Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

by Liz Herbert McAvoy (Editor), Teresa Walters (Editor)

Overview

While moralists may stress the importance of the proper management of appetite, medieval and early modern narratives are full of images of monstrous and deformed appetites running out of control. Consuming Narratives examines the significance of these concepts, metaphors and narratives of appetite for understanding gender, politics, race and nation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The essays in this wide-ranging collection consider appetite in relation to sexual and textual consumption, monstrous bodies, and genders, races and nations. Each section is introduced by a leading academic in the field, while individual papers deal with a variety of texts, from the Revelations of Divine Love to Massinger’s The Sea Voyage, and cover topics ranging from trade and colonialism to vampires, witchcraft and the sheela-na-gig figure.

Consuming Narratives analyses representations of monstrous appetites, highlights the role of consumption within narrative practices and considers the ways in which appetites and ideas about them contributed to the production of textual, human and national bodies. It will be an essential book for all those interested in the intersections of gender, politics and narrative in the medieval and early modern periods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780708317433
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	07/02/2002
Series:	University of Wales - Pocket Guide Ser.
Pages:	257
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Liz Herbert McAvoy is Lecturer in Gender in English Studies at the University of Wales Swansea. She has published widely on medieval women’s writing, the medieval mystical experience and anchoritism, including a monograph on Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. She is currently writing a book on constructions of gender in anchoritic guidance texts.

Mari Hughes-Edwards is Lecturer in English at the University of Salford. She has recently been awarded a Ph.D. on contemplative models in high and late medieval anchoritic guidance texts which she is currently revising for publication. Other research interests include the constructions of gender and space in contemporary women’s poetry, on which she has also published a number of articles.



Liz Herbert McAvoy teaches in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She has written widely on female spirituality and mysticism, especially in relation to Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.
 
Teresa Walters, formerly a teacher in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, is currently working for the Dyfi Eco-Valley Partnership.



Liz Herbert McAvoy teaches in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She has written widely on female spirituality and mysticism, especially in relation to Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.
 
Teresa Walters, formerly a teacher in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, is currently working for the Dyfi Eco-Valley Partnership.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword and Acknowledgements

List of Editors and Contributors

1.    Introduction

       Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters

I      Sexual / Textual Consumption

2.    The Monstrosity of the Moral Pig and Other Unnatural Ruminations

       Nicholas Watson

3.    Consuming Passions in Book VIII of John Gower's Confessio Amantis

        Diane Watt

4.    Consuming the Body of the Working Man in the Later Middle Ages

       Isabel Davies

5.    Reproductive Rites: Anne Askew and the Female Body as Witness in the Acts and Monuments

       Kimberly Anne Coles

6.    ‘Such Stowage as These Trinkets’: Trading and Tasting Women in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage (1622)

       Teresa Walters

7.    ‘Antipodean Tricks’: Travel, Gender and Monstrousness in Richard Brome's The Antipodes

       Claire Jowitt

II    Monstrous Bodies

8.    Monstrosity and the Mercurial Female Imagination

       Margo Hendricks

9.    Bloodsuckers: The Construction of Female Sexuality in Medieval Science and Fiction

       Bettina Bildhauer

10.  Sheela’s Voracity and Victorian Veracity

       Emma L. E. Rees

11.  ‘Ant nes he him seolf reclus i maries wombe?’: Julian of Norwich, the Anchorhold, and the Redemption of the Monstrous Female Body

       Elizabeth Herbert McAvoy

12.  Fountains and Strange Women in the Bower of Bliss: Eastern Contexts for Acrasia and her Community

       Marion D. Hollings

13.  Monstrous Tyrannical Appetites: ‘& what wonderfull monsters have there now lately ben borne in Englande’

       Margaret Healy

III  Consuming Genders, Races, Nations

14.  Reading Between and Beyond the Lines

       Andrew Hadfield

15.  The Devil in Disguise: Perverse Female Origins of the Nation

       Ruth Evans

16.  Monstrous (M)othering: The Representation of the Sowdanesse in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale

       Sue Niebrzydowski

17.  An Ethiopian History: Reading Race and Skin Colour in Early Modern Versions of Heliodorus’ Aithiopika

       Sujata Iyengar

18.  Monstrous Generation: Witchcraft and Narrative in Othello

       Kirstie Gulick Rosenfield

Select Bibliography

Index