Roberta (Bonnie) Krueger, the Burgess Chair of Romance Languages & Literature and Professor of French, was recently invited to speak at a journée d’études, or study day, at the University of Paris 7 (Denis Diderot). She and five other scholars presented work on the representation of the female body in didactic and literary texts from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.
In “Le Corps féminin dans les discours savants et la littérature du Moyen Age au XVIII siècle,” Krueger discussed approaches to the body in three medieval conduct books for lay women, including a book that Christine de Pizan wrote in 1405 for the young princess Margaret of Burgundy. Christine’s book stands out as the only female-authored conduct book for women, and the only book that explicitly addresses women of all classes.
Krueger also spoke at two events in the U.S. this spring. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, she presented “Savoir parler de ***: the role of the fabliau in BnF ms. 11952” at a symposium in honor of Professor Emerita Cynthia Brown.
At the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Krueger discussed “Autonomy and Community in Medieval Feminist Scholarship” at a roundtable honoring Elizabeth Robertson of the University of Glasgow. The event was sponsored by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, which Krueger founded in 1985 with Robertson and E. Jane Burns.
