Feminine Identity Formation In The Middle Ages
In her book Male Authors, Female Readers, Anne Clark Bartlett demonstrates what type of identification and personal identity women formed in the Middle Ages based on the roles outlined for them within the available texts of the time. Bartlett admits that earlier in her scholastic endeavors she was quite convinced that the texts of the time were primarily masculinistic presuppositions of women, from their “superimposition of a male physiology of desire on female readers to [their] insistent repetition of conventional medieval antifeminist representations, such as the Gossip, the Whore, and the Fickle Woman,” (Bartlett ix). However, these defining and negative categories of women were not as univocal and readily internalized by female readers as Bartlett first suspected. Rather, further inquiry by the author revealed that there were actually three alternative characterizations of women’s identities that comprise three separate categories of discourse in Middle English devotional literature: courtesy; familiarity; contemplation. The masculine ideals and perspectives associated with a great deal of medieval religious literature greatly contrast to these three alternative discourses.
Even though many of the works of the medieval period were filled with the misogyny of their male authors, a great many of the devotional works enjoyed wide popularity among female audiences. Bartlett’s investigation of what she calls the “counterdiscourses” of the time reveal that many texts may have actually been responsible for lending their female readers an identity and roles that went against established norms in society at large, “…they have perpetuated, celebrated, and undermined the ideologies of gender and sexual politics operating in the larger historical context of medieval English society” (Bartlett 2). Bartlett expands her perspective during her investigation, underst...