The origins of medieval affective spirituality are rather succinctly defined by Scott DeGregorio: “the transition from early to late medieval piety is often described in terms of a movement from a ‘fear-based’ to a love-based’ devotion: the divinely majestic Christ, a distant judge who evokes a response of awe-struck reverence from his audience, is replaced by the compassionate human Christ, whom the believer should love, not fear” (131). Although this love-based devotion is significant because it yielded a variety of texts by and about medieval women’s devotion and emotional depth, scholarship on the topic has focused on divine “rapture” and subsequently, the gendered power dynamic encoded in women’s relationship to Christ. In this panel, we aim to read women’s writing and bodies on their own terms, paying particular attention to the psychological dynamics of their interiority.

The goal of this panel is to build on existing feminist and queer medieval scholarship, to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on desire and motherhood, and to provide a forum in which to trace the evolving representations of medieval femininity. This will be achieved through examining various intersectional roots of the discursive interplay between medieval femininity and the divine, highlighting queer and trans perspectives, and working towards a reconceptualized image of medieval feminine desire and emotion. This panel also integrates and highlights the primary foci of the period by exploring various forms of embodiment, motherhood, and sexual expression in writing by and about women.

Alison Hyde Pascale (she/her)

Alison Hyde Pascale will begin by proposing a historiographic curriculum which attempts to address the many gaps between 10^th century writer Hrotsvitha’s world and the world of post-secondary students in the 21st. Juxtapositioning cloistered religious life and a post-Victorian assumption of the linear progression of sexual liberation, Pascale will propose a curricular intervention which pairs Dulcitius with Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and subsequent work on queer medieval historiography such as Will Rogers’ work on Medieval Futurity. Essentially, she will explore Dulcitius not as a fixed text, but as an embodied site of female sexual expression. She will conclude by claiming when read for performance, Dulcitius’ inclusion of cross-gender play and female sexual desire outside of the stricture of marriage and motherhood reveals an often-overlooked complexity of thought around sexuality and divinity.

Nat Rivkin (she/her, they/them)

Working from this useful historical underpinning and transtemporal focus, Nat Rivkin will move forward to the 15th century and examine how the Virgin Mary’s immaculate childbirth and on-stage gynecological exam in the N-Town Nativity illuminates and historicizes recent scholarship on trans misogyny. By close reading what we now call obstetrics in early Christian theater, Rivkin will argue that the N-Town Nativity diagnoses Mary’s enduring virginity after childbirth as itself a form of gender variance. What Jules Gill-Peterson and Elías Cosenza Krell, among others, theorize as “trans misogyny” sheds new light on this late medieval drama even as Mary’s resistance to gendered classification provides historical depth to current criticism in trans studies. Drawing together these current theories of trans misogyny with medieval studies, Rivkin will situates the N-Town Nativity within a longer history of what scholars have called “women’s medicine” in the late European Middle Ages.

Kashaf Qureshi (she/her)

Finally, Kashaf Qureshi will build on the explorations of feminine expressions, desire, and embodiment in the previous presentations by examining the Virgin Mary’s relationship to her own maternity and sexuality in the Middle English lyric Stounde Wel Moder Under Rode. She will explore how Jesus and Mary’s relationship destabilizes the poem's devotional ideation by simultaneously apotheosizing and rejecting feminine desire. Thinking with medieval theories of Marian sexuality and birth, this paper examines how these lyric imaginaries figure Mary's maternal status as a site of lack and rupture, throwing into relief the problematic fantasy of ideal femininity as it remains caught between the contradictory values of virginity and maternity.

By combining presentations exploring trans, queer, and feminist perspectives from three graduate students and young scholars in English and drama, this panel presents an interdisciplinary and multifaceted challenge to the dangers of restricting a force as amorphous and fluid as femininity. It also acknowledges the critical need for further study and engagement in an often-homogenized field such as medieval studies. Thanks to a conscious decision to eschew a fourth paper and limit the panel to standard-length presentations, there will be ample time to explore their manifold interconnections during a stimulating discussing period.

Organized by Caitlyn Salinas (she/her/hers)

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of English | Texas A&M University

College Station, TX 77845

caitlynmsalinas@tamu.edu | LAAH 306