Motherhood and its Spaces in Medieval Romance

Discusses the spaces occupied and used by mothers in French and English medieval romance of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.


Mothers have tended to be overlooked in romance scholarship, in favour of fantastical adventures, courtly love stories, and connections with historical events. Yet they are often central to the action in these narratives, whether in a birthing chamber, a royal court, a forest or the Otherworld.
This book focuses on the spaces occupied and utilised by mothers in French and English medieval romance of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Analysing mothers' use of social space shows how these texts intervene in contemporary social, cultural, legal, and medical debates on motherhood and its place in elite society and families. In examining the presence and contributions of maternal figures in such narratives as the Roman de Melusine, Emaré, Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, it demonstrates how romance distorts and subverts gendered roles in order to reveal the complexities of medieval selfhood and social interaction. Recognising the importance of these figures not only sheds a new light on how we may read these romances but on the role of elite mothers in society more generally, presenting a model in which motherhood is central to the construction of not just lineage, but of alliances, communities, cities and nations.

Contributor: Kirsty Bolton KIRSTY BOLTON is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on intersectional identities in Middle English romance.