Uncovering the many striking female alternatives to patrilineal narratives in medieval texts, Emma O. Bérat explores strategies of writing and illustration that creatively and purposefully depict women’s legacies. Genealogy, used to justify a character’s present power and project it onto the future, was crucial to medieval political, literary, and historical thought. While patrilineage often limited women to exceptional or passive roles, other genealogical forms that represent and promote women’s claims are widespread in medieval texts. Female characters transmit power through book patronage and reading, enduring landmarks, and international travel, as well as childbearing and succession. These flexible – if messy – genealogies reflect the web of political, biological, and spiritual relations that frequently characterized elite women’s lives. Examining hagiography, chronicles, genealogical rolls, and French, English, and Latin romances, as well as associated codices and images, Bérat highlights the centrality of female characters and historical women to this fundamental aspect of medieval consciousness.

Emma O. Bérat is an independent scholar living and working in Artigat, France. She is co-editor of Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages (2021), and has written extensively on women’s historiography, literary patronage, and cultural movement.

Table des matières :

1. The book as bloodline: the life of Queen Margaret of Scotland
2. Records on the landscape: landmarks in Audree, Osith, and Modwenne
3. Tracing mobility: royal genealogical diagrams and Trevet’s Les Cronicles
4. Mothers and messengers: violent transmission in Athelston
   Conclusion: Matrilineal legacies.

Informations pratiques :

Emma O. Bérat, Women’s Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination. Matrilineal Legacies in the High Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024 ; 1 vol., 246 p. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature). ISBN : 978-1-00943-475-1. Prix : GBP 85,00.

Source : Cambridge University Press