Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland [Paperback]

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse.Introduction: Ann Dooley and Sarah Sheehan 1. Travelers and Settled Folk: Women, Honor, and Shame in Medieval Ireland ; M?ir?n N? Dhonnchadha 2. Sex in the civitas : Early Irish Intellectuals and their Vision of Women; Catherine Swift 3. Looking for 'Mr. Right' in Tochmarc Becfhola ; Joanne Findon 4. Playing for Power: Macha Mongr?ad's Sovereign Performance; Amy C. Mulligan 5. Feasts for the Eyes: Visuality and Desire in the Ulster Cycle; Sarah Sheehan 6. They Kept their Skirts On: Gender-Bending Motifs in Early Irish Hagiography; Judith L. Bishop 7. Human Frontiers in Medieval Irish Religious Literature; Jennifer Karyn Reid 8. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Late Medieval Irish R?m?nsa?ochta ; Giselle Gos 9. Speaking with Forked Tongues: Gender and Narrative in the Acallam ; Ann Dooley

This book is a groundbreaking re-reading of gender construction in Medieval Ireland. Despite Ireland's unique early literature, there has been little produced on this topic, and it is a joy to find contributions from such scholars in one volume. This book will be welcomed for its scope and depth as an invaluable addition to the general medieval field of gender studies, for the amateur and professional scholar alike. - Muireann N? Bhrolch?in, Senior Lecturer, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland

The unruly sex-gender systems of medieval Irish literature remain nearly as much a scandal to the conservative heteronormativism of modern scholarship in the field as they were to Romanizing churchmen, proto-colonialist Normans, and Elizabethan carpet-baggers. This collection, at long last, clarifies what scholars of medieval gender have to learn frlSb