Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature / Karma Lochrie, Usha Vishnuvajjala.

• Superior document: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
• TeilnehmendeR: Lochrie, Karma; Vishnuvajjala, Usha
• Place / Publishing House: Columbus, OH : : The Ohio State University Press,, 2022.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.)

In Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala bring together established scholars and new voices to illuminate a previously understudied but consequential element of life in the Middle Ages. Contributors focus on representations of women's friendships in medieval European literature and their afterlives both to historicize them and draw out the finer nuances of the multitude of forms, affects, values, and ethics that emerge within those friendships. This volume examines works by Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Marie de France, female saints, and late-Middle Scots poets alongside lesser-known late medieval lyrics and Middle English romances to chart women's friendships and their many and sometimes conflicting affinities with the cultural categories of gender, religion, politics, and sexuality. In addition to exploring the parameters of female friendship across a range of texts and historical contexts, contributors evaluate the political, religious, and civic structures negotiated in public and private and engage with the long history of theory and philosophy on friendship. The result is a theoretical and historical rubric for the future study of women's friendships in medieval texts and beyond.

Table of Contents

Female friendships and visionary women / Jennifer N. Brown -- The foundations of friendship: Amicitia, literary production, and spiritual community in Marie de France / Stella Wang -- Friendship and resistance in the Vitae of Italian holy women / Andrea Boffa -- Sisters and friends: the medieval nuns of Syon Abbey / Alexandra Verini -- "Amonge maydenes moo": gender-based community, racial thinking, and aristocratic women's work in Emaré / Lydia Yaitsky Kertz -- Women's communities and the possibility of friendship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur / Usha Vishnuvajjala -- Female friendship in late medieval English literature: cultural translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory / Melissa Ridley Elmes -- Cultivating cummarship: female friendship, alcohol, and pedagogical community in the alewife poem / Carissa M. Harris -- "All these relationships between women": Chaucer and the Bechdel test for female friendship / Karma Lochrie -- The politics of virtual friendship in Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies / Christine Chism -- Prosthetic friendship and the theater of fraternity / Laurie A. Finke -- Conversations among friends: Ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the arts of storytelling / Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing -- Afterword: Friendship at a distance / Penelope Anderson.