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Examines the role of women in medieval law and society
This new collection of essays brings together brand new research on widowhood in medieval and early modern Europe. The volume opens with an introductory chapter by the Editors which looks generally at the conditions and constructions of widowhood in this period. This is followed by a range of essays which illuminate different dimensions of widowhood across Europe - in England, Italy, France, Germany and Spain. A particular attraction of the volume is the attention given to widowers, and the comparisons made between the male and female experience of widowhood. It is an exciting reinterpretation of the subject which will do much to undo the traditional stereotype of the widow. Contributing to the volume are: Jodi Bilinkoff, Giulia Calvi, Sandra Cavallo, Isabelle Chabot, Julia Crick, Amy Erikson, Dagmar Freist, Elizabeth Foyster, Margaret Pelling, Pamela Sharpe,Tim Stretton, Barbara Todd, and Lyndan Warner.
It has long been thought that the post Black Death period offered unparallelled opportunities for women. However, through a careful consideration of economic and legal changes affecting women of all social classes and conditions, the author shows that this was not the case, taking issue with orthodox opinion. She argues that marriage at a late age was not customary for women, and that the ability of wives to supplement their income with intermittent paid labour (at harvest time, for example) was not so great as has been supposed: rather, most married women spent more time on unpaid agricultural labour on their own land than their peers had done in the pre-plague economy. Professor Mate also demonstrates that there is little evidence to support the current belief that widowhood was the period in a woman's life when she enjoyed most power, freedom, and independence; moreover, legal changes were a mixed blessing for women, leaving some widows with a larger portion and a more secure title to land, but totally depriving others. Throughout, the book pays much attention to class as well as gender, showing how many things were determined by it, from what a woman wore or ate to the age at which she married, her power within the household, and even her vulnerability to rape.Professor MAVIS E. MATEteaches in the Department of History at the University of Oregon.
This volume provides a comprehensive study of widowhood in Medieval Britain based on literary and historical sources from the seventh to the 15th centuries. It devotes much attention to family structures and to the legal and social aspects of inheritance.
Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.
A survey of attitudes to marriage as represented in medieval legal and literary texts. Medieval marriage has been widely discussed, and this book gives a brief and accessible overview of an important subject. It covers the entire medieval period, and engages with a wide range of primary sources, both legal and literary. It draws particular attention to local English legislation and practice, and offers some new readings of medieval English literary texts, including Beowulf, the works of Chaucer, Langland's Piers Plowman, the Book of Margery Kempe and the Paston Letters. Focusing on a number of key themes important across the period, individual chapters discuss the themes of consent, property, alliance, love, sex, family, divorce and widowhood. CONOR MCCARTHY gained his PhD from Trinity College Dublin.
The twelve essays in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe re-examine the vexing issue of women, money, wealth, and power from distinctive perspectives - literature, history, architectural history - using new archival sources. The contributors examine how money and changing attitudes toward wealth affected power relations between women and men of all ranks, especially the patriarchal social forces that constrained the range of women s economic choices. Employing theories on gender, culture, and power, this volume reveals wealth as both the motive force in gender relations and a precise indicator of other, more subtle, forms of power and influence mediated by gender.
This study of illicit sexuality in medieval England explores links between marriage and sex, law and disorder, and property and power. Some medieval Englishwomen endured rape or were kidnapped for forced marriages, yet most ravished women were married and many 'wife-thefts' were not forced kidnappings but cases of adultery fictitiously framed as abduction by abandoned husbands. In pursuing the themes of illicit sexuality and non-normative marital practices, this work analyses the nuances of the key Latin term raptus and the three overlapping offences that it could denote: rape, abduction and adultery. This investigation broadens our understanding of the role of women in the legal system; provides a means for analysing male control over female bodies, sexuality and access to the courts; and reveals ways in which female agency could, on occasion, manoeuvre around such controls.
A collection of essays by twelve historians and literary critics who explore Margery Kempe, her Book, and her world.
Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath examines how Ovid's Ars amatoria shaped the erotic discourses of the medieval West. The Ars amatoria circulated in medieval France and England as an authoritative treatise on desire; consequently, the sexualities of the medieval West are haunted by the imperial Roman constructions of desire that emerge from Ovid's text. The Ars amatoria ironically proposes the erotic potential of violence, and this aspect of the Ars proved to be enormously influential. Ovid's discourse on erotic violence provides a script for Heloise's epistolary expression of desire for Abelard. The Roman de la Rose extends the directives of the Ars with a rhetorical flourish and poetic excess that tests the limits of Ovidian irony. While Christine de Pizan critiqued the representations of erotic violence in the Rose, Chaucer appropriates the Ovidian discourse from the Roman de la Rose to construct the Wife of Bath—a female figure that today's readers find uncannily familiar. Well written and provocative, this book will interest scholars of premodern literature, especially those who work on Medieval English and French, as well as classical, texts. Marilynn Desmond draws on feminist and queer theory, which places Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath at the cutting edge of debates in gender and sexuality.