Published in 2012 (first published 1996)
214 pages
Valerie Hotchkiss serves as the Azariah S. Root Director of Oberlin College Libraries. She has directed university and special collections libraries at SMU, the University of Illinois, and Vanderbilt University, always championing engagement, as well as serious collection building, access to resources, and teaching with primary sources. Hotchkiss has raised well over $25 million for libraries over her nearly three-decade career. She earned her BA in classics at the University of Cincinnati with study at the University of Tübingen. In addition to the MLS, she holds a PhD from Yale University in medieval studies.
Hotchkiss also holds the title of Professor of English and Book Studies and publishes in the areas of cultural history, religion, women’s studies, and the history of books and printing. Her books include: Clothes Make the Man: Female Transvestism in Medieval Europe (Taylor & Francis, 1996/2012), English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton (U of Illinois Press, 2008), The 1862 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: A Facsimile Edition with Michael Burlingame (U of Illinois Press, 2014), The Reformation of the Bible / The Bible of the Reformation with Fred Robinson (Yale Press, 1996), and Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, a 4-volume work she coauthored with Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University Press 2003).
What is this book about?
In this book, the author explores medieval society’s fascination with the cross-dressed woman. The author examines a wide variety of religious, literary, and historical sources, which record interpretations of sartorial attempts to overcome gender hierarchy and also illustrate, mainly through the device of inversion, a remarkably sustained desire to examine and reexamine the nature of social gender identities.
