Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image(The New Middle Ages)

Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture. The volume represents an exciting array of scholarship dealing with visual and textual cultures from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth centuries. Bringing together a range of theoretical approaches that address the troubling effects of vision on medieval texts and images, the book mediates between medieval and modern constructions of gender and sexuality. Troubled Vision focuses thematically on four central themes: Desire, looking, representation and reading. Topics include the gender of the gaze, the visibility of queer desires, troubled representations of gender and sexuality, spectacle and reader response, and the visual troubling of modern critical categories.

Table of Contents:
PART I: TROUBLED DESIRES Picturing Same-Sex Desire: The Falconer and His Lover in Images by Petrus Christus and the Housebook Master; D.Wolfthal Visible and Invisible Bodies and Subjects in Peter Damian; W.Burgwinkle Seeing Women Troubadours without the '-itz' and 'isms', F.Nicholson PART II: TROUBLED LOOKS The Look of Love: The Gender of the Gaze in Troubadour Lyric; S.Gaunt Sacrificial Spectacle and Interpassive Vision in the Vie de Sainte Foi; E.Campbell 'Al com of sihðe': Troubled Looks in the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse; R.Mills PART III: TROUBLED REPRESENTATIONS Now You See It, Now You Don't: Inside Jacopone's Bedroom; C.Howie Sex and the City: Desire, Distance and Politico-Erotic Vision in Early Italian Verse; C.Keen The Son's Gaze on Noah's Nakedness: A Case of Viriliphobia?; M.H.Caviness PART IV: TROUBLED READINGS Reading Reading Women: Double-Mirroring the Dame in Der Ritter vom Turn; A.Simon Visualizing the Feminine in the Roman de Perceforest; S.Huot Too Many Women: Reading Freud, Derrida and Lancelot; M.Griffin Response; S.Salih Index

About the Author :
Emma Campbell is a specialist on Old French literature. She has published articles in French Studies and Comparative Literature and is currently completing a doctoral thesis on Old French saints' lives at King's College London. She was winner of the Gapper prize 2002 for the best essay in postgraduate French studies in the British Isles. Robert Mills is a lecturer in English Literature in the English Department, King's College London and a specialist on late-medieval visual culture. His book Visions of Excess: Pain, Pleasure and the Penal Imaginary in Late-Medieval Art and Culture is forthcoming; he is co-editor, with Bettina Bildhauer, of a collection of essays on The Monstrous Middle Ages, and has published articles on medieval gender and sexuality in journals such as Exemplaria and New Medieval Literatures.

Review :
"A stimulating and engaging way to consider how vision is deployed - whether as privileged mediator or as deceptive medium - in the construction (and deconstruction) of gender categories." - The Medieval Review "In Troubled Vision (and particularly in part two, "Troubled Looks," which is in many ways the heart of the volume), Campbell and Mills have provided a stimulating range of approaches to the intersection of vision, gender, and desire in pre-modern culture." - Suzanne Akbari, University of Toronto