Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226042480 ISBN 13: 9780226042480

Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1994

Synopsis

Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women's activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women's challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life.

These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways on which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.

From Publishers Weekly:

Eleven provocative essays, reprinted from Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , offer a diverse glimpse of medieval life, as well as a sample of contemporary scholarship that is "altering the patriarchal and antifeminist traditions of academia." Accessible to the general reader, the articles are highly specific in focus. (For example, canon law has surprising applications: Are prostitutes required to pay tithes on their professional earnings? Answer: Yes, but the Church can't accept the money until the prostitutes have reformed.) Sarah Westphal-Wihl's "The Ladies' Tournament" analyzes a work of courtly literature in which women dispute the nature of honor and stage a joust. Elsewhere Monica Green finds that early health care regulations were more concerned with the moral character of midwives than with their medical skills. Mary Martin McLaughlin's account of the troubled conversion of a lay community to an Augustinian monastery for women highlights ideologies in conflict. Bennett, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, wrote Women in the Medieval English Countryside . Illustrations not seen by PW .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0226042480
• ISBN 13: 9780226042480
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 315
• Editor: Bennett Judith M., Clark Elizabeth A., O'Barr Jean F., Vilen B. Anne