Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Raskolnikov Masha

The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists-how my body relates to me. In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like Will or Reason any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving sowlehele is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the selfs inner powers.