This course will focus on how and what the material body can signify in medieval culture. We’ll consider a complex spectrum of medieval gender identities revealed to us through a variety of literary genres. We’ll explore medieval conversations about how narratives that focus on the body’s parameters, from essentialist to performative, might support representing sex, gender, and sexuality in different ways. In the course of our reading and discussions, we’ll encounter bodies torn between the demands of the physical and the devotional. We’ll consider monstrous, hybrid, comic, political, social bodies. We’ll ask ourselves what roles cross-dressing, mimicry, gender-ambiguation, and woundedness play in the creation of narrative selves. Ultimately, we want to consider how the dynamic variety of bodies represented in these literary works can give us access to medieval conversations about the forces underlying theological, political, social, and textual power. Texts will include: Marie de France, Lais (selections); Heldris de Cornuälle , Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance; Dante, Inferno (selections); Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (selections); The Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Julian of Norwich, Showings (selections); Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (selections).