Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Listening to Bodies Talk

PART I. KNOWING WOMEN
Chapter One: A Close Look at Female Orifices in Farce and Fabliau
—Head or Ass? Refocusing the Penis-Eye
—Lips or Labia? How Headless Women Speak
Chapter Two: A Taste of Knowledge: Genesis and Generation in the Jeu d'Adam
—Mind Over Matter: Why Women Should Be Silent
—Matter Before Mind: How Women Come First

PART II. DESIRING LADIES
Chapter Three: Beauty in the Blindspot: Philomena's Talking Hands
Chapter Four: Rewriting Men's Stories: Enide's Disruptive Mouths
Chapter Five: Why Beauty Laughs

Promotional Information

In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey.

About the Author

E. Jane Burns is Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is author of "This Prick Which Is Not One" in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, edited by Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), and of Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle.