Author Description

Medieval Women looks at a thousand years of English history, as it affected - and was made by - women. Such a broad canvas is based on, and indeed has only been made possible by, the rich interdisciplinary research into women's history of the last twenty-five years. The book opens with the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to England in the fifth century and looks at the variety of sources that can throw light on the lives and contributions to their society of women in the Dark Ages. It moves into the Anglo-Norman period with an examination of what 1066 may have meant for women. The focus then moves to problems and attitudes fundamental to 'everywoman': medieval attitudes to sex, marriage and motherhood; and the world of work and the experience of widowhood for peasant, townswoman and aristocrat. The book closes with an exploration of the intellectual and spiritual worlds of medieval women. Each chapter is accompanied by substantial extracts from primary sources, which vividly illustrate medieval thought and assumptions. Medieval Women celebrates the diversity and vitality of English women's lives in the Middle Ages and rescues them from the shadows cast by those fathers of English history, Victorian patriarchs.