -- Part 2. Buildings, Books, and Women's (Self-)Fashioning -- A Gift from the Queen : The Architecture of the College de Navarre in Paris / Michael T. Davis -- Anne of Bohemia and the Objects of Ricardian Kingship / Lynn Staley -- Royal Biography as Reliquary : Christine de Pizan's Livre des Fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V / Nadia Margolis -- A Gift, a Mirror, a Memorial : The Psalter-Hours of Mary de Bohun / Jill C. Havens -- "Parchment and Pure Flesh" : Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of the Twelfth Earl of Oxford, and Her Book / Jocelyn Wogan-Browne -- Part 3. Bodies, Objects, and Objects in the Shape of Bodies -- Objects of the Law : The Cases of Dorigen and Virginia / Eleanor Johnson -- Galatea's Pulse : Objects, Ethics, and Jean de Meun's Conclusion / Robert R. Edwards -- Transgender and the Chess Queen in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess / Jenny Adams -- Statues, Bodies, and Souls : St. Cecilia and Some Medieval Attitudes toward Ancient Rome / C. David Benson -- Contributors
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