Promotional Information

Explores how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were outlawed in medieval England

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction:
Touching the Past 1
Chapter One
It Takes One to Know One: Lollards, Sodomites, and Their Accusers 55
Chapter Two
Good Vibrations: John/Eleanor, Dame Alys, the Pardoner, and Foucault 100
Chapter Three
Margery Kempe Answers Back 143
Coda
Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Use of the Past 183
Notes 207
Bibliography 305
Index 337

About the Author

Carolyn Dinshaw is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She is author of Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics and Chaucer and the Text: Two Views of the Author and cofounding editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"Getting Medieval is not just for medievalists... Dinshaw's very personal, highly specific and precisely targeted vision should stimulate consideration of the meanings assigned to the medieval world in the postmodern world."--The Times Higher Education Supplement, September 8, 2000 "Carolyn Dinshaw is preeminent for the subtlety with which she discloses gendered turmoil in historically situated texts. I can hardly wait to have Getting Medieval on my own shelf, to have its adventurous deployments of 'the touch of the queer' available for frequent consultation." Paul Strohm, University of Oxford "This book has a beautiful range, both among premodern English discourses and in postmodern theory, and Dinshaw really and truly does make these different textualities touch" Louise O. Fradenburg, University of California, Santa Barbara