Dedicated to the scholarship of Elizabeth Robertson, Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature is a collection of essays that explore how gender in medieval English literature intersects with philosophy, poetry, history, and religion.

Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays, dedicated to her work, examines gender as a construct of language, a mode of embodiment, and a critical framework for thinking about the past. Its eleven contributors approach the figure of the gendered body in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. The volume focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliau, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies. Taken together, they celebrate the scholarly career of Elizabeth Robertson while also presenting a coherent and multifaceted investigation of the intersections of gender and medieval literary practice.

Introduction: The Form of Thought

Jennifer Jahner (Caltech) and Ingrid Nelson (Amherst College)

Part 1: Form and Knowing

1. Chaucerian Insomnia and the Hospitality of Sleeplessness in Late Medieval Dream Visions

Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr College)

2. Cloudy Thoughts: Cognition and Affect in Troilus and Criseyde

Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)

3. Voluntarism and the Self in Piers Plowman

Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder)

4. Margery Kempe and the Paradoxical Presence of God

Kate Crassons (Lehigh University)

Part 2: Material Poetics

5. Both ‘Gostly Sense’ and ‘Amerouse Sentensce’: The Nightingale’s Resurrection as Hybrid Text

Amy N. Vines (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

6. Middle English Verse Acrostics: A Survey

Julia Boffey (Queen Mary University) and A.S.G. Edwards (University of Kent)

7. The Landscapes of Pearl: Poetry and Theology

Ad Putter (University of Bristol)

Part 3: Historicizing Gender

8. Disrupting Medieval Marriage in Anglo-Norman Women’s Writing: Clemence Barking’s Vie de Sainte Catherine, Marie’s Life of Saint Audrey and Marie de France’s Eliduc

Roberta Krueger (Hamilton College)

9. Three Medieval Visitors to Rome and the Women They Found There

C. David Benson (University of Connecticut, Storrs, emeritus) and Pamela J. Benson (University of Connecticut, Storrs, emerita)

10. The Anagogic Wife of Bath

James Simpson (Harvard University)