Hall, A orcid.org/0000-0002-1479-4441 and Meghani, SA (2021) »I am a virgin woman and a virgin woman’s child« Critical Plant Theory and the Maiden Mother Conceit in Early Medieval Riddles. Medieval Worlds, 14. pp. 265-288. ISSN 2412-3196
Abstract
While early medieval riddles in Old English and, to a lesser extent, Latin, have been studied extensively from ecocritical perspectives in recent years, the large corpora of riddles in other languages of western Eurasia have yet to benefit from or feed back into these methodological developments. Meanwhile, ecocritical research generally has focused on animals at the expense of plants. We respond to both problems by providing the first extensive study of riddles whose solutions are plants, through the lens of one recurrent conceit in ancient and medieval verse riddles in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Old Norse and, we argue, Hebrew. The conceit is that a plant is a virgin woman who nevertheless reproduces. By examining different permutations of this motif, we show how these riddles use plants to comment on human gendering, and how, while usually fundamentally patriarchal in their world-views, they register patriarchal anxiety at women’s reproductive capabilities, acknowledge critiques of patriarchal constraints on women, and queer gender norms in other ways; inter alia we note that the Old Norse riddle studied here may be the only explicit (albeit metaphorical) representation of female homosexual eroticism in the Old Norse corpus. However, we also draw on critical plant theory to explore how the riddles situate plants in medieval Abrahamicate cultures, uncovering implicit recognitions of the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between human farmers and their family structures, the plants that domesticate them, people’s and plants’ mutual shaping of the ecosystems they inhabit or colonise, and the economies that these interactions constitute.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative-Commons-Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). |
Keywords: | riddles, critical plant theory, Abrahamicate, ekphrasis, Dunash ben Labraṭ ha-Levi, Heiðreks saga, ecocriticism, sexuality |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 Dec 2021 14:16 |
Last Modified: | 16 Dec 2021 14:16 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1553/medievalworlds_no14_2021s265 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:181482 |