Customer Reviews

Women in the Middle Ages

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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."

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 Fortunately, this section has been superseded by Lisa Bitel's recent "Women in Early Medieval Europe," which covers the same period in much greater detail.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.

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.

What a simple title, yet a more simpler book. Very little facts of interest or use, very short and trite, I'd prefer to read the Wives of Henry VIII for the fourth time.

Don't get this book, there are much more worthy ones that account the lives of WOMEN in the middle ages, and if you really are looking for women, the women in this book are truely unknown and did not account to much in the middle ages.

Nothing in the book made any sense to me. There was never a point made. It was all stuff that know one really want to learn about. Overall I didn't like the book at all