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Alice Raw

@aliceraw.bsky.social

191 followers 270 following 12 posts

Historian of medieval gender and sexuality Currently writing about pleasure and protests Mark Kaplanoff Fellow in History, Pembroke College Cambridge

Posts Replies Media

Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I just love making conference packs it’s like party bags #medievalsky

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

#medievalsky 'Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis' is now open for registration. 17-18 September 2026, Pembroke College, Cambridge. Spaces are limited, so we request a short statement of interest. Sign up here: forms.gle/Lk5KcHovpTE8...

Conference poster. Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis. 17-18 September 2026. Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Request full accessible programme. Christian Liddy, Durham University, The politics of family values: what was “family” in late medieval London? Panel 1: Seamus Dwyer, University of Cambridge, Sodomite Bodies and the Written Word; Helen Carr, Queen Mary University London, ‘Pur Honneur Des Femmes’: Women and Warfare, The England/Scotland Border, 1296-1346; Lisa Demets, Universiteit Antwerpen, Chronicles and the Politics of Sexual Violence in Late Medieval Low Countries (Pre-recorded) Panel 2: Minne De Boodt and Chanelle Delameillieure, KU Leuven, A Common Language of Power? Negotiating Governance at Home and in the Polity of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries; Rose Bramley, Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m not yours: The Political Significance of St Margaret of Antioch on the Seals of Bishop’s Lynn, ca. 1370-1420; Lucia Akard, University of York, Public or Clandestine: Sex Workers and Politics in Medieval Dijon Panel 3: Eleanor Pickford, University of Cambridge, Reading Utopia in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies; Caitlin Coxon, Cardiff University
This tale is seyd for this conclusioun’: Suspended Endings as Political Provocation in The Legend of Good Women Panel 4: Grant Jones, Durham University, ‘Noble and Vigorous Men’: Chivalric Masculinity as Political Vocabulary in the Reign of Henry III, 1216-1272; Ella Foschia, University of Cambridge, Queenship and the Cult of Saints in the Kalmar Union: Female Power and Political Legitimacy; Movern French, Historic Environment Scotland, and Iain MacInnes, University of the Highlands and Islands, The King and the Countess: Edward III, Katherine Beaumont, and Gendered Accounts of the Second Scottish War of Independence Panel 5: Jelle Haemers, KU Leuven, Women and Political Contention in the Late Medieval Low Countries; Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow, Women Petitioners and the 1381 Revolt. Sylvia Federico, Bates College, “With or Without Her Consent”: Rape as Discourse in the English Revolt of 1381

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

In 2021, @luciaakard.bsky.social and I ran Medieval Consent: A Symposium. We are so happy to release the co-edited Special Issue! scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/vol61/is...

scholarworks.wmich.edu

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality | Vol 61 | No. 1

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Two weeks left to submit abstracts to Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis. Attendance, accommodation, and conference meal fully funded, travel bursaries available, and publication opportunity. What's not to love #medievalsky #medieval #historians

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Sat down with the wonderful Dr Stef Conner for a festive chat about sex in a medieval Christmas story. Have a listen here! #histmed #medievalsky #skystorians youtu.be/NjPoqewOtDw?...

youtu.be

The (Explicit) Cherry Tree Carol

YouTube video by stefconner

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Call for Papers! Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis #medievalsky #Fissures2026

Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis
17-18 September 2026
Pembroke College, University of Cambridge

Gendered work on medieval popular politics has tended to revolve around the exceptional. This workshop explores how studies of gender can reconfigure discourses of medieval political community. We ask how attending to gendered bodies and identities might help us better understand the fissures in political culture in medieval Europe. Marking, for example, women’s participation as either absent or rare confines their involvement to the historical margins. How did literary as well as non-literary texts from various genres, ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, engage with gendered political action? How did ideas of gender stabilise or destabilise political performances?

We invite abstracts for 25-minute papers, as well as expressions of interest for participation. We welcome papers with a historical, literary, or interdisciplinary focus. Potential topics could include but are not limited to:

• Frameworks for understanding non-normative gender expressions in political spaces.
• Studies of politics at the intersection of gendered, queer, or trans methodologies.
• Histories of masculinities in political community.
• Emotion and/or Affect
• Weaponized/defensive gender
• Manoeuvring bodies through political crisis
• Inclusion and exclusion
• Different sites of political discourse, such as domestic and non-violent conflict.

Collectively, the papers will interrogate the role of gender in political discourse. Selected papers may be considered for inclusion in an edited volume. Means-based bursaries for speakers may be available by further application.

Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 200 words to Alice Raw (ar889@cam.ac.uk) and Abbie Fray (abigail.fray@unibe.ch) by 16 January 2026.

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

@elenarossi.bsky.social makes the best gifts!

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Good morning to this footnote and no one else (From E. Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C., 2004), 123-151.)

I am thinking here of Timothy Gould’s interpretation (in a personal communication, 1994) of Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘‘ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—’’ (116, poem no. 254). Gould suggests that the symptoms of fluttering hope are rather like those of posttraumatic stress disorder, with the difference that the apparently absent cause of perturbation lies in the future, rather than in the past.

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Looking at the 15th century visitations of Norwich, and I'm utterly enchanted by Sister Anna Marten, a nun of the priory of Carrow, who complains that the Psalms are being sung too fast, and without proper observation of breaths and pauses. It was not like that when she was young! Jessopp ed. (1888)

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Alice Raw @aliceraw.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Just thinking about this delightful ghost hand imprinted in CUL EDR D/2/2. Only visible as you turn the page in the light.

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