History Commons^™

Teaching Premodern Women And Gender, Lucy C. Barnhouse

Quidditas

In her influential History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Judith Bennett asked “Who’s afraid of the distant past?” Fifteen years after this book’s publication, the question remains relevant. Teaching the history of women and gender in the premodern world presents linked pedagogical challenges. