Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

E. Jane Burns
Druscilla French Distinguished Professor of Women's Studies
University of North Carolina
 
Thursday, January 29, 7PM
Maison Française, 16 Washington Mews
 
Professor Burns will speak about her new book, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women's Work in Medieval French Literature (in press, U Pennsylvania P) where she shows that literary accounts of women working silk in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France add an important component to the more familiar story of commercial exchange along the historical Silk Road. Medieval French tales of women weaving, sewing, and crafting silk create a metaphorical, textile geography that ties northern France to a larger Islamicate Mediterranean society while also connecting elite European women, so often represented as wearing silk, with those who produce it.

Professor Burns's publications include  Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (2002),Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (1993),Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle (1985) and a translation of The Quest for the Holy Grail (1995). She was subject editor for literature for Women and Gender in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (2006), editor of Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings (2004), and co-editor of Cultural Performances in Medieval France (2007). She is one of the co-foundering editors of the Medieval Feminist Newsletter (1985), now the Medieval Feminist Forum,  and co-editor of  Courtly Ideology and Woman's Place (1985). Her work over the years has focused principally on feminist readings of medieval French literature and culture including "Courtly Love: Who Needs It? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition" inSigns (2001) and "Saracen Silk and the Virgin'sChemise: Cultural Crossings in Cloth" in Speculum(2006).

Sponsored by the Department of French

This event is free and open to the public.