I am a medieval historian by training. I am a gender historian by inclination. At the start of my academic career in the 1980s, I found myself in a minority in both fields: gender historians often worked in much later periods, or preferred to think of themselves as womenâs historians. Very few medieval historians specialized in gender, nor did they self-identify as gender historians, for all that their work was gendered; some even questioned the applicability of gender theory to medieval evidence, given that medieval people âdidnât think about genderâ. (But they did â they just didnât articulate their thoughts in the same languages that modern, academic theorists do.) This book is based loosely on an undergraduate course that I taught from 1995 to 2007, which encouraged second-year/sophomore students to try out the different theories and apply them to sources that interested them. Even in that short time span, the proliferation of studies was both exciting and daunting. In the decade since then, the landscape has changed still more, to the extent that it is possible to compile anthologies of key readings as âCompanionsâ to gender history (albeit that their coverage of the Middle Ages remains patchy). This book is not a personal reflection. It starts its survey much earlier than the 1980s, but the acceleration and proliferation of work on gender during the intervening decades will form a significant part of what follows.
Historiography books (books about how history has been written, and current approaches to history-writing) often mirror the pattern of mutual exclusion. Few of the, otherwise excellent, introductory textbooks on Gender History mention the Middle Ages, let alone feature medieval examples. There are a number of â again, perfectly usable â textbooks introducing students to Medieval History, but if women and/or gender feature in these, it will often be as a bit of an afterthought, even well into the twenty-first century (though gender historians have been involved in updating older works, for example Judith Bennettâs revision of Warren Hollisterâs Medieval Europe: A Short History, now in its eleventh edition). The many excellent books that have been written about women and gender in the medieval world also tend to assume some prior knowledge of the period, which often leads to an omission of methodological or temporal framing. A substantial proportion of existing works has been written by scholars working in areas outside history departments, focusing in particular on later medieval literature in English and other languages, which adds another layer of complexity deriving from very different scholarly approaches (and an associated academic language that can be discipline-specific and difficult to follow for those untrained in the theoretical models that have become commonplace in English and other language studies). In each chapter of this book, therefore, words in bold are concepts which are further explained in the Glossary for each chapter. For experts in other fields than history, this book will come as a bit of a disappointment: although it will explore the impact of theory on gender history, it does not form the starting point in this survey, and I do not analyse medieval literary texts at all. There are plenty of works introducing students to Chaucer, or Marie de France, or Dante, or Arthurian romance. The exclusion of such works should not be taken as an indication that they have no value for the historian, however, and the themed Source Hunts in this book might provide a jumping-off point to explore this literary and creative world too. After all, medieval studies is an inherently â and necessarily â interdisciplinary Studying a subject from multiple approaches, for example combining history, literary studies, anthropology, etc., to produce a richer picture than single-discipline work field.
This book is, instead, written for a complete beginner in history, looking to find out about an approach â gender â that may be unfamiliar, and/or about a period that s/he has not studied before. For students that have already studied some gender history, some of the inspirational, âclassicâ texts referred to here will be familiar, for medievalists have adopted many of their ideas and applied them to the medieval world. For students with some medieval history, this book offers ideas on how to expand beyond the standard narratives of kingdom formation, power, piety and authority, and think about how these might look if explored with a gendered eye. For hard-pressed members of staff/faculty, the book offers a frame and suggestions to guide students through both theoretical and primary materials, and the basis for dissertation or term paper topics.
The chapters are arranged thematically, and offer a guide to studying medieval gender history by combining three elements. First, each explores a particular theme and how it has been studied across over a century of academic work (within and outside the academy The community of scholars working in institutions such as universities, producing (and controlling) knowledge about the past itself). The discussion within each chapter is organized roughly chronologically, but the book as a whole is not a history of gender. Each chapter suggests readings from âclassicâ texts as well as more recent works: it is crucial to understand how successive generations of scholars have built upon, rejected or refined what came before. It is also important to recognize that gender history has its roots in work focused on womenâs neglected experiences and the ways in which womenâs voices have been ignored or suppressed, so in some chapters women will feature more heavily than men as topics such as bodies, regulation and identities are addressed. As we shall see, much early work on women and gender was obscured by their authorsâ inability to secure professional posts as historians, or by neglect of their work as âmarginalâ to mainstream history. Some of the classics in gender history have absolutely nothing to say about the Middle Ages. My acid test for identifying such works as âclassicsâ, however, is that they have provoked medievalists to test the applicability of their models on medieval material; retained their place on gender history syllabuses; and/or continue to be debated in scholarly conferences. Of course, that may be because their authors remain powerful figures in the academy, keen to ensure a legacy for successive students and thus perhaps revising their books for new readers; or that the publishers continue to re-issue such texts and restate their importance for commercial reasons, but neither of these explanations need devalue the actual influence of the works themselves.
