The Representation of Women in Medieval Literature: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Medieval literary cultures across regions have consistently employed representations of women as critical sites for negotiating moral authority, spiritual legitimacy, and social order. Yet existing scholarship has largely examined these representations within isolated cultural frameworks, leaving their cross-cultural dynamics underexplored. Addressing this gap, the present study offers a comparative analysis of women’s representation in Western European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian medieval literature, focusing on The Canterbury Tales, The Arabian Nights, and Bhakti devotional poetry attributed to Mirabai. Grounded in a qualitative, feminist-oriented textual methodology, the article examines how narrative positioning, symbolic function, and modes of agency attributed to women are shaped by distinct religious and literary systems. The findings demonstrate that although portrayals of women differ significantly across cultures, they converge around recurring structures of moral regulation, spiritual mediation, and culturally sanctioned forms of agency. Western texts tend to construct femininity through moralized and relational frameworks influenced by Christian doctrine, Middle Eastern narratives foreground intellectual and discursive authority through storytelling, and South Asian devotional poetry emphasizes affective spirituality and devotional subjectivity. By placing these traditions in dialogue, the study reveals both shared representational patterns and culturally specific constructions of medieval womanhood. The article contributes to feminist medieval studies by advancing a non-Eurocentric, cross-cultural framework that deepens understanding of how gender, power, and meaning were negotiated in medieval literary imagination.