Re-dressing History: Mother Nature, Mother Isabeau, the Virgin Mary, and Schiller's Jungfrau

This essay begins with Schiller's intriguing assertion of Anmut as a detachable, movable quality in "Über Anmut und Würde" and applies it to a discussion of gender attributes and gender attributions in Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Schiller's awareness of the contingency and transportability of the attributes that signal gender generates a counter-model to the medieval "sex-gender" assumptions that triggered the execution of the historical Joan of Arc, but this is at best a vexed and inconclusive "countering." (GKH)