In my dissertation, "Women Healers Crossing Gender Role Boundaries in Old French Narrative," I examine the role and representation of women healers in the literature of medieval France. The term women healers encompasses a vast array of characters types, namely women empirics, lady leeches, female surgeons, physicians, university doctors, and magicians. Despite the difference in their practice, these women share the fact that they put into question the validitiy of discourses on women. Borrowing from contemporary gender and feminist theories, I argue that emphasizing the role of the healer in Old French literature leads to a questioning of discourses on women and highlights an alternative structure of relationship to the traditional structure in which women function as objects mediating bonding between men. There is a widespread presence of women healers in Old French literature. She appears in many genres of texts, namely romances, fabliaux, and poems. I have divided my dissertation into five chapters and I conduct a thorough examination, in chronological order, of works from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. More specifically, I focus on romances and Lais by twelfth-century authors Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France, the thirteenth-century anonymous romance of Aucassin et Nicolette, Rutebeuf's Dit de l'Herberie, the anonymous fabliau La Seineresse, and Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la Violette. Despite the differences in genre, each work, thanks to the healing episode, generates a questioning of masculine discourses on women that confine them to the categories of virgin, or pucele, mother, nun, and widow. The healer's womanhood thus does not derive from her heterosexuality. She deconstructs what tradition prescribes in two ways. Standing in juxtaposition to the lady of the narrative she comes to represent what the lady is not and thus embodies an alternative type of woman. Furthermore, she establishes a bond with the lady of the narrative, or with other women, and temporarily undoes triangulated schemas in which women, reduced to the status of object, mediate bonding between male personae.
Zahedi, Shahrzad,
"Women Healers Crossing Gender Role Boundaries in Old French Narrative"
(2008).
French Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0TH8K33
