Holly Crocker
In this talk, Holly Crocker reads Cressid's sullied literary history against the prescriptive discourse of feminine virtue from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. As she argues, writers including Chaucer, Henryson and Shakespeare demonstrate the problems of performative virtue that conduct books, marriage manuals, and exemplary catalogues elide or ignore in their renderings of notable women. Though Cressid becomes a lasting symbol of false virtue, her suffering reveals performativity's damaging influence over gender expectations for women during this transformative period.
Holly A. Crocker is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina. At the moment she is Fulbright Scholar and Fellow,Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
