Subtheme:
Scandalous Bodies: Relation, Reputation, Resistance

When Joan McLellan was summoned before her local church court in Edinburgh due to rumors that she was pregnant, unmarried, and had tried unsuccessfully to terminate her pregnancy while living in her father’s house, she strenuously “denyd all occasione of scandal,” with “scandal” signifying a report of illicit sexual and reproductive conduct against an individual person circulated among the community. “Scandal,” too, was a chief concern of abbott Stephen of Lexington, who prohibited the Cistercian nuns of Moncey in 1232 from granting hospitality to any women nearing childbirth “on account of avoiding scandal [scandalum] to the house”; here, “scandal” is institutional reputational damage invoked as justification for denying healthcare to those in need of it.  

 

This panel considers “scandal,” capaciously rendered, as heuristic for understanding domination and liberation in the Middle Ages, asking how scandal reveals the operations of identity-driven forms of domination, functions as a tool for articulating structural wrongs, and affirms individuals’ bodily autonomy. Papers might consider the ways that scandal, where it names reputational damage, might operate as a method of oppression, or explore how its invocation functions to disempower those who are already marginalized. They could, too, consider its citation as a tactic of resistance to hegemonic pressures, as when, for example, women express fears of slander to repel sexual aggressors, or they could address the way scandal, as relational accusation that is inherently contagious and transmissible, reveals hidden networks of resistance and aid among the disenfranchised. We particularly welcome talks that consider scandal’s joyful valences, extrapolating from its use to designate discredit to hegemonic and patriarchal institutions to ask how the disempowered could wield scandal to critique or undermine structures of abusive power. We would, likewise, be delighted to see proposals which offer metacritical examinations of the ways scandal shapes the archives from which we work–making certain medieval lives visible to us as they preserve legal or social disgrace–or which reflect on the ways contemporary scandal, as offense or shock, delegitimizes or constrains scholarly approaches to the past.