Adela of Blois

Adela of Blois

Author: Kimberly A. LoPrete

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 710

ISBN-13:

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Based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of sources, this is the first scholarly volume devoted to the life and political career of Adela, the youngest daughter of William the Conqueror, who ruled as Countess of Blois, Chartres and Meaux for 20 years.


A Medieval Woman's Companion

A Medieval Woman's Companion

Author: Susan Signe Morrison

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1785700804

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What have a deaf nun, the mother of the first baby born to Europeans in North America, and a condemned heretic to do with one another? They are among the virtuous virgins, marvelous maidens, and fierce feminists of the Middle Ages who trail-blazed paths for women today. Without those first courageous souls who worked in fields dominated by men, women might not have the presence they currently do in professions such as education, the law, and literature. Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman’s Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability. Their legacy abides until today in attitudes to contemporary women that have their roots in the medieval period. The final chapter suggests how 20th and 21st century feminist and gender theories can be applied to and complicated by medieval women's lives and writings. Doubly marginalized due to gender and the remoteness of the time period, medieval women’s accomplishments are acknowledged and presented in a way that readers can appreciate and find inspiring. Ideal for high school and college classroom use in courses ranging from history and literature to women's and gender studies, an accompanying website with educational links, images, downloadable curriculum guide, and interactive blog will be made available at the time of publication.


Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

Author: Theodore Evergates

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-08-03

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0812200616

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Were aristocratic women in medieval France little more than appendages to patrilineal families, valued as objects of exchange and necessary only for the production of male heirs? Such was the view proposed by the great French historian Georges Duby more than three decades ago and still widely accepted. In Aristocratic Women in Medieval France another model is put forth: women of the landholding elite—from countesses down to the wives of ordinary knights—had considerable rights, and exercised surprising power. The authors of the volume offer five case studies of women from the mid-eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, and from regions as diverse as Blois-Chartres, Champagne, Flanders, and Occitania. They show not only the diversity of life experiences these women enjoyed but the range of social and political roles open to them. The ecclesiastical and secular sources they mine confirm that women were regarded as full members of both their natal and affinal families, were never excluded from inheriting and controlling property, and did not have their share of family property limited to dowries. Women across France exchanged oaths for fiefs and assumed responsibilities for enfeoffed knights. As feudal lords, they settled disputes involving vassals, fortified castles, and even led troops into battle. Aristocratic Women in Medieval France clearly shows that it is no longer possible to depict well-born women as powerless in medieval society. Demonstrating the importance of aristocratic women in a period during which they have been too long assumed to have lacked influence, it forces us to reframe our understanding of the high Middle Ages.


Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor of Aquitaine

Author: B. Wheeler

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 1137052627

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Eleanor's patrilineal descent, from a lineage already prestigious enough to have produced an empress in the eleventh century, gave her the lordship of Aquitaine. But marriage re-emphasized her sex which, in the medieval scheme of gender-power relations relegated her to the position of Lady in relation to her Lordly husbands. In this collection, essays provide a context for Eleanor's life and further an evolving understanding of Eleanor's multifaceted career. A valuable collection on the greatest heiress of the medieval period.


Stephen and Matilda's Civil War

Stephen and Matilda's Civil War

Author: Matthew Lewis

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2020-01-19

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1526718359

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The story of the twelfth-century rivalry for the throne between the daughter and the nephew of Henry I—a battle that tore England apart for over a decade. The Anarchy was the first civil war in post-Conquest England, enduring throughout the reign of King Stephen between 1135 and 1154. It ultimately brought about the end of the Norman dynasty and the birth of the mighty Plantagenet kings. When Henry I died having lost his only legitimate son in a shipwreck, his barons had sworn to recognize his daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, as his heir, and remarried her to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. But when she was slow to move to England upon her father’s death, Henry’s favorite nephew, Stephen of Blois, rushed to have himself crowned, much as Henry himself had done on the death of his brother William Rufus. Supported by his brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester, Stephen made a promising start, but Matilda would not give up her birthright and tried to hold the English barons to their oaths. The result was more than a decade of civil war that saw England split apart. Empress Matilda is often remembered as aloof and high-handed, Stephen as ineffective and indecisive. By following both sides of the dispute and seeking to understand their actions and motivations, Matthew Lewis aims to reach a more rounded understanding of this crucial period of English history—and ask to what extent there really was anarchy.


The Congregation of Tiron

The Congregation of Tiron

Author: Ruth Harwood Cline

Publisher: ARC Humanities Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781641893589

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In-depth study of a little-known reformed Benedictine congregation crucial for the development of trade and urban development in Angevin Britain and France.


Medieval Mothering

Medieval Mothering

Author: Bonnie Wheeler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-23

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1134822782

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First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


A Medieval Miscellany

A Medieval Miscellany

Author: Margaret Wade Labarge

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780886292904

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The varied lives of medieval women, their power and status within society, are depicted through their own writings; questions of medieval culture are linked to those facing humanity in our time; travel, as experienced by the most prestigious ambassador and by the lowliest pilgrim, is explored; and the origins and conditions of health care are examined. These themes have inspired or informed her eight major works, but are revisited here with the clarity, wit and discipline of a great teacher.


Lost Letters of Medieval Life

Lost Letters of Medieval Life

Author: Martha Carlin

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0812207564

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Everyday life in early thirteenth-century England is revealed in vivid detail in this riveting collection of correspondence of people from all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls. The documents presented here include letters between masters and servants, husbands and wives, neighbors and enemies, and cover a wide range of topics: politics and war, going to fairs and going to law, attending tournaments and stocking a game park, borrowing cash and doing favors for friends, investigating adultery and building a windmill. While letters by celebrated people have long been known, the correspondence of ordinary people has not survived and has generally been assumed never to have existed in the first place. Martha Carlin and David Crouch, however, have discovered numerous examples of such correspondence hiding in plain sight. The letters can be found in manuscripts called formularies—the collections of form letters and other model documents that for centuries were used to teach the arts of letter-writing and keeping accounts. The writing-masters and their students who produced these books compiled examples of all the kinds of correspondence that people of means, members of the clergy, and those who handled their affairs might expect to encounter in their business and personal lives. Tucked among the sample letters from popes to bishops and from kings to sheriffs are examples of a much more casual, ephemeral kind of correspondence. These are the low-level letters that evidently were widely exchanged, but were often discarded because they were not considered to be of lasting importance. Two manuscripts, one in the British Library and the other in the Bodleian Library, are especially rich in such documents, and it is from these collections that Carlin and Crouch have drawn the documents in this volume. They are presented here in their first printed edition, both in the original Latin and in English translation, each document splendidly contextualized in an accompanying essay.