SELCS

Narrating Female Virtue: from medieval to modern


Course code: ELCS6058
Tutor: Dr C Keen
Level: Intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 3 hour desk examination
Term: taught in term 2

Course Description:
This course will consider literary, historical and visual representations of women from the medieval period as examples of virtuous moral conduct (or its opposite), and the reception and reworking of such figures in later times. It investigates the ambivalent attitude that European societies have often taken towards women, and the moral values bound up in the image and behaviour of exemplary women, whether saints or sinners, or something in between. The course will follow the evolution of different ideas about women as symbols of the social, intellectual and spiritual order of different societies within Western Europe, from the medieval to the modern periods. Saints from Catherine of Siena to Joan of Arc, literary heroines from Queen Guinevere to Patient Griselda, or powerful real-life queens from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Joanna of Naples: we are still familiar with the names of many medieval women, but the associations raised by their names have changed significantly from century to century. Today’s feminist or gender theory scholars often propose very different interpretations of a medieval woman’s image or behaviour to those of commentators from the thirteenth century, the nineteenth, or other historical periods. Throughout the course, we will consider questions such as how male authors or commentators represent their ideas about women, and whether and how female responses differ; the distance between the idealized figure of the female in literature and the realities of her historical existence; and how medieval narratives of womanhood might be read in the light of contemporary feminist literary criticism. The course explores such questions by selecting a single medieval exemplar of female virtue, and following her reception in various forms of translation and transmission.

Primary Texts:
This year, the course will focus on Patient Griselda. We will investigate medieval versions of her story, from Boccaccio’s original, through the translations and retellings of Petrarch and Chaucer; visual depictions of the story, from the National Gallery’s 15th-century Sienese cycle (class visit), to 19th-century images such as Cope’s in the House of Lords; and later ironic or feminist reworkings of the Griselda figure in works such as Maria Edgeworth’s novel The Modern Griselda (1804), and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls(1982).

Initial Secondary Bibliography:
Secondary bibliography will be provided at the start of the course.