Honors Seminars Spring 2024

ENGL 402-02/HON 436-02/ HON 446-02, "Medieval Women," MWF 9-9:50 with Dr. Joseph Turner

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Virgil tells of Dido, the African Queen, who was forced to flee her native Phoenicia, forced to seize ships to carry her and her people across the sea, before founding and ruling the well-ordered and bustling city of Carthage. The text summarizes her heroic triumph with three Latin words: dux femina facti, “a woman was leader of the deed,” or even more simply, “she was boss of the whole thing.” You may know other female bosses of history and of fiction: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of twelfth century France who went head-to-head with a Pope and won; or Chrstine de Pizan, whose fourteenth century Book of the City of Ladies is often hailed as one of the most important texts in western feminism; or Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, an outspoken voice against antifeminist double standards of her day. This class will focus on such socially privileged women but also lesser known women such as Margery Kempe, the English brewer, evangelist, and perhaps the first woman known to require her husband to sign a “postnuptial” agreement; as well as Julian of Norwich, an English mystic whose Revelations of Divine Love is the first devotional text known to be authored by a woman in English. If you join me for this class, you’ll learn much more about real and fictional medieval women who fought against a culture that attempted to restrict their agency and self-authorship, a culture that continues to generate debate and dissent today.