Medieval Mobilities Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements

This collection explores the intersection of gender and mobility across the Global Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities questions how medieval people, texts, images, and ideas move across physiological, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries. In what ways do these movements afford new configurations of gender, sexuality, and being? Enacting a dialogue between medieval studies, feminist thought, and queer theory, Medieval Mobilities proposes that attending to the undulations of premodern gender and sexuality may help destabilize unstated assumptions about ways of being and loving in the Middle Ages. This volume also brings together emergent and established scholars to challenge an increasingly static academy and instead envision a scholarly practice focused on intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing upon wide range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks, the resultant essays unsettle the imagined fixity ofgender and propose alternative conceptualizations of embodiment, identity, and difference in the medieval world.

Introduction.- Part I Bodies.- Introducing Bodies.- Where Do We Go from Here: Transitivity and Journey Narratives in Eleanor Rykener.- Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy.- Seeing Mobility in Static Images: Tools for Non-Binary Identification in Late Medieval Sources.- Part II Spaces.- Troubling Spaces: Taking up Space and Being Taken by Generative Scholarship.- “Here I Am, In This Far-Off Land Where We Are Now”: Encountering and Observing Rus Women in Ibn Fa?lan’s Risala.- Disorienting Masculinity: Movement, Emotion and Chivalric Identity in Partonope of Blois.- Part III Transcendence.- Troubling Mobilities: Transcendence.- Inspiring Anchoritic Mobility: Orientation, Transgression and Agency in the Katherine Group’s Seinte Margarete.- Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies.- Greenland as a Horizon: Approaching Queer Utopianism in FlóamannaSaga.- Afterword; Afterwards

Basil Arnould Price is Wolfson Scholar at the University of York, UK. His research focuses on later medieval Iceland and in particular, the queer politics of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Old Norse-Icelandic sagas. He has previously published articles on colony, race, and queerness in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English literature.

Jane Bonsall is Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on gender in late medieval English romance, with a focus on intertextuality and popular reception theories. Her recent publications concern gendered materiality, consent and coercion, and the role of the supernatural in Middle English romance.

 Meagan Khoury is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, USA, in Art History with a minor in Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation centers questions of women’s communal living and cultural production in early modern Italy.