The Lactating, Menstruating Christ: Constructing and Depicting Gender in Late Medieval Europe

Throughout the long span of the Middle Ages, gender was a mutable category, dangerous and at times powerful because of its instability. This seminar explores the conceptualization, creation, and demarcation of medieval gender, drawing from both medieval texts and the physical record — art, architecture, archaeology, and objects — for evidence. In the first half of the course, we will discuss how gender was defined, bounded, and represented. We will draw from the resulting grasp of how gender was constructed and performed in the second half of the course to complicate, nuance, and interrogate how gender operated in particular contexts and for particular purposes.