Call for papers 2024. 2: “Women in the Middle Ages: protagonism, authorship and representations”

Call for papers 2024. 2: “Women in the Middle Ages: protagonism, authorship and representations”

Org.: Isabela Albuquerque (UPE/Campus Garanhuns)

Fernanda Cardoso Nunes (UECE-FAFIDAM)

Prazo/Deadline:  20 de agosto de 2024/August, 20th, 2024

Social historians assumed women as a homogeneous category, defined as biologically feminine people who, despite circulating in different roles and contexts, maintained their essence unchanged. This reading contributed in the 1970s to the discourse of collective identity, establishing the antagonism of men versus women, thus favoring political mobilization within the scope of the feminist movement. The emergence of women's history played a key role in demystifying the historiographical currents inherited from the Enlightenment and overthrowing the supposed impartiality of their readings and interpretations, considering that such authors eliminated women from their narratives (Soihet, 1997, p. 97) and this field of study was of fundamental importance in questioning and deconstructing globalizing and linear schemes regarding national and universal historical processes.

An important contribution to women's history was gender studies. In her famous article “Gender: a useful category of historical analysis”, published in 1990 and translated into Portuguese in 1995, the American historian Joan Scott points out that the term gender implies a wide range of theoretical positions as well as simple descriptive references to relations between the sexes; used to designate the social relationships between them (Scott, 1995, p. 73-75). In the scope of literary studies, the recent recovery and inclusion of female authors within the medieval literary canon. The protagonism of these women of letters has been increasingly highlighted and sheds new light on issues of authorship, gender and female representation in the Middle Ages.

The male protagonism within historical and literary studies, however, led to a question, starting in the sixties: where are women in history? And in medieval literature? The purpose of this dossier, “Women in the Middle Ages: protagonism, authorship and representations”, consists of bringing together articles by doctors and aims to bring together works on topics related to women in the medieval period.