Discources on gender in medieval and early modern Europe
Location: AgC222.1 (upper floor).
Programme:
Friday (October 9):
15:00-15:30 Ilse Paakkinen (University of Helsinki): Male hearted widows – Transgressing the Boundaries of Male and Female in Christine de Pizan’s Thought
15:30-16:00 Marko Lamberg (University of Jyväskylä): Interpretations on religious and lay ideas on gender on the basis of late medieval exempla and early modern folkloristic material
16:00-16:30 Sari Katajala-Peltomaa (University of Tampere, Finland): Performative Space - Rituals and Lived Religion in Gender Construction.
Saturday (October 10):
9:00-9:30 Hanna Kietäväinen-Sirén (University of Jyväskylä): Marital Violence and the Presentations of Manliness and Womanliness in the Late 17th Century Finnish Countryside
9:30-10:00 Marianna Muravyeva (Herzen State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg, Russia): Violent Households in 18th Century Russia: reconstruction of 'barbarous' masculinities
10:00-10:30 Raisa Maria Toivo (University of Tampere): Witchcraft as discourse on gender and trouble - early modern and contemporary?
10:30-12:00 General discussion
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Approved participants in alphaphetical order
Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari: Performative Space - Rituals and Lived Religion in Gender Construction.
This paper focuses on laity's lived religion as a means to construct and perform gender in the late Middle Ages. Different rituals were a mode to communicate with the divine and with the surrounding community. Thus they enabled men and women to emphasise various elements in their gendered identity and to challenge the dominant discourse of clerical rhetoric.
Kietäväinen-Sirén, Hanna: Marital Violence and the Presentations of Manliness and Womanliness in the Late 17th Century Finnish Countryside
According to the patriarchal ideal man was the head of his household. Husband’s formal supremacy included the right to discipline his wife, while she could never have the right to discipline her husband. According to the law, wife could moderately be punished for her crime, but ungrounded maltreatment was criminalized. In this presentation I shall examine descriptions of womanliness and manliness expressed in district courts during investigations of marital violence. The material consists of the district court protocols from the latter part of the 17th century. The following questions are to be answered: how community took husband’s violence against his wife? What kind of violence was approved and what wasn’t, how and when was it interfered and what this tells about the use of violence as a part of manliness? Did women exercise violence against their husbands, and if they did, how it was taken? Then, how maltreated wives were presented? Marital violence was almost exclusively exercised by men, and seen as household’s inner matter. Community could interfere informally in excessive violence, but the boundaries were sliding. When violence was investigated, manliness or womanliness weren’t brought out directly, even if the act itself was condemned. However, reasons for husband’s violence were often searched for in wife’s behaviour. It was allowed to discipline wife including for bad manners, drunkenness and disobedience, that is, when she offended against the feminine ideal.
Lamberg, Marko: Interpretations on religious and lay ideas on gender on the basis of late medieval exempla and early modern folkloristic material
My paper deals with how gendered norms and practices were perceived and depicted in Nordic societies at the end of the Middle Ages. The presentation is based on an analysis of late medieval collections of exempla (moral warning tales) and folkloristic material collected from the late eighteenth century onwards.
Paakkinen, Ilse: Male hearted widows – Transgressing the Boundaries of Male and Female in Christine de Pizan’s Thought
Christine de Pizan (1363-1434) is known from her women and femininity defending treatises. Among the contemporary male scholars her oeuvre presented a society feminisized. The importance of women and femininity is emphasized in different walks of life, such as mediating for peace, nurturing the sick and clothing the masses. The duties of the male are of different form. If categorizing reality into male and female spheres was important to Christine’s contemporaries, it was elemental also for her. In the case of widowhood, however, the categories of feminine and masculine bend. According to Christine widowed women need to adopt a male heart in order to defend and protect themselves. “Keeping the world under rule of justice” and other protective duties belong to men. The duties of the male and female complete each other. The married couple forms a kind of moral unit, where duties are divided according to the sex of a person. Consequently, while married, women do not need to protect themselves, for it is the duty of the husband. However, when widowed, women need to take control of both the feminine and the masculine sphere. Thus a widow needs to assimilate male virtue in her feminine being by adopting a male heart. My paper discusses the flexible nature of femininity and masculinity in Christine de Pizan’s thought. What seems at first glance to be a constant and monolithic division between the male and the female, is unveiled variable and adaptable. As Christine herself was a widow and claims being transformed into a man, also her personal experiences are a part of the analysis. On a larger scale, Christine’s views challenge the normativity of experienced gender. My presentation will also shed light on the allegedly strict division between the male and female in the medieval interpretations of gender.
Muravyeva, Marianna: Violent Households in 18th Century Russia: reconstruction of 'barbarous' masculinities
Toivo, Raisa Maria: Witchcraft as discourse on gender and trouble - early modern and contemporary?
This paper deals with different ways in which discourse on witchcraft can and cannot be analysed as discourse on gender, and what consequences such analysis will have on our understanding of early modern gender, religion and society.
Last update 5.10.2009.
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