Woodley, Baylee; (2025) Medieval Femmes: Exploring Queer Femininities in the Visual Culture of Late Medieval England and France. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores queer femininities in the visual culture of late medieval England and France. It focuses on manuscript illuminations including those in Books of Hours and Apocalypse manuscripts, romances such as Le Roman de Silence and Le Roman de la Rose, and travel or pilgrimage narratives including The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. It also puts them in dialogue with representations in other media including misericords, wall paintings, and stained glass. Together, these case studies show complex medieval explorations and enrolments of queer femininities in representations of figures ranging from saints, serpents, and so-called Saracens to witches, whores, and wodewoses.   Analyses of the practices of contemporary, UK-based queer artists thinking through questions of femininity are also woven throughout. This thesis advocates that discourse from within contemporary queer communities can draw out a multiplicity of medieval femininities that are not done justice by contemporary binarizing language. It further argues that medieval visual culture can offer additional and expansive queer possibilities to those thinking about femininity in the present.    The theoretical framework driving this project and its use of ‘femme’ is femme theory, which aims to fill lacunae around femininity left by queer and feminist theory. Femme theory emphasizes being intersectional, taking femininity as a category of analysis distinct from womanhood or femaleness, speculating the possibilities of what femme can do rather than what femme is, and centring femininity in analyses of power structures. Bringing femme theory to bear on medieval art history, this thesis offers an analysis of the ways that femininity in the medieval and modern operates systemically at the intersections of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, classism, and ableism as well as the ways in which it can be a means of speculating queer alternatives.

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