Feminism, Gender studies, and Medieval Studies

“Feminists, then, are revising the field of medieval studies from three directions: adding new information, answering old questions in new ways, and creating entirely new research agendas. We have helped to introduce the “linguistic turn ” to medieval studies, and we are taking all of the middle ages (men as well as women, masculinity as well as feminity) under our view. Medieval studies will never be the same. ” Yet “although women are better assimilated into medieval studies in the 1990s, feminist scholarship is not. ” (Bennett 1993: 25–26). It has been a revealing exercise for me to reflect on feminist scholarship on the European cultures of the middle ages, as it looks fifteen years on – from the Beijing Conference on Women, and from the “feminist ” issue of the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, cited above.1 Right after 1993 it might have seemed that the whole card house of feminism had collapsed. A special issue of Differences, entitled “The Essential Difference ” appeared in 1994; Naomi Schor brought together many of the stellar feminists of the moment to ponder the risk of essentialism, that is, of taking for granted that there is a male and a female identity: Teresa de Lauretis