Peggy McCracken

Languages: French, Old French, Occitan, Latin, Italian

Affiliations: Romance Languages and Literatures, Women's and Gender Studies, Institute for the Humanities

Teaching interests: Medieval literature, feminist theory, posthumanist theory

Recent courses:

• CompLit 790:  Animacy/Agency/Ecology
• CompLit 790: Feminism and Posthumanism
• CompLit 790: Ovid's Metamorphoses in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (co-taught with Valerie Traub)

Research interests: My teaching and research interests are, broadly defined, in the intersections of medieval literature, history, and theory. My research focuses on romance narratives as well as on medieval theatre, poetry, chansons de geste, and medical and theological discourses. In earlier projects I have explored the intersections of medieval theories and practices of queenship with romances about adulterous queens, and the ways in which gendered cultural values are mapped onto representations of blood.

My most recent book is In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (2017). Other recent projects include In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Christian Saint, co-authored with Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and a translation of Gui de Cambrai's Barlaam and Josaphat. My current research focuses on affect and embodiment in medieval adaptations and rewritings of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Book publications:  

• In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France. 2017. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Christian Saint. 2014. Co-author with Donald S. Lopez, Jr. New York: Norton.
• Marie de France: A Critical Companion. 2012. Co-author, with Sharon Kinoshita. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer (Gallica series). 
• Thinking through Chrétien de Troyes. 2011. Co-author, with Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sarah Kay, and Sharon Kinoshita. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer (Gallica series).
• The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature. 2003. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature. 1998. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Co-editor

• Ovidian Transversions: ‘Iphis and Ianthe,’ 1300-1650. 2019. Co-editor, with Valerie Traub and Patricia Badir. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. 2013. Co-editor, with E. Jane Burns. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• “The Animal Turn in Medieval Studies.” 2011. Issue of Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2.1. Co-editor, with Karl Steel.
• Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe. 2007. Co-editor, with Basil Dufallo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Feminist Theory Reader [in Mandarin]. 2007. Chief editor, with associate editors Ai Xiaoming and Ke Qianting. Guangxi: Guangxi Normal University Press.
• Constructing Medieval Sexuality. 1997. Co-editor, with Karma Lochrie and James A. Schultz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Other publications

• Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha, a translation of Gui de Cambrai’s Barlaam et Josaphat. 2014. New York: Penguin Classics.
• “Translations and Travels of a Pious Prince: Barlaam and Josaphat and the Text Network,” in A Companion to World Literature, gen. ed. Ken Seigneurie (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2019)
• “Metamorphosis as Supplement: Sexuality and History in the Ovide moralisé,” in Ovidian Transversions: ‘Iphis and Ianthe,’ 1300-1650, ed. Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 43-59.
• “Human Being and Animal Becoming: Embodiment and Metamorphosis in the Ovide moralisé,” Essays in Medieval Studies 34 (2018): 1-15.
• “Fantastic Lactations: Fiction and Kinship in the French Middle Ages,” Anthropozoologica 51.1 (2017): 53-8.
• “The Wild Man and His Kin in Tristan de Nanteuil,” in L’homme et l’animal dans la France médiévale (XIIe-XVe s.). Human and Animal in Medieval France (12th-15th c.), ed. Irène Fabri-Tehranchi and Anna Russakoff (Atlanta and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), pp. 23-42.
• Co-author, with E. Jane Burns, “Introduction: Gendered Bodies in Unexpected Places,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, In.: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), pp. 1-14.
• “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, In.: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), pp. 39-64.
• Co-author, with Sarah Kay, “Introduction: Animal Studies and Guillaume de Palerne,” for article cluster on Guillaume de Palerne, ed. Kay and McCracken, in Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistiques 24 (2012): 325-330.
• “Skin and Sovereignty in Guillaume de Palerne,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistiques 24 (2012): 361-75.
• “The Human and the Floral,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 65-90. 
• Co-author, with Karl Steel, “The Animal Turn: Into the Sea with the Fish-Knights of Perceforest,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2.1 (2011): 88-100.
• “Translation and Animals in the Lais of Marie de France,” Australian Journal of French Studies 46.3 (2009): 238-49.
• “Love and Adultery: Arthur’s Affairs,” Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 188-200.
• “Romance Captivities in the Context of Crusade: The Case of the Prose Lancelot,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 576-82.
• “Dying for Love in the Prose Lancelot: Masculinity and Death,” French and Francophone Masculinities, ed. Lewis C. Seifert and Todd Reiser. (Dover: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 51-66.
• “Love and War in Cligès,” Arthuriana 8.3 (2008): 6-18.
• “The Old French Vulgate Cycle,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 35-47. 
• “Maternity and Chivalry after Chrétien: The Case of King Lot’s Wife,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistiques 14 (2007): 76-85.
• “The Efficacy of Images: Mimesis and Miracles,” Yale French Studies 110 (2006): 47-57.
• “The Amenorrhea of War,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (Winter 2003): 625-43.
• “Scandalizing Desire: Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Chroniclers,” Eleanor of Aquitaine, Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 247-63.
• “Engendering Sacrifice: Blood, Lineage, and Infanticide in Old French Literature,” Speculum 77 (2002): 55-75.
•  “Chaste Subjects: Gender, Heroism, and Desire in the Grail Quest,” Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 123-42.
• “The Curse of Eve: Female Bodies and Christian Bodies in Heloise’s Third Letter,” Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 217-31. 
• “Damsels and Severed Heads: More on Linking in the Perlesvaus,” in Por le soie amisté: Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 339-44.
•  “The Poetics of Sacrifice: Allegory and Myth in the Grail Quest,” Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 152-68.
• “Mothers in the Grail Quest: Desire, Pleasure, and Conception,” Arthuriana 8.1 (1998): 35-48. (Winner of the James Randall Leader Prize for outstanding article of 1998 in Arthuriana.)
•  “The Queen’s Secret: Adultery and Political Structure in the Feudal Courts of Old French Romance,” Romanic Review 86 (1995): 289-306.
• “‘The Boy who was a Girl’: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence,” Romanic Review 85.4 (1994): 517-36.
• “Silence and the Courtly Wife: Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide,” The Arthurian Yearbook III (1993): 105-24.
• “Women and Medicine in Medieval French Narrative,” Exemplaria V.2 (1993): 239-62.
• “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 38-64.