Customer Reviews

A History of Women in the West, Volume II: Silences of the Middle Ages

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The Virginia Quarterly Review comments: "Analyses of medieval popular culture and art are woven together judiciously in this comprehensive and well-informed volume." The Review caught the book's strengths just right. Its thoughtful assembly and much of its writing shimmers. The book makes the non-rational logic of medieval minds much clearer.

Editor Christiane Klapisch-Zuber marshals participating authors and their work in a well-ordered sequence, showing her command of subject and materials in her Introduction, "Including Women." She starts at the appropriate pressure point, with Western Europe's first female professional writer, Christine de Pisan, and her "The City of Ladies." Klapisch-Zuber writes, "Just as the Middle Ages were giving way to the Renaissance, around 1400," Christine de Pisan was describing the "misfortune" of having been born a woman. For the first time a western woman dared to dissect and expose the "women's issue" in writing for publication.

Six hundred years later, "A History of Women in the West, Volume II, Silences of the Middle Ages" is still pressing the task that Christine de Pisan started, exploring and explaining the plight of the medieval female condition with a broader brush. Its first part, "Norms of Control," describes the need for priests to supervise women and explores the "Nature of Woman" (which was held to be different and inferior from the "better" male gender). Naturally, such weak and erratic beings needed protection, not least from themselves--which brings us to the final section of the first part.

The book leads us through well-balanced essays where expert authors explain how society--especially the male half--tied itself in knots to solve the mystery: What is "Woman"? Two and a half centuries earlier, Eleanor of Aquitaine's Court of Ladies had argued the case for women as the arbiters of social graces, and for a while the female condition in Christendom improved. But reactionary forces soon clawed back most gains: reactionaries found their literary champion in Jean de Meun's satirical "Romance of the Rose." In her turn, Christine de Pisan launched a resolute literary counterattack against de Meun.

Essays in "A History of Women in the West, Volume II, Silences of the Middle Ages" lead logically forward, charting the medieval ebb and flow of women's lib. and anti-lib. We accompany the changing status of women in a journey both informative and entertaining.

Robert Fripp, Author, "Power of a Woman. Memoirs of...Eleanor of Aquitaine"

Blame it on my European origin, but it was pleasing, like a change of the landscape, to read most of the essays. Even though I do consider myself a feminist, I was glad to finally find a modern academic book which doesn't share the pretentious and dry obsession about gender!

The style is fluid, with many anecdotes. Of course, one could argue that it is sometimes too easy-going or not focused enough, but it is a recommendable introduction.

It came quickly and is in great condition for $6 and hard back as well.

One can at once notice the meticulous research that preceded the writing of the book, the more surprising is that the author describes only the reasons why women were considered "vessels of sin" in that period of time and other hideous superstitions attributed to them. No line is dedicated (and to believe that history had not preserved any evidence of the contrary is laughable) about those mothers, mistresses, wifes, sisters that had been deeply loved, adored and respected. To creat an opinion that all women were either adored as saints or abhorred and violently subjugated, would be, to my idea, misleading....