Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination

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.

• Multilingual in approach, examining texts across the three key literary languages of medieval England – English, French, and Latin – and including Anglo-Norman texts with no modern translation
• Explores depictions of medieval maternity and childbearing in a historiographical context, highlighting their public, political implications and showing how politics and representations of motherhood, often considered only marginally related, are in fact deeply intertwined
• Models interdisciplinary analysis of images, manuscript contexts, texts in multiple genres, and related material objects