Gendering the Master Narrative - by Mary C Erler & Maryanne Kowaleski
About this item
Highlights
- Gendering the Master Narrative asks whether a female tradition of power might have existed distinct from the male one, and how such a tradition might have been transmitted.
- About the Author: Mary C. Erler is Professor of English and Maryanne Kowaleski is Professor of History at Fordham University.
- 280 Pages
- Social Science, Women's Studies
Description
About the Book
Gendering the Master Narrative asks whether a female tradition of power might have existed distinct from the male one, and how such a tradition might have been transmitted. It describes women's progress toward power as a push-pull movement, showing...
Book Synopsis
Gendering the Master Narrative asks whether a female tradition of power might have existed distinct from the male one, and how such a tradition might have been transmitted. It describes women's progress toward power as a push-pull movement, showing how practices and institutions that ostensibly enabled women in the Middle Ages could sometimes erode their authority as well.This book provides a much-needed theoretical and historical reassessment of medieval women's power. It updates the conclusions from the editors' essential volume on that topic, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, which was published in 1988 and altered the prevailing view of female subservience by correcting the nearly ubiquitous equation of "power" with "public authority." Most scholars now accept a broader definition of power based on the interactions between men and women.In their Introduction, Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski survey the directions in which the study of medieval women's agency has developed in the past fifteen years. Like its predecessor, this volume is richly interdisciplinary. It contains essays by highly regarded scholars of history, literature, and art history, and features seventeen black-and-white illustrations and two maps.
Review Quotes
By entitling this collection Gendering the Master Narrative, editors Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski intend to prepare readers for the fact that the essays supplement the story of men's access to and wielding of power in European Middle Ages with the story of women's.
--Conrad Leyser, University of Manchester "American Historical Review"Interdisciplinary essays on the exercise and transmission of female power in medieval society.
-- "The Chronicle of Higher Education"About the Author
Mary C. Erler is Professor of English and Maryanne Kowaleski is Professor of History at Fordham University.
