MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Students may say medieval women were submissive, illiterate, dependent, domestic, and unable to engage in public life connected to trade, travel, and politics. They may imagine beautiful aristocratic damsels in distress, cloistered nuns, or compliant serving girls, but they will be hard-pressed to name women who asserted themselves as public people or subverted the cultural constructs associated with medieval womanhood. Teaching Marie de France with Margery Kempe enables a more complex understanding of medieval womanhood. In her autobiography, Margery Kempe constructs her narrator as a subject with personal agency, free will, and ascendency above men she encounters. She is a working business woman who seeks a spiritual path, renegotiates the terms of her marriage with her husband, asserts her right to abstain from sexual intercourse (ending her need to endure perpetual maternity), travels as a religious mystic/teacher, and dictates her life story for print circulation (perhaps our first autobiography by a women in English). Almost certainly aristocratic by birth and highly literate, Marie de France borrows from romance, fairy lore, and Christian doctrine in her lay “Yonec.” She dramatizes one woman’s achievement of personal power within and against the institutions of marriage and religion by invoking the trope of the princess in the tower and then subverting reader expectations repeatedly. A woman locked in a tower by an unloving husband imagines a supernatural lover with the ability to shape-shift. The boundaries of marriage are crossed in an adulterous affair. The fluidity of identity, penetration of masculine bodies, and assertion of feminine control become the overriding themes. Both texts comment on the traditions and genres within which they were written –medieval mysticism and courtly romance – and they serve nicely to challenge the assumptions students may have about the lives and minds of medieval women.