In the on-going debate on gender in antiquity the Greek novel occupies a special place. This is a simultaneously reliable and fascinating insight into the kaleidoscopic world of male and female in the novels. Haynes shows that the strong heroines are best understood not as an undistorted mirror on an improved social reality, but as a type of "constructed femine." She situates the novelistic heroines within a continuing tradition of using the female image to say something about the male self and his aspirations. Rather than as "failed heroes" the males are revieled as promotinga particularly provocative brand of passive masculinity.
Medieval Heroines in History and Legend
(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Bonnie Wheeler
Southern Methodist University
Ph.D., Brown University
This course presents the lives, based on the latest scholarly interpretations, of four medieval women
who still shimmer in the modern imagination:
Heloise, the abbess and mistress of Abelard; the prophet
Hildegard of Bingen; the legendary
Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine; and the woman-warrior and saint,
Joan of Arc.
In
Medieval Heroines in History and Legend, Professor Bonnie Wheeler discusses these four remarkable women in the light of the present "golden age" of medieval scholarship. Almost daily, researchers are recovering lost information that corrects our picture of what had been a misunderstood era. As a result, we know more than ever about the roles women played in medieval life.
What did it mean to be a heroine in the medieval world? As the four subjects of this course make clear, it meant shaping and changing that world. In the monasteries and churches where people prayed, the universities where they wrote and thought, and even on the political map of Europe itself, these women made differences perceived not only in our time, but in theirs.
who still shimmer in the modern imagination:
