The Pursuit of Privacy in Medieval Landscapes

Abstract

The Pursuit of Privacy in Medieval Landscapes identifies the ways in which individual pursuits of privacy in the medieval world are shaped by the landscapes in which those pursuits occur. There is a correlation between the space of a particular landscape feature and the gender interactions of the characters that move in or around that feature. Landscapes are places for power relations that are crucial to the product of gendered and private identities. This dissertation focuses on four features of the medieval British and French literary landscape: houses, towers, gardens, and forests. Landscapes in medieval literature may be the palette of political agendas. Used and occasionally abused for the purposes of power and control, landscapes can be produced and programmed. Each of the selected texts in this chapter features characters that must engage closely with their respective environments in order to obtain some form of individual privacy, and in all of the texts, authorities or convention controls the space and landscapes in some way. The struggle for privacy in these texts, whether that struggle is for privilege, for freedom, or for sovereignty, seems like an easily relatable concept for a medieval audience who so frequently endured political conflicts over control of space and social convention.