ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

Contributors:
Penelope Anderson, Andrea Boffa, Jennifer N. Brown, Christine Chism, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Laurie Finke, Carissa M. Harris, Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Clare A. Lees, Karma Lochrie, Gillian R. Overing, Alexandra Verini, Usha Vishnuvajjala, Stella Wang

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Karma Lochrie is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. She is also the author Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t and Nowhere in the Middle Ages, among others.

Usha Vishnuvajjala is Lecturer at Cardiff University. She is also the author of Feminist Medievalisms.

REVIEWS

“The significance of Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature cannot be overstated: it gathers some of the freshest voices in medieval literary studies to present some of the most transformative and inspiring work on women and gender to date.” —Holly A. Crocker, author of The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

“Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature is one of those rare collections in which each article not only stands on its own as a provocative piece of scholarship but also contributes to an integrated whole. The contributors, that is, have become collaborators in a shared argument, so that the volume models the social and textual work of women’s friendship that it explores.” —L.M.C. Weston, Modern Philology

“This wonderful unification of female academic voices, spearheaded by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala, is profound, intriguing and often emotive. … a beautiful ode to female friendship, both modern and medieval. Lochrie and Vishnuvajjala have created the foundations for a whole new field of research, while also aiming to shape our understanding of ourselves and our histories in a post-pandemic world.” —Emma Bairstow, Forum for Modern Language Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1 Varieties of Spiritual Friendship

Chapter 1 Female Friendships and Visionary Women

Chapter 2 The Foundations of Friendship: Amicitia, Literary Production, and Spiritual Community in Marie de France

Chapter 3 Friendship and Resistance in the Vitae of Italian Holy Women

Chapter 4 Sisters and Friends: The Medieval Nuns of Syon Abbey

Part 2 Feminine Space, Feminine Voices

Chapter 5 “Amonge maydenes moo”: Gender-Based Community, Racial Thinking, and Aristocratic Women’s Work in Emaré

Chapter 6 Women’s Communities and the Possibility of Friendship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur

Chapter 7 Female Friendship in Late Medieval English Literature: Cultural Translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory

Part 3 New Modes of Female Friendship

Chapter 8 Cultivating Cummarship: Female Friendship, Alcohol, and Pedagogical Community in the Alewife Poem

Chapter 9 “All These Relationships between Women”: Chaucer and the Bechdel Test for Female Friendship

Chapter 10 The Politics of Virtual Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies

Chapter 11 Prosthetic Friendship and the Theater of Fraternity

Chapter 12 Conversations among Friends: ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the Arts of Storytelling

Afterword Friendship at a Distance