The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature

by Peggy McCracken

Overview

Peggy McCracken offers a feminist historicist reading of Guenevere, Iseut, and other adulterous queens of Old French literature, and situates romance narratives about queens and their lovers within the broader cultural debate about the institution of queenship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France.

Moving among a wide selection of narratives that recount the stories of queens and their lovers, McCracken explores the ways adultery is appropriated into the political structure of romance. McCracken examines the symbolic meanings and uses of the queen's body in both romance and the historical institutions of monarchy and points toward the ways medieval romance contributed to the evolving definition of royal sovereignty as exclusively male.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812234329
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	03/29/1998
Series:	The Middle Ages Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Peggy McCracken is the Domna C. Stanton Collegiate Professor of French, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is author of The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

What People are Saying About This

John Carmi Parsons

An original and invaluable contribution to our understanding of gender/power relations in the Middle Ages, medieval apprenhensions and expectations of powerful women, and the ways in which presumably male writers imagined such women's behavior.

Editorial Reviews

"A provocative study of an intriguing subject. . . . The Romance of Adultery establishes perceptive and tantalizing connections between literature and history while sensibly resisting the teptation to see the former as a reflection of the latter."

Romance Philology

"An original and invaluable contribution to our understanding of gender/power relations in the Middle Ages, medieval apprehensions and expectations of powerful women, and the ways in which presumably male writers imagined such women's behavior."

John Carmi Parsons

"An original and invaluable contribution to our understanding of gender/power relations in the Middle Ages, medieval apprehensions and expectations of powerful women, and the ways in which presumably male writers imagined such women's behavior."—John Carmi Parsons

"A provocative study of an intriguing subject. . . . The Romance of Adultery establishes perceptive and tantalizing connections between literature and history while sensibly resisting the teptation to see the former as a reflection of the latter."—Romance Philology

From the Publisher