The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the 'women's movement' of the 1960s. In feminist criticism in the 1970s the major effort went into exposing what might be called the mechanisms of patriarchy, that is, the cultural 'mind-set' in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality. This chapter looks at three particular areas on which debates and disagreements have centred on about feminist criticism: the role of theory; the nature of language; and the value or otherwise of psychoanalysis. It includes a STOP and THINK section to help readers ponder over anti-essentialism which has for some years now been a dominant concept in critical theory. The chapter describes some critical activities of feminist critics and presents an example of feminist criticism by taking the account of Wuthering Heights by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from their book The Madwoman in the Attic.

Pearl is a religious dream-vision in which the dream is largely taken up by dialogue between the narrator or dreamer, as a figure in his dream, and a woman who is a fount of divine wisdom. It does not engage significantly with the fourteenth century. Its interest lies rather in relating Christian doctrine to universal life-experience, and particularly in the problem that some of the basic tenets of that doctrine fly in the face of basic human instincts and attitudes. The narrative of Pearl is multi-layered, with the poet creating a dreamer-figure separate from himself whose attitudes differ significantly before, in, and after his dream. If the dreamer is to be taken as a representative figure for all humanity then the poem demonstrates that the ways of God can never be justified to men, for the distance between God and man is too great to be bridged.

This chapter looks at an essay published in 1912 by Marianne Weber, a key representative of liberal feminism, ‘Authority and Autonomy in Marriage’. Weber explores the contradictory character of marriage as both diminishing individual autonomy and making a meaningful, ethically autonomous life possible for the individual. She is particularly interested in the idea that the spiritual deepening of monogamy has disciplined men.

Following directly on many of the ideas implicit in the previous chapter, this chapter explores the potential to open art history, as a humanities discipline, into the discourses of posthumanism. This involves drawing on productive earlier histories that, like recent counterparts, offer a critique of anthropocentric perspectives which dominate mainstream art history. Both Guattari’s notion of ‘the three ecologies’, and Braidotti’s work are key in this regard, as is the radical scientific philosophy of Barad and other critics of normative ways of parcelling up knowledge and ontology. The chapter also looks at the challenges posed by the enormity of scale in aligning the humanities with environmental concern, as well as intersubjectivity as a useful term to help shape future art historical approaches.

This chapter explores both the roots of the historical interpretation and the stimuli for change by considering the long historiographical tradition, attitudes to textual sources, and the changing political environment on ninth-century history-writing of Franks and Bretons. Ninth-century Breton texts talk of French occupation and Breton resistance; the language of 'oppression' by the French, the 'yoke' they imposed, and the 'servitude' and 'liberty' of the Bretons belongs with later medieval and modern representations - a comment in itself, of course, on changing attitudes to personal status, as it is also an obvious comment on the changing administration of the French state. But, just as Carolingian conquest is undeniable, so is the fact that that conquest provoked the emergence of the Breton polity and the establishment of its historic frontiers - a state with real political significance in the later medieval and early modern periods.

In the Middle Ages the status of women in the Jewish community underwent a real and fundamental change. Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac had recognized that women conducted business within the community and with Christians, and in his opinion this did not present a problem. The economic activities of Jewish women in northern France and Germany centred on small loans, made on the basis of pledges, to Christian women, who used the money to finance their routine household expenses. Licoricia of Winchester's saga illustrates how the favourable economic status of a Jewish woman in the Middle Ages could also affect her social status in England in general and in the Jewish community in particular. Another Jewish woman, Chera of Winchester, cooperated economically with the Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches.

This chapter examines the British and Foreign Bible Society’s (BFBS) Arabic Bible translations in the context of European imperial expansion, the global missionary project and emergent Arab nationalism. Unlike the American Bible Society, the BFBS did not produce its own Bible in literary Arabic. They instead published editions in forms of Arabic that were regionally and socially variable and that closely resembled what people spoke. The choice of the BFBS to translate and publish in colloquial Arabic had political implications. By undermining the primacy of literary Arabic during an age of incipient anticolonial Arab nationalism, and by fostering a new and more popular culture of Arabic reading that included men and women from modest social classes, these BFBS editions had the potential to shift extant social hierarchies. The distribution of vernacular Arabic Bibles had the potential to make and remake communities of readers within territories that bore comparison to the colonial borders which Britain and France were imposing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These colloquial North African Arabic Bibles contributed to a convoluted history that tied together Britain and America; North Africa and western Asia (or ‘the Middle East’); and other parts of the globe.

It has often been asserted that as a result of 'new discoveries' the factual credibility of Mandeville's description of the world evaporated towards the end of the sixteenth century . The main contention in this chapter is that this is simplistic. Far more complex combinations of factors were at work, and perceptions of Mandeville. The chapter explores how and in what form did people in sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century England encounter Mandeville's Travels, and, in what way, or ways, might they read it. Although the chapter concentrates on printed texts from English presses, people ought not to forget that texts printed on the Continent did circulate in England, and the Continental input into the English printing tradition of Mandeville is clear. A summary diagram explains the descent from the lost original to very free reworkings, the Continental and Insular versions.