Peggy McCracken

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France

In the Skin of a Beast

Karma Lochrie

James Alfred Schultz

This collection brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires. Considering sexuality in relation to gender, the body, and identity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of the period. 17 photos.

Constructing Medieval Sexuality

In The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero, Peggy McCracken explores the role of blood symbolism in establishing and maintaining the sex-gender systems of medieval culture. Reading a variety of literary texts in relation to historical, medical, and religious discourses about blood, and in the context of anthropological and religious studies, McCracken offers a provocative examination of the ways gendered cultural values were mapped onto blood in the Middle Ages. As McCracken demonstrates, blood is gendered when that of men is prized in stories about battle and that of women is excluded from the public arena in which social and political hierarchies are contested and defined through chivalric contest. In her examination of the conceptualization of familial relationships, she uncovers the privileges that are grounded in gendered definitions of blood relationships. She shows that in narratives about sacrifice a father's relationship to his son is described as a shared blood, whereas texts about women accused of giving birth to monstrous children define the mother's contribution to conception in terms of corrupted, often menstrual blood. Turning to fictional representations of bloody martyrdom and of eucharistic ritual, McCracken juxtaposes the blood of the wounded guardian of the grail with that of Christ and suggests that the blood from the grail king's wound is characterized in opposition to that of women and Jewish men. Drawing on a range of French and other literary texts, McCracken shows how the dominant ideas about blood in medieval culture point to ways of seeing modern values associated with blood in a new light, and how modern representations in turn suggest new perspectives on medieval perceptions.

Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature

The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero

Donald S. Lopez

Looks at the medieval tale of St. Josaphat, a prince who gave up everything to follow Jesus, and traces its origins in the story of the Buddha, looking at the various versions of the story, their similarities, and their differences.

In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint

Sarah Kay

Zrinka Stahuljak

This co-written book challenges assumptions about Chrétien as the author of a canon of works. In a series of lively exchanges, its five authors reassess the relationship between lyric and romance, between individuality and social conditions, and between psychology and medieval philosophy. The idea of 'logical time' is used to open up such topics as adventure, memory, imagination, and textual variation. Recent research on Troyes and on the political agency of women leads to the reappraisal of subjectivity and gender. Throughout, the medieval texts associated with the name of Chrétien are privileged as sites where thought emerges; the implications of this thought are historicized and further conceptualized with the help of theoretical thinkers including Agamben, Lacan and Lyotard. This is a multi-stranded work whose dialogic texture interacts playfully with its decentered and decentering account of the Chrétien corpus. ZRINKA STAHULJAK, VIRGINIE GREENE, SARAH KAY, SHARON KINOSHITA and PEGGY McCRACKEN are professors at UCLA, Harvard, Princeton, UCSC and the University of Michigan respectively.

Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes

Peggy McCracken offers a feminist historicist reading of Guenevere, Iseut, and other adulterous queens of Old French literature, and situates romance narratives about queens and their lovers within the broader cultural debate about the institution of queenship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. Moving among a wide selection of narratives that recount the stories of queens and their lovers, McCracken explores the ways adultery is appropriated into the political structure of romance. McCracken examines the symbolic meanings and uses of the queen's body in both romance and the historical institutions of monarchy and points toward the ways medieval romance contributed to the evolving definition of royal sovereignty as exclusively male.

Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature

The Romance of Adultery

"A provocative study of an intriguing subject. . . . The Romance of Adultery establishes perceptive and tantalizing connections between literature and history while sensibly resisting the teptation to see the former as a reflection of the latter."—Romance Philology

Sharon Kinoshita

This new companion to the works of Marie de France offers fresh insights into the standard critical debates.

A Critical Companion

Marie de France

Basil Dufallo

From Eurydice to Laura and beyond, dead lovers call forth powerful expressions of grief, sorrow, love, and longing. They occasion mourning and other rituals and seem to be intrinsically bound up with changing ideas of subjecthood itself. Dead Lovers explores the complex attachments to the figure of the dead lover in Western literature, art, and other forms of cultural expression from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. By reflecting on the study of dead lovers, these essays also trace the development of themes and claims relating to our own investment in a “dead” but eroticized past that we seek to recover. The collection offers a sustained discussion of how scholarly interest in the representation of loss and erotic bonds raises pressing questions about nostalgia, performance, the role of affect in intellectual work, and the gendered cultural values that script the description and experience of the erotic. In its focus on loss as a site of affect and imagination, Dead Lovers offers an original and provocative contribution to the history of scholarship. Basil Dufallo is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.

Peggy McCracken

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