Events

Jessica Minieri PhD Candidate, Department of History, Binghamton University “Burden my Youth with the Solitude of Prison”: Gender and Imprisonment in Late Medieval Culture The image of the queen locked away in a tower is one that permeates the imagery of the Middle Ages in medieval literature and visual art and in modern film. For saints that found themselves locked inside towers – notably Barbara of Nicomedia and Margaret of Antioch – their association with prisons has continued to be a large part of their iconography in manuscripts, statues, and stained-glass. For queens who found themselves prisoners of kings and noblemen, their safety, political authority, and body autonomy were at stake. While Saint Barbara, Saint Margaret, and imprisoned women in literature, such as Queen Guinevere, were celebrated in late medieval culture despite their roles as prisoners, the reality of the experience for noble and elite women was far from the romantic or hagiographic ideal. To explore the imprisonment and abduction of elite women in the later Middle Ages, this talk will discuss the parallels between the presence of “damsels in distress” in literature and popular religion and the experiences of queens, duchesses, and princesses who were forcibly confined between 1300 and 1415. Understanding the imprisoned queen as a cultural, religious, and political concept can help scholars better situate politically potent captive women such as Johanna of Durazzo in Naples and Maria of Sicily in Aragon into a wider context of gender and the cultural history of imprisonment in the later Middle Ages.