Peggy Mc Cracken 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, Mc Cracken explores the ways adultery is appropriated into the political structure of romance. Mc Cracken 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.
About the author
Peggy Mc Cracken 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.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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