Writing Medieval Women's Lives - (New Middle Ages) by C Goldy & A Livingstone (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Medieval women's history is entering a new stage. In the last thirty years medievalists have recovered the sources about women, and have moved women to the foreground of narratives to view society from their vantage point. Prosopographic methods have been implemented to learn about the least documented women though they often lack a human face. This volume responds to various questions of how historians are asking. Can we go beyond the most powerful of women while retaining the personal aspect possible with a biographical approach? How can we write about the mundane aspects of female life rarely deemed worthy of textual mention? How far can we extrapolate from our fragmentary sources and yet remain historical? Scholars working on the history of early modern women have already demonstrated that we can write about women who left only fragmentary evidence of their lives as compelling and illuminating history in part by experimenting with narrative structures. The work in this volume demonstrates that techniques used by these historians can be equally fruitful in writing a more complete history of medieval women. The historians in this collection are looking for ways to expand the ways we examine and write about medieval women. They are interested in the great and the obscure, and women from different times and places. They all attempt to get closer to the life as lived, personified in individual stories. As such, these essays prompt us to rethink what we can know about women, how we can know it, and how we can write about them to expand our insights"--

Book Synopsis

A collection of essays representing the growing variety of approaches used to write the history of medieval women. They reflect the European medieval world socially, geographically and across religious boundaries, engaging directly with how the medieval women's experience wa reconstructed, as well as what the experience was.

Review Quotes

"This collection of thirteen essays by North American scholars provides a series of micro-biographies of individual medieval women's 'lived experience, ' ones that aim to recover some of the nuance and emotion of women's relationships and their political connections. In their introduction, editors Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone offer a cogent overview of the historiography about medieval women, detailing how these essays both draw on established historiographical approaches and chart new avenues for writing the stories of women about whom only fragmentary records survive. Divided into two sections, Rereading Sources and Seeking the Undocumented, this collection features work by well-established second- or beginning-stage third-generation scholars of women's history." - The Medieval Review

About the Author

Emilie Amt is the Hildegarde Pilgram Professor of History at Hood College. Nicole Archambeau is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Caltech. Anne Reiber DeWindt is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Theresa Earenfight, Professor of History at Seattle University, Katherine French is the J. Frederick Hoffman Chair of Medieval English History at the University of Michigan. Valerie L. Garver is an associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University where she teaches medieval history and medieval studies. Charlotte Newman Goldy is an associate professor of History at Miami University. Amy Livingstone is a Professor of History of Wittenberg University and co-editor of the journal, Medieval Prosopography. Jonathan Lyon is an assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. Linda E. Mitchell is the Martha Jane Phillips Starr/Missouri Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Christian Raffensperger is Assistant Professor of History at Wittenberg University. Jamie Smith is an independent scholar. Rebecca Lynn Winer is an associate professor of History at Villanova University.