Women in the Middle Ages [Paperback]

Joseph Gies (Author), Frances Gies (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 1991

Correcting the omissions of traditional history, this is "a reliable survey of the real and varied roles played by women in the medieval period. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Many a quaint and amusing side, as well as a wealth of solid information." -- --New York Times

About the Author

Fiances and Joseph Gies have been writing books about medieval history for thirty years. Together and separately, they are the authors of more than twenty books, including Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, Life in a Medieval Village, The Knight in History, and Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. They live near Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (October 16, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060923040
• ISBN-13: 978-0060923044
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #614,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and Readable Book, February 23, 2000

By 

E. A.B Phelps (Tallahassee, Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Women in the Middle Ages (Paperback)

This book is a welcome addition to the medieval history books written by these authors. It profiles several prominent women of medieval times, and in so doing, gives us a glimpse of what life was like for all women back then. Well written, not at all dry. Strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in medieval history and/or women's history. Also check out, by these same authors, "Life in a Medieval Village" and "Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel."

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A scattershot introduction to a millennium of European women, November 11, 2007

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Women in the Middle Ages (Paperback)

Frances and Joseph Gies, singly or as a pair, have cranked out two or three dozen short primers on topics in medieval European history over the last four decades, and they are used, I suppose, primarily for the classroom. This one, summarizing nearly a millennium of "women," is a mixed bag.

The first part of the book covers the period to the year 1100 and "summarizes what is known about woman's situation in that fascinating and, to the historian, frustrating era" and describe "the principal attitudes toward women that prevailed." It's an impossible task for fifty pages: much of this section is filled with a string of unavoidably vapid generalizations ("medieval marriages often developed into closed and loving relationships") and context-free anecdotes, spiced with the occasional factoid or randomly selected quote from medieval sources. The lack of focus makes for incredibly boring reading--akin to making sense of a professor's lecture notes. Fortunately, this section has been superseded by Lisa Bitel's recent "Women in Early Medieval Europe," which covers the same period in much greater detail.

The meat of Gieses' book can be found in the seven chapters on individual women who lived during the High Middle Ages (1100 to 1500). A trio of chapters spotlights the aristocracy: Hildegarde of Bingen serves as the example for female monasticism; Blanche of Castile and her daughter-in-law Marguerite of Provence for queenship; Eleanor de Montfort for noblewomen, with an excellent synopsis of the siege of Kenilworth Castle. The best of these is the last: the authors recast the familiar story of Simon de Montfort (Eleanor's husband) and King Henry III (her brother) from the equally pivotal perspective of the powerful woman in the middle of their egos.

A chapter on the peasantry uses the fictional wife of Piers Plowman as a metaphorical stand-in and examines scattered evidence from local court and tax records. The final three chapters survey what might be termed the rising middle class: the fascinating Agnes li Patiniere and her mother, cloth dyers in Flanders who (fortunately for historians) sued their employer--and won; Margherita Datini, a merchant's wife in the late 1300s outside of Florence, whose story we know from a cache of business papers discovered in a stairwell in 1870; and Margaret Paston, the matron of a nouveau riche family whose surviving letters have served in recent years as the basis for a BBC dramatization and a number of books--including one published a decade ago by the Gieses.

These seven quasi-biographical chapters give a far better sense of what life in the medieval period may have been like than do the random simplifications offered by the earlier portion of the book. Still, readers would probably be well served avoiding the scattershot approach offered by this book and instead choosing among the abundance of more recent titles that concentrate on specific lives, topics, regions, and periods.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Opens the door on a very different world, June 11, 2010

By 

Jonathan Groner (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Women in the Middle Ages (Paperback)

This history book is very readable and opens the door to contemporary readers on a world that is quite different from ours, yet remarkably similar in some ways. The discussion of a student protest in Paris in 1229, which was brutally crushed by the police under orders of Queen Blanche of Castile, was particularly memorable.

The seven chapters that deal with individual women -- a merchant's wife, a commoner, a queen, and so on -- are mistitled a bit, because they deal just as much with broad issues such as the legal disabilities of women in the Middle Ages, their occupations, family life, and land holding.