Inventing Womanhood Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing

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Tara Williams, "Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing "
English | ISBN: 0814211518 | 2011 | 224 pages | PDF | 2 MB
In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women's roles and lives.

Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including "womanhood" and "femininity," and refashioned others, such as "motherhood." These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women's relationships to different kinds of authority-generally masculine and frequently religious.
By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary,
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