Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination [Hardcover]

Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, this book offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England.Introduction: The Mother's Mark and the Maternal Monster 1. Women's Secrets and Men's Interests: Rituals of Childbirth and Northern Octavian 2. That Moder Ever Hym Fed : Nursing and Other Anthropophagies in Sir Gowther 3. 'Youre Owene Thyng:' The Clerk's Tale and Fantasies of Autonomous Male Reproduction 4. 'A Mooder He Hath, But Fader Hath He Noon:' Maternal Transmission and Fatherless Sons: The Man of Law's Tale 5. Forgetting Eleanor: Richard Coer de Lyon and England's Maternal Aporia 6. Monstrous Maternity and the Mother-Mark: Melusine as Genealogical Phantom Afterword: Abjection and the Mother at the End of this BookAngela L. Florschuetz is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Trinity University.