The blog goes on, even when I'm posting it from an airport boarding lounge. This week will be the Sirens conference on women in fantasy literature. Next week will be a family get-together for my father's 90th birthday. So this past weekend I was scrambling to make sure that everything was set up for the blog and podcast for the next several weeks so I can pretend to be on an actual "vacation". The only time the LHMP has been on posting-vacation since the start back in June 2014 was when I was migrating the Project from my old Live Journal to this site and my webmasteres forbade me from creating new content during the process.
Chapter 4 of Cadden cuts directly to the more fascinating aspects of medieval gender theory: the layers of conflicting and even contradictory models, and the ways in which authors justified or dismissed those apparent contradictions, or the places where their theories led to observably false conclusions. In the end, despite the appearance of logical argument and observation-based theory, medieval philosophers had a fixed notion of How The World Worked and their goal was to create a systematic explanation of those pre-existing conclusions. This applied to gender and sexuality just as much as it did to all the astronomers who designed ever more elaborate orbital epicycles to support a geocentric cosmology. Individual authors might challenge those sex/gender models but overall there was a center of theoretic gravity that resisted such challenges.
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