An examination of three cases of judicial separation from the late medieval court of York.

Since the publication of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood in the early 1960’s, historians of the family have been intrigued by the prospect of a history of change in familial sentiment. 1 Aries’ study of attitudes about children from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, based primarily on art and material evidence, demonstrates…[Read more]

This paper asks us to rethink the boundaries between consent and coercion in medieval England. From gentle persuasion to threats and abuse, coercion was a part of the courtship process. Although late medieval society expected parents to play an active, even heavy-handed, role in matchmaking, the English church recognized the possibility that…[Read more]

When Isabelle, widow of Richard Vergeons, commissioned the writing of a bill of complaint to Chancery at the end of the fifteenth century, she was clearly at the end of her tether. Six months before the writing of the petition, the wife of Thomas Hyll, a wire monger of London, approached the petitioner’s husband, begging for ‘‘secour and saufg…[Read more]

According to medieval common law, assault against a pregnant woman causing miscarriage after the fi rst trimester was homicide. Some scholars have argued, however, that in practice English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as homicide. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, male…[Read more]

Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone’s view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating”…[Read more]

Art historian Barbara Kellum’s 1973 article on child murder in medieval England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of young children. Despite the overstated tone of her w…[Read more]

With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of…[Read more]

In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island’smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today’s youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the sol…[Read more]

We say, you belong to me, or I belong to you. But is it possible to be possessed by others? And can we ever possess ourselves? In this raw and intimate account, Eva-Lynn Jagoe merges memoir with critical theory as she recounts the unraveling of everything she thought she knew about selfhood, relationships, and desire. Through the story of an…[Read more]

This work provides a close linguistic and thematic analysis of the dialogues in the two novels Midaq Alley by N. Mahfouz and Rosa Mistika by E. Kezilahabi, as they reflect fundamental assumptions about gender, tradition, and modernity. Certain complex clauses that have been traditionally recognized in Logic and Philosophy to be used in argument…[Read more]

Fall 2019 Syllabus | SUNY Cortland

What is literature and why does it matter? How can literary texts help us think differently about the world? In this course, we will explore these and other questions through works of modern and contemporary U.S. literature. In particular, we will consider the ways resources are unevenly distributed along…[Read more]

The author proposes fairy-tale logic as a mode of magical thinking typified by the belief that certain functions, fulfilled correctly and in the right order, lead to predictable outcomes. Mapping similarities in implicit reasoning within “Beauty and the Beast,” the reality television program Beauty and the Geek (2005-08), and the misogynistic nar…[Read more]

Este ensayo tiene como objetivo pensar la relación entre feminismo e infrapolítica situándola en la interrogación, desde escalas impensadas, de variantes específicas del feminismo contemporáneo en Latinoamérica. Para tal fin, se ponen en perspectiva histórico-filosófica algunas de las premisas e implicaciones de la “descolonización” feminista y s…[Read more]

Many of the feminist readings of the Dinah story in Genesis 34 in recent years have focused on the question of whether Dinah is raped. The interpretations that perhaps Dinah was not “raped” span the spectrum from a teenage love affair between Dinah and Shechem, to a case of statutory rape, to a marriage by abduction. Guilty of exploring this que…[Read more]

Extending Audre Lorde’s intuition around the polysemy of the term recreation, I put forward this concept as an organizational principle. Via the framework of recreation, I want to think about some of the main political stakes of the forms used by collectivities able to act politically in the present. I transpose the double binding that Lorde a…[Read more]

Over the past decade, the idea of the commune has again become increasingly important to political theorists and philosophers thinking about communism. Within their debates, the anarchist-communist line of thought and practice of the commune is not much reflected. This is a mistake.
Within this chapter I reconstruct the collectively shared…[Read more]