Next, each chapter points towards a sample of medieval texts that can be profitably mined for information about the theme, and lend themselves to applying some of the theoretical approaches to reading the evidence itself â this is the Source Hunt. Many different types of text are represented here â chronicles, laws, charters, letters, biographies, to name just a few. With a more critical, gendered eye, it is soon apparent that much of the evidence used to reconstruct medieval social life was produced by an extraordinarily narrow sector of medieval society, white, male, clerical, and often elite. Rather than seeing this as a barrier, however, gender history equips scholars to take on this limited sample, and generates new and exciting questions about not only the authors, but also the social frameworks within which they worked. One chapter of this book, in fact, will also look specifically for works that were produced by women, but will ask whether female writers owed more to their social class than their gender: we cannot assume that the very articulate women of the medieval period whose writings are preserved a representative of women as a whole.
Finally, each chapter offers some suggestions for further reading, often by people who have adopted the approach discussed, or about the type of source we have explored. First, though, we need to set the scene.
Gender and No Medieval?
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, gender history still occupies a precarious position within the higher education systems of much of the developed world, and in some places is still entirely absent. In many history departments, it is still possible to find medieval history curricula with little or no gendered content, and the field as a whole lacks widespread institutional support, particularly from elite universities. Gender history had its origins in the struggle for social equality and womenâs emancipation Narrowly speaking, womenâs right to vote in political elections; more broadly, their right to make their own decisions freely over issues concerning their lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a struggle that continues for women in many parts of the globe today, even in supposedly âmodernâ nation states. For many gender historians, therefore, the modern (i.e. post-1800ce) fight by women (and some men) for social justice is at the core of their research, and current journals in the field are dominated by studies focusing on the modern era. The feminist journal Signs, for example, has only published one medieval article in its last ten issues, and other journals devoted to womenâs history, such as the Journal of Womenâs History, fare only slightly better. As medievalist Mathilde van Dijk has commented, the focus of womenâs historians on documenting âordinaryâ women has had the (perhaps unintended) effect of screening out the medieval era, where most texts document the lives of elites. In fact this statement can be nuanced somewhat as we reach the later Middle Ages, when records become fuller and more diverse in nature. Yet early work on womenâs history, driven by first-wave feminist movements of the later nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, and carried out largely by researchers working outside established university positions, regularly sought out the premodern origins of womenâs oppression, and thus laid the foundations for a gendered history that included much earlier periods. During the early twentieth century, approaches to history-writing itself diversified dramatically, with more interest in the social and economic conditions of the past and how patterns of power relations changed over time, or remained static over long periods. Medieval historians were at the forefront of this development, particularly in France, where âtotal historyâ meant scrutinizing a much more diverse range of source materials, and examining social and cultural developments alongside political change. This in turn has given more room for the lives of women, and other neglected groups in the Middle Ages, to be explored in more detail.
The second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s revived earlier questions about womenâs history in a self-consciously political way, often emphasizing the role of the education system in suppressing knowledge of earlier womenâs work and achievements, challenging the economic disempowerment of women and reclaiming control over womenâs bodies and sexuality. If first-wave feminism was thought to have had a narrow focus â the political emancipation of (certain) women â the second wave sought to broaden the agenda for action. Large and important books were written that sought to give a âwomenâs history of the worldâ or trace the distant origins and stubborn persistence of patriarchal Putting the interests of âfathersâ â by definition male â first. For more on patriarchy see Chapter 4 systems that held women back in contemporary society. Yet again much of this work was very present-centred: in telling the story of womenâs âprogressâ to emancipation, such histories either ignored the medieval era or moved swiftly on from it. Indeed, media coverage of modern examples of injustice or cruelty towards women often deploys the term âmedievalâ to signal the backwardness (in their eyes) of the society under scrutiny. Very few historians have challenged this short-sightedness, with the major exception of Judith Bennett, whose articles and subsequent book-length study History Matters pointed up the benefits of taking a longer view and using the medieval period as a laboratory to test ideas about womenâs enduring subordinate status even as moments of change seemed to give them brief advances. Bennettâs work will feature in more detail in the following chapters.
âSecond-waveâ feminism has come in for fierce criticism, however, particularly in the United States, for its perceived focus on white, middle-class, straight womenâs concerns. In 1989 law professor KimberlĂ© Crenshaw wrote what has become a foundational essay asking why Black women (her term) were âtheoretically erasedâ by a feminist theory that privileged whites and a race theory that privileged men. âDemarginalizing the intersectionâ between the two fields, she sought to demonstrate how Black women were âmultiply burdenedâ, and raise awareness of how tightly- defined identity politics (which we shall return to in Chapter 6) ignored the diversity of experiences within particular groups. Her ideas have influence...