Virgins, Wives, and Succubi: Women and Medieval Literature

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Women have been associated with original sin since the temptation of Eve. They are redeemed through their connection with the Virgin Mary but condemned again by the conflicting demands of chastity and marriage. Christian misogyny merged with medical treatises during the Middle Ages to create a complex matrix through which female and male bodies were understood and women's and men's social expectations were constructed. This course investigates the ways in which Old and Middle English literature both reflects and resists the tropes that posited women as either properly chaste or overly sexed. It explores representations of women in writing and film and considers how medieval conceptions of women move forward into the modern era. What did it mean to be a woman in the Middle Ages? How have premodern ideas about gendered bodies and behaviors come to bear on contemporary ideology? To what extent does the modern era remain in the shadow of its medieval past?