ABSTRACT
Late medieval antifeminist satire uses the topos of the Philosopher and the Shrew to draw particular attention to a gendered discursive disparity that juxtaposes speech and writing. The shrew, a representation of irrational, disorderly speech, encounters the philosopher, the representation of masculine authority, whose self-containment is due to his rationality, the foremost value of the learned. Feminist scholars have long recognized the effects of the topos of the Philosopher and the Shrew. The valorization of the literate male over against the speaking woman has pushed women’s utterances to the margins of socially authoritative discourse from the Middle Ages onward. The legacy of the discursive binary is that even when women gained access to education and publication opportunities the literary products of their labors were nevertheless categorized as informal and ephemeral. The proliferation of antifeminist satire focused on unruly speaking women in the fifteenth century continues into the early modern period where the word becomes even more definitively linked to femininity.
