Introduction

Summary

THIS BOOK is a gendered reading of the works of an individual author with special reference to the themes of conquest and nation. The author in question is the twelfth-century Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury whose literary oeuvre spans a number of genres including history and hagiography.

Since Joan Wallach Scott offered her two-pronged definition of gender in 1986 historians have considered the usefulness of gender as a category of historical analysis. Scott argued that gender was an intrinsic social component of sexual difference between men and women as well as being a synonym for power relations between the sexes. Following this, postmodern literary studies emphasised the importance of language as a means of organising and conceptualising these social relations and sexual differences. Other scholars have emphasised the relational aspects of gender, especially by taking into account male experiences and through exploring masculine gender constructions. There is a growing desire to understand better how men and women interacted and responded to each other, the dynamics of society and culture that governed these relations and the flexibility on which the whole system was dependent. Both these methods have influenced the central aim of this book, which is to consider the portrayal of gender by an individual author. How does the author present men and women? What can this tell us about the author's ideas and ideals of masculinity and femininity? In doing so the study thus seeks to contribute to gender studies by looking in depth at the construction of gender in a particular author and his works.