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H@H - What Your "Moder" Gave You: Fears and Fantasies of Maternal Heredity in Medieval England

In a strongly patriarchal society like medieval England, reproduction was meant to reinforce likeness between father and son. While medieval men might have wished to pretend otherwise, mothers, too, had tremendous impact on their children. Join us as Dr. Samantha Seal explores medieval fears about the feminine influence on children, using examples from medieval romance and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, in which mothers subvert fathers’ biological connection with “their” sons, bestowing their own maternal traits — magic and monstrosity, holiness and hereditary power — and challenging which sex was more powerful.

About the presenter: Dr. Samantha Seal is an Associate Professor of English and the Pamela Shulman Professor of European and Holocaust Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She specializes in the study of gender and race in medieval English literature, especially in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. She held an ACLS faculty fellowship in 2019-2020, currently serves on editorial board of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, and is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.

Mar 24, 2023 05:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)