Description
Book SynopsisSandy Bardsley examines the complex relationship between speech and gender in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and engages debates on the static nature of women''s status after the Black Death. Focusing on England, Venomous Tongues uses a combination of legal, literary, and artistic sources to show how deviant speech was increasingly feminized in the later Middle Ages. Women of all social classes and marital statuses ran the risk of being charged as scolds, and local jurisdictions interpreted the label scold in a way that best fit their particular circumstances. Indeed, Bardsley demonstrates, this flexibility of definition helped to ensure the longevity of the term: women were punished as scolds as late as the early nineteenth century.
The tongue, according to late medieval moralists, was a dangerous weapon that tempted people to sin. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerics railed against blasphemers, liars, and slanderers, while village and town eli
Trade Review
"The unique contribution of Venomous Tongues lies in its interdisciplinary approach and the way it situates scolding within a broader range of issues specific to the legal and social history of the period. Its subject matter makes it likely to be read by many beyond specialists: those interested in comparative women's history, in oral culture, and in anthropologically influenced modes of social/cultural analysis." * L. R. Poos, The Catholic University of America *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Speech, Gender, and Power in Late Medieval England
Chapter 1. "Sins of the Tongue" and Social Change
Chapter 2. The Sins of Women's Tongues in Literature and Art
Chapter 3. Women's Voices and the Law
Chapter 4. Men's Voices
Chapter 5. Communities and Scolding
Chapter 6. Who Was a Scold?
Conclusion. Consequences of the Feminization of Deviant Speech
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
