2021/01/01 by Alaric Hall, Shamira A. Meghani · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Ancient history #Art #Biology #Domestication #Ecology #Eroticism #Gender studies #Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies #History #Human sexuality #Linguistics and language evolution #Literature #Medieval Literature and History #Medieval literature #Middle Ages #Queer #Queer theory #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no14_2021s265
published in Medieval Worlds medieval worlds(Volume 14. 2021), 265-288 (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press)
openalex publication_date 2021/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
While early medieval riddles in Old English and, to a lesser extent, Latin, have been studied extensively from ecocritical perspectives in recent years, the large corpora of riddles in other languages of western Eurasia have yet to benefit from or feed back into these methodological developments. Meanwhile, ecocritical research generally has focused on animals at the expense of plants. We respond to both problems by providing the first extensive study of riddles whose solutions are plants, through the lens of one recurrent conceit in ancient and medieval verse riddles in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Old Norse and, we argue, Hebrew. The conceit is that a plant is a virgin woman who nevertheless reproduces. By examining different permutations of this motif, we show how these riddles use plants to comment on human gendering, and how, while usually fundamentally patriarchal in their world-views, they register patriarchal anxiety at womenâs reproductive capabilities, acknowledge critiques of patriarchal constraints on women, and queer gender norms in other ways; inter alia we note that the Old Norse riddle studied here may be the only explicit (albeit metaphorical) representation of female homosexual eroticism in the Old Norse corpus. However, we also draw on critical plant theory to explore how the riddles situate plants in medieval Abrahamicate cultures, uncovering implicit recognitions of the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between human farmers and their family structures, the plants that domesticate them, peopleâs and plantsâ mutual shaping of the ecosystems they inhabit or colonise, and the economies that these interactions constitute.