Ebook: Women in Medieval Western European Culture

First published 1999 by Garland Publishing.

Women's history is a fairly new field; most of the major works have been written within the last twenty years. The sources for such history, however, have existed in various forms for hundreds of years. Sometimes it is hard to find female voices in the documents and literatures of past eras. Sometimes the voices are overlaid with male voices or hemmed in by the structures of male discourse. But those voices exist and they can be heard. The authors of this volume of essays have unearthed, uncovered, and revealed the voices of medieval women from the wilds of northern England to the luxuries of medieval Constantinople. They have articulated the activities and ambitions of women from all walks of life — queen, noblewoman, urban matron, and peasant. They have also revealed the ways in which male authors and masculine social systems subtly (and not so subtly) limited and restricted female expression during the Middle Ages. This pressure to remain silent and private has led some historians of the medieval world to claim that women are invisible in the records of European culture. The authors of this volume show that women were far from invisible as long as one knows where to look.