4) Write a thesis based essay exploring the Medieval, Renaissance/ Reformation images of women and how it affects the women thereafter.
Use these prompts if you have a hard time getting started:
a) Although a female tradition started, female writers still did not belong to literary communities comparable with the male writers like those of Shakespeare and Marlow. The Old English Era, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance make up one single early period in women’s literature. The literature of this time is distinctively and consistently concerned with problems creativity posed for women, and they may, therefore, seem idiosyncratic when set against the texts of male contemporaries. The women were haunted by the images of women that men had constructed for them. The writers of this time sought to redefine or resign itself to male preconceptions about femininity. Especially writers like Julian of Norwich but all female writers, had to confront the misogyny of male theologians who sought to censure and silence them as well as an ideal of courtly love that glamorized and glorified them I ways that were sometimes problematic (5). The Norton Anthology introductions note the following:
-Intellectual ambition for women was associated with evil.
-Femaleness itself was an intrinsically debased and secondary condition (6).
-Tertullian, a third century philosopher of asceticism wrote in regard to woman’s nature “ She is the temple built over a sewer”(6).
-Jacques de Vitry, a 13th century writer, wrote in regards to Eve “Between Adam and God in paradise there was but one woman and she had no rest until she had succeeded in banishing her husband from the garden of delights and in condemning Christ to the torment of the cross”(6).
-Pliny, a 1st century Roman scholar, wrote on the subject of woman’s biological nature “Contact with [menstrual fluid] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren...the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and the horrible smell fills the air”(6).
Research one of these sources and write an investigation into how the male construct affects women.