Figuring the Feminine : : The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature / / Jill Ross.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Ross, Jill,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective.Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius' Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión's Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Carnal Knowledge: Metaphor, Allegory, and the Embodiment of Truth -- 2. Dynamic Writing and Martyrs' Bodies in Prudentius's Peristephanon -- 3. Macho Words: Writing, Violence, and Gender in the Poema de mio Cid -- 4. The Metaphorics of Mary: Language and Embodiment in Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora -- 5. Undressing the Libro de buen amor -- 6. Configuring Culture: Writing the Hybrid in Shem Tov of Carrión -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index