If you’ve ever felt a deep feminine rage at the patriarchy in Game of Thrones and have a vested interest in fantasy and fandom at large, “Medievally Hers: Femme Medievalisms, Fantasy, and Fandom” is the pop-culture essay collection for you.
Medievally Hers novelly connects pop culture, medieval literature, and fandom by using internet-era tropes to unpack a queer femme focus on medievalisms in femme fantasy novels. Everything in Medievally Hers links back to the late twelfth-century icon Marie de France. From her bawdy humor, magical storylines, and romantic characters, her medieval French poems – called Bretonlais – defy modern expectations of the period. When you look at her work with modern queer BIPOC femme fantasy books, the blatant reappearance of the feminine pursuit of freedom, romantic partnership, and authority forces us to reexamine the enduring role of the patriarchy and what femme-written fantasy books can tell us about resistance through tropes.
This pop essay collection understands how feminine desire largely fuels a magical reaction to patriarchy in medieval literature and modern fantasy. In the chapter “Wanting a Girl in a Tower,” I explore the claim that the girl in the tower trope stages femme desires initiating magical escapes from patriarchy in Marie de France’s “Guigemar” and persists as a medievalism in Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne. In another chapter entitled “I Need A Hero (For My Rescue Romance),” I unpack the rescue romance trope as a way of building a future life through unlikely romantic, heroic bravery in Marie De France’s “Lanval” and persists as a medievalism in Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn.