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OverviewIn Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women's roles and lives. Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including womanhood and femininity, and refashioned others, such as motherhood. These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women's relationships to different kinds of authority--generally masculine and frequently religious. By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Tara WilliamsPublisher: Ohio State University Press Imprint: Ohio State University Press Dimensions: Width: 16.50cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 24.10cm Weight: 0.454kg ISBN: 9780814211519ISBN 10: 0814211518 Pages: 224 Publication Date: 02 March 2011 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsAuthor InformationTara Williams is associate professor of English and affiliated faculty in Women Studies at Oregon State University. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |