Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages [Hardcover]

Judith M. Bennett (Editor), Elizabeth A. Clark (Editor), Jean F. O'Barr (Editor), B. Anne Vilen (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 1989 | ISBN-10: 0226042472 | ISBN-13: 978-0226042473 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals; 1 edition (December 15, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226042472
• ISBN-13: 978-0226042473
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,017,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)