"Judge No More What Ladies Do": Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Active Medievalism, The Female Troubadour, And Joan of Arc‪.‬

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's engagement with and contribution to the cultural discourse of Victorian medievalism is an area of her work which deserves far more critical attention than it has received: indeed the whole question of female-authored medievalism has received scant discussion. (1) Medievalism, the way "the Middle Ages have been stretched in many directions in order to provide a ideological space in which a society can explore and articulate concerns which are otherwise repressed," (2) especially nineteenth-century medievalism, has received attention in recent years in Clare A. Simmons's Reversing the Conquest (1990), Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism (1998), and Elizabeth Fay's Romantic Medievalism (2002), (3) following seminal studies by Alice Chandler and Marc Girouard. (4) However, all these critics largely focus on the work of only the celebrated male medievalists of the nineteenth century, with the exception of Fay, who gives equal focus to male and female writers, considering the work of Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon, and Mary Shelley alongside male poets within her Romantic time-frame. When critics have addressed EBB's medievalism, they often suggest that the poet's view corresponds with that expressed by Aurora Leigh: