1st Edition

Images of Women in Medieval Texts and Literature Misogyny and Praise from Tertullian to Chaucer

By Pedro Carlos Louzada Fonseca Copyright 2025
208 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

Employing a critical and analytical method, this volume takes an innovative approach to existing anthologies of medieval texts, proposing a comprehensive methodology for examining and understanding the historical and cultural construction of the image of women in medieval literature. Critically and analytically appreciating representative works and authors from the medieval period, Images of... Read more

Introduction: Presence of Misogyny and its Legacy in Medieval Literature

 

 

Part 1: Misogyny in the Literature of the Ancient World and its Medieval Legacy

 

 

Chapter 1: Pronouncements of the Classical Science of Aristotle and Galen

 

Chapter 2: Influences of the Classical Literature of Ovid and Juvenal

 

Chapter 3: Pronouncements of Sacred Scripture

 

 

Part II: Misogyny in Medieval Literature

 

 

Chapter 4: Literature of the Fathers of the Church

 

Chapter 5: The Religious and Secular Literary Legacy of the Patristics

 

Chapter 6: Literary Vernacular Contributions in the Later Middle Ages

 

 

Part III: Praise of Women in the Literature of the Middle Ages

 

 

Chapter 7: The Anonymous The Thrush and the Nightingale

 

Chapter 8: Marbod of Rennes

 

Chapter 9 Abelard

 

Chapter 10: Albertano of Brescia

 

Chapter 11: The Anonymous Response to Le Bestiaire d’Amour by Richard de Fournival

 

Chapter 12: The Anonymous The Southern Passion

 

Chapter 13: John Gower

 

Chapter 14: Treatise in Refutation of Walter Brut

 

Chapter 15: The Anonymous Dives and Pauper

 

Chapter 16: The Anonymous A demanda do Santo Graal

 

 

Part IV: Women in the Bible: Between Defamation and Praise

 

 

Chapter 17: Discredited Women

 

Chapter 18: Admirable Women

Biography

Pedro Carlos Louzada Fonseca is Professor at the Faculty of Letters and a Permanent Volunteer Professor of the Graduate Program in Literary Studies and Linguistics at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil. Having received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of New Mexico, he carried out postdoctoral research at the Open University of Lisbon and at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. His most recent publications are mainly about the medieval bestiary and its symbolic and ideological implications; the presence of the medieval imaginary in Portuguese-Brazilian colonial literature; and the religious, cultural and political issue of defamation and defense of women during the Middle Ages. He is the author of the Portuguese-language books Bestiary and Discourse of Gender in the Discovery of America and the Colonization of Brazil (2011), Chronistics and Colonization of the New World: Gender Discourse, Forms of the Symbolic and Representation of Reality (2017), Women and Misogyny in the Vision of the Church Fathers and Their Medieval Legacy: Study and Reading of Fundamental Texts (2017), Introduction to Medieval Misogyny from Tertullian to Chaucer (2020), and Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages.