Vol. 2 (2024): Ritual and Gender in Medieval Cultures
Ritual and Gender in Medieval Cultures

This special issue reveals the complexity of gender dynamics in ritual enactment, which has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. The issue’s articles show that medieval rituals served several gender-specific needs and purposes. They were used to teach men and women how to perform their gender; to establish and confirm an individual’s manhood or womanhood; to discipline and punish individuals who did not conform to their assigned gender roles; to sustain the gender binary and validate gender inequalities; to empower women in a male-dominated world; to release men’s and women’s anxieties; and to initiate individuals to male and female forms of piety and asceticism and to gender-specific dynastic and family traditions. The present special issue also points to the key similarities between (medieval) ritual and gender that reveal the gendered aspects of ritual and the ritual dimensions of gender, both in the present and the past.

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