Honora & Heresy

The recorded history of medieval women informs us they lived extremely dreadful and difficult lives. Inside and outside of literary characterization, women struggled to be humanized by the public eye and were carelessly tossed into a given archetype of “virgins, prostitutes, witches, queens, or victims (Kaufman). For my project, I decided to reverse these gender categories in a new reality: a post-patriarchal, newly matriarchal medieval world. Within the attachments below, attachment "image1" is an excerpt from the beginning and "image0" is an excerpt from the end. Unfolding similarly to Bisclavret, this short story follows Flenwich’s most gifted and well-esteemed huntress Honora, who is requested to exterminate a local heretic despoiling land and causing chaos. Throughout her journey, Honora battles patronizing anxieties that cause her to rethink her purpose as a huntress who grounds her morals in the Catholic faith. This story challenges gender roles to highlight the downfall of binary logic: if patriarchy failed society, how could another form of absolutism be the answer to their problems? Establishing a new way to exist with each other requires a complex examination of the inner workings of society – who does a society get to benefit? Even when roles are reversed and things appear to be changed for the better, intergenerational values seep through the present and inform our understanding of today.

Annabella De Sousa