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Summary:

"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"-- [Provided by publisher]

Table of Contents:

• Machine generated contents note: pt. I Rereading Sources
• 1. Foundation Legend of Godstow Abbey: A Holy Woman's Life in Anglo-Norman Verse / Emilie Amt
• 2. Remembering Countess Delphine's Books: Reading as a Means to Shape a Holy Woman's Sanctity / Nicole Archamheau
• 3. Letters of Princess Sophia of Hungary, a Nun at Admont / Jonathan R. Lyon
• 4. Missing Rusian Women: The Case of Evpraksia Vsevolodovna / Christian Raffensperger
• 5. Leaving Warboys: Emigration from a Fifteenth-Century English Village / Anne Reiber DeWindt
• 6. Women as Legal Agents in Late Medieval Genoa / Jamie Smith
• 7. Piecing Together the Fragments: Telling the Lives of the Ladies of Lavardin through Image and Text / Amy Livingstone
• pt. II Seeking the Undocumented
• 8. Girlindis and Alpais: Telling the Lives of Two Textile Fabricators in the Carolingian Empire / Valeric L. Garver
• 9. Agents or Pawns? The Experiences of the Peasant Women of Roussillon in the Blanquet Family Parchments, 1292-1345 / Rebecca Lynn Winer
• 10. Joan de Valence: A Lady of Substance / Linda E. Mitchell
• 11. Royal Women in Late Medieval Spain: Catalina of Lancaster, Leonor of Albuquerque, and Maria of Castile / Theresa Earenfight
• 12. Muriel, a Jew of Oxford: Using the Dramatic to Understand the Mundane in Anglo-Norman Towns / Charlotte Newman Goldy
• 13. Well-Behaved Women Can Make History: Women's Friendships in Late Medieval Westminster / Katherine L. French.

Contributors:

Goldy, Charlotte Newman, 1949-

Livingstone, Amy, 1961-

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Related Series:

New Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))

Subjects:

Women and literature — Europe — History — To 1500

Women — History — Middle Ages, 500-1500

Middle Ages — Historiography

Medievalists

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-275) and index.
Description based on print version record.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Call Numbers:

PN682.W6 W75 2012eb

ISBNs:

9781137074706 (electronic bk.)
1137074701 (electronic bk.)
9780230114555 (hardback) [Invalid]
0230114555 (hardback) [Invalid]

OCLC Numbers:

809799171

Other Control Numbers:

EBC1016523 (source: MiAaPQ)
[Unknown Type]: ybp9266825