Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages - Hardcover

Mary Erler; Maryanne Kowaleski

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801441129 ISBN 13: 9780801441127

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2003

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.

About this title

About the Author

Mary C. Erler is Professor of English and Maryanne Kowaleski is Professor of History at Fordham University.

Review

"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)

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0801441129
• ISBN 13: 9780801441127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 280