Grief, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages: Knowing Sorrow

This edited collection examines the ways in which medieval grief is both troubled and troubling–troubled in its representation, troubling to categories such as gender, identity, hierarchy, theology, and history, among others. Investigating various instantiations of grief-sorrow, sadness, and mourning; weeping and lamentation; spiritual and theological disorientation and confusion; keening and the drinking of blood; and grief-madness-through a number of theoretical lenses, including feminist, gender, and queer theories, as well as philosophical, sociological, and historical approaches to emotion, the collected essays move beyond simply describing how men and women grieve in the Middle Ages and begin interrogating the ways grief intersects with and shapes gender identity.

Contributors are Kim Bergqvist, Jim Casey, Danielle Marie Cudmore, Marjorie Housley, Erin. I. Mann, Inna Matyushina, Drew Maxwell, Kristen Mills, Jeffery G. Stoyanoff, Lee Templeton, and Kisha G. Tracy.