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1 Introduction: the Discursive Strategies of the Marginalized 1 NOTES 1 Introduction: The Discursive Strategies of the Marginalized 1. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 12 [3–21]. 2. See Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 188–90. 3. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 129; see also Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Feminist Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 21 n9. 4. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Feminist Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 21 n9. 5. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. 6. See Bhabha, Location of Culture, 50. Bhabha notes that “Forms of popular rebellion and mobilization are often most subversive and transgressive when they are created through opposition of cultural practices” (29). 7. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Feminist Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 13. 8. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 3. 9. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 2. 10. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 2. 11. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 329; see also Bhabha, Location of Culture, 24. 12. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 15. 13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–17. 14. Although the vernacular is said to be the norm for most medieval women, many did know, read, and write Latin, a language conventionally regarded as patriarchal and reserved for male ecclesiastics in the Middle Ages. See the fine anthology of texts by medieval women edited by Laurie J. Churchill, 136 NOTES Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 15. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 11.2.23, excerpted in Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C.W. Marx, eds., Woman Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992), 43. Blamires’s handy anthology of excerpts allows a close reading of gender difference through etymologies that is extremely helpful for understanding contemporary feminist theory. 16. Isidore, Etymologies 11.2.17, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 43. 17. Isidore, Etymologies 11.2.17, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 43. 18. Isidore, Etymologies 11.2.23, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 43. 19. Isidore, Etymologies 9.5.3, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 44. 20. Isidore, Etymologies 9.5.3, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 44. 21. Isidore, Etymologies 7.6.5, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 44–45. 22. Isidore, Etymologies 7.6.5, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 45. 23. St. Jerome, Against Jovinian 1 (1.7) and 2, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 64, 65. 24. 1 Cor. 14 (Rheims-Douai Version of the Catholic Vulgate Bible); see St. John Chrysostom, Homily 9, 1 and 2, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 58, 59. 25. St. John Chrysostom, Homily 9, 2, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 59. 26. St. John Chrysostom, Homily 9, 3, excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 59. 27. St. Jerome, Against Jovinian, 4 (156), excerpted in Blamires, Woman Defamed, 62. 28. R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1987): 1 [1–24]. 29. Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” 3. 30. Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” 6. 31. Stephen Harper, “ ‘So Euyl to Rewlyn’: Madness and Authority in ‘The Book of Margery Kempe,’ ” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 98 (1997): 59 [53–61]. 32. See Thelma S. Fenster and Claire A. Lees, eds., Gender and Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 33. See, for example, Carol M. Meale, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Laurie Finke, Women Writing in Medieval England (London: Longmans, 1999); Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., New Trends in Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 2 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1999); and, for a work more specifically focused on the spaces in which women wrote, Diane Watt, ed., Medieval Women in Their Communities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 34. See Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Compositions of Medieval Texts (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). 35. For medieval books written by and intended for women, see Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith, Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, NOTES 137 British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); for book ownership by women, see Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 36. For Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, see Phyllis R. Brown, Linda A. McMillan, and Katharina M. Wilson, eds., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004); for Anna Comnena, see Thalia Gouma-Peterson, ed., Anna Komnene and Her Times (New York and London: Garland/Taylor and Francis, 2000). 37. For Heloise, see Bonnie Wheeler, ed., Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, New Middle Ages Series (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2000); for Hildegard of Bingen, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 38. For Christine de Pizan, see Earl Jeffrey Richards, with Joan Williamson, Nadia Margolis, and Christine Reno, eds., Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); Margarete Zimmermann and Dina De Rentiis, eds., The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994); Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Woman in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Barbara Altmann and Deborah McGrady, eds., A Casebook on Christine de Pizan (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Angus J. Kennedy, with Rosalind Brown-Grant, James C. Laidlaw, and Catherine M. Müller, eds., Contexts and Continuities: Proceedings of the IVth International Colloquium on Christine de Pizan (Glasgow 21–27 July 2000), Published in Honour of Liliane Dulac, Glasgow University Medieval French Texts and Studies, 3 vols. (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2002). 39. For women visionaries and mystics, including Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe, see Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, and Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 1999); and Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Also, on Margery Kempe, see Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); and John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis, eds., A Companion to “The Book of Margery Kempe” (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004). 40. For aristocratic women’s family letters, see John M. Klassen, trans., The Letters of the Rovmberk Sisters: Noblewomen in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia, Library of Medieval Women (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2001); and Diane Watt, ed., The Paston Women: Selected Letters, Library of Medieval Women (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004). 138 NOTES 41. Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 42. See Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 43. Susan Schibanoff, “Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman,” in Gender and Reading, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 101–2 [83–106]. 44. See Pam Whitfield, “Power Plays: Relationships in Marie de France’s Lanval and Eliduc,” Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999): 242–54. 45. There are exceptions, of course; for example, both Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (ca. 935–ca. 1000) and Anna Comnena (1083–153) wrote epics: the former, in her Primordia Coenobii Gandeshemensis and Carmen de Gestis Oddonis Imperatoris, which trace the origins of her convent and the Ottonian dynasty that supported it, and the latter, in her Alexiad, which memorializes the rule of her own family. 46. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, eds., Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 47. Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s ‘Cité des Dames’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 48. William D.
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