Inventing womanhood in late medieval literature (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe)

This dissertation uncovers the origins of the word womanhood in the fourteenth-century works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. It then traces the evolution of the term and concept through the fifteenth century, combining philology with feminist readings. Although many feminist medieval projects have analyzed female characters, the underlying idea of womanliness has received little attention. I argue that post-plague social and economic shifts created a linguistic gap: new ideas about women's roles necessitated new vocabulary. Chaucer invents several terms to address this gap, including femininity and wifehood, but womanhood becomes particularly significant and its meanings evolve through various late medieval texts. Womanhood does consistently involve two issues: whether it is primarily interior or exterior (and, by extension, whom it includes or excludes) and whether it restricts or enables feminine forms of power. While these issues remain unsettled, womanhood provides a mediating category through which conflicting ideas about women---in society and in textual representation---can be combined. In an introductory chapter, this study establishes the historical and linguistic context for womanhood. The second chapter examines Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Clerk's Tale, arguing that he reshapes his sources to highlight womanhood and its spiritual qualities. While Chaucer focuses on its internal virtues, Gower imagines womanhood as embodied and performed; Chapter Three explores his divergent usage in the Confessio Amantis. The fourth chapter contends that John Lydgate's Temple of Glas and Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid draw from these dual influences as they explore how applying the virtues of womanhood might determine a female subject's actions and circumstances. Chapter Five shows that Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe revise a component of womanhood---motherhood---to construct a feminine spiritual authority modeled on the Virgin Mary. The dissertation concludes with the Digby Mary Magdalene, which stages the power Mary Magdalene derives from her womanhood, as a female intimate of Christ, alongside the limitations it creates for her as a woman disciple. Such heterogeneous medieval conceptions of womanhood reflect deep historical and literary disparities and suggest its potential for individual interpretations even in modern usage.