In her essay “Forget Your Darlings,” published in the European Review of Books, Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Literature Program Marisa Libbon explores the ways in which “three recent books about the lives of medieval women—one fictional, the others real —experiment with biographical form, and in doing so, challenge their readers to remember differently.” In her analysis of Charlotte Cooper-Davis’s Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy, Janina Ramirez’s Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, and Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Libbon reveals how the complexity and agency of women’s lives and work during the Middle Ages have been scarcely memorialized or documented—and in some cases, textually erased—since that era. “It’s only in the historical narrative, our memory of the past, that women are absent,” Libbon writes. “Today, and historically, these absences leave room for false narratives to take root about what were and are ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ roles for women.”
Post Date: 11-28-2023