Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 118 (previously 37b) - Interview with Penny Mickelbury
(Originally aired 2019/08/10 - listen here)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 117 (previously 37a) - On the Shelf for August 2019 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2019/08/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2019.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 116 (previously 36d) - Swinging Singles and Lesbian Opportunities - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/07/27 - listen here)
Why Study Singlewomen?
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 119 (previously 37c) - Bosom Sex (reprise) - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/08/17 - listen here)
[This podcast was originally broadcast as episode 4 on 2016/11/26]
With its emphasis on the details and proofs of heterosexual intercourse within marriage (or the lack thereof) this article doesn’t bring much to the LHMP. Still interesting in terms of the concerns of women’s lives, but not much to say here.
And with that, we conclude this collection of papers on singlewomen in medieval and early modern England. Next week I hope to start my series on "the foundational texts of the history of gender and sexuality that everyone else is in conversation with"--possibly leavened with some other shorter items because this is a lot of weighty stuff.
In this study of the legal and social context of infanticide concerns, I found a lot of interesting connections with modern discourse around abortion. It becomes clear that the law and the patriarchal establishment wasn’t really so much concerned with the lives of the women and fetuses involved, but with controlling and punishing women’s bodies for stepping outside the prescribed paradigms.
OK, I confess that once I hit the “this is going to be lit crit” part of this article, and I already knew it wasn’t going to be strongly relevant to the Project, I didn’t really even skim the rest of the article. But if lit crit is your thing, hey, that’s ok!
Once again, this article takes women’s lives and makes them all about the men. It feels like there are entirely too many articles in this collection that fall in that category. The genre of “widow portraits” in early modern England are a testament to men’s anxiety that maybe--just-maybe--their wives aren’t quite as in love with them as they seem.
One can pretty much guarantee that any general discussion of women in medieval England is going to talk about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath eventually. This collection gets double-duty from her. It isn't that there aren't other women (and actual, rather than fictitious, women) that appear in texts of the same era. But academia has always been fond of anointing specific figures and stories as central, iconic representations and then building analytic industries around them.
The use of the word “sely” in this paper’s title is likely to be confusing to anyone not versed in the historic development of the word. Originally (in Anglo Saxon) “saelig” meant “blessed, holy” and was typically applied to religious figures.
