Writing Medieval Women’s Lives: (The New Middle Ages)

A collection of essays representing the growing variety of approaches used to write the history of medieval women. They reflect the European medieval world socially, geographically and across religious boundaries, engaging directly with how the medieval women's experience wa reconstructed, as well as what the experience was.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone The Foundation Legend of Godstow Abbey: A Holy Woman's Life in Anglo-Norman Verse; Emilie Amt Remembering Countess Delphine's Books: Reading as a Means to Shape a Holy Woman's Sanctity; Nicole Archambeau The Letters of Princess Sophia of Hungary, a Nun at Admont; Jonathan R. Lyon The Missing Rusian Women: The Case of Evpraksia Vsevolodovna; Christian Raffensperger Leaving Warboys: Emigration from a Fifteenth-Century English Village; Anne R. DeWindt Women as Legal Agents in Late Medieval Genoa; Jamie Smith Piecing Together the Fragments: Telling the Lives of the Ladies of Lavardin through Image and Text; Amy Livingstone Girlindis and Alpais: Telling the Lives of Two Textile Fabricators in the Carolingian Empire; Valerie L. Garver A Peasant Family in Roussillon: Understanding the Experiences of Women in the Blanquet Parchments, 1292-1345; Rebecca Lynn Winer Joan de Valence: A Lady of Substance; Linda E. Mitchell Royal Women in Late Medieval Spain: Catalina of Lancaster, Leonor of Albuquerque, and María of Castile; Theresa Earenfight Muriel, a Jew of Oxford: Using the Dramatic to Understand the Mundane in Anglo-Norman Towns; Charlotte Newman Goldy Well-Behaved Women Can Make History: Women's Friendships in Late Medieval Westminster; Katherine L. French

About the Author :
Emilie Amt is the Hildegarde Pilgram Professor of History at Hood College. Nicole Archambeau is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Caltech. Anne Reiber DeWindt is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Theresa Earenfight, Professor of History at Seattle University, Katherine French is the J. Frederick Hoffman Chair of Medieval English History at the University of Michigan. Valerie L. Garver is an associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University where she teaches medieval history and medieval studies. Charlotte Newman Goldy is an associate professor of History at Miami University. Amy Livingstone is a Professor of History of Wittenberg University and co-editor of the journal, Medieval Prosopography. Jonathan Lyon is an assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. Linda E. Mitchell is the Martha Jane Phillips Starr/Missouri Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Christian Raffensperger is Assistant Professor of History at Wittenberg University. Jamie Smith is an independent scholar. Rebecca Lynn Winer is an associate professor of History at Villanova University.

Review :
"This collection of thirteen essays by North American scholars provides a series of micro-biographies of individual medieval women's 'lived experience,' ones that aim to recover some of the nuance and emotion of women's relationships and their political connections. In their introduction, editors Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone offer a cogent overview of the historiography about medieval women, detailing how these essays both draw on established historiographical approaches and chart new avenues for writing the stories of women about whom only fragmentary records survive. Divided into two sections, Rereading Sources and Seeking the Undocumented, this collection features work by well-established second- or beginning-stage third-generation scholars of women's history." - The Medieval Review