Wide-ranging examination of women's achievements in and influence on many aspects of medieval culture.
Medieval women were normally denied access to public educational institutions, and so also denied the gateways to most leadership positions. Modern scholars have therefore naturally tended to study learned women either as anomalies, and more generally as victims.This volume argues instead for a via media. Drawing upon manuscript and archival sources, and reaching further afield for more multidisciplinary methods, scholars here show that more medieval women attained some form of learning than hitherto imagined, and that women with such legal, social or ecclesiastical knowledge also wielded professional or communal leadership.
The contributors to this book challenge several traditional orthodoxies, not least the still-prevalent idea that women's intellectual accomplishments were limited to the Latin literate. So, too, they argue that what constitutes intellectual accomplishment for women shifts. This collection therefore engages heavily with vernacular writings (in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian) and also with material culture (manuscript illumination, stained glass, fabric, and jewelry) for evidence of women's advanced capabilities. But in doing so the contributors strive to avoid the trap of seeing women's accomplishments as limited to the vernacular and the material, a view related in part to modern emphasis on the "embodiment" of women's experience. So they therefore focus on "women and the mind" as counterbalance, with chapters examinig women at work with the sacred languages in all of the three Abrahamic traditions (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew). And a third traditional view is also interrogated: that women were somehow more "original" for their lack of learning and dependence on their mother tongue.
KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON is Professor Emerita, University of Notre Dame; JOHN VAN ENGEN is Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame; KATIE BUGYIS is Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame.
Contributors: Asma Afsaruddin, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Amanda Bohne, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Dyan Elliott, Thelma Fenster, Sean Field, Sarah Foot, Megan Hall, Ruth Mazzo Karras, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Rachel Koopmans, F. Thomas Luongo, Leanne MacDonald, Gary Macy, Maureen Miller, Barbara Newman, S.J. Pearce, Anna Siebach-Larsen, Gemma Simmonds, David Wallace, John Van Engen, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne,
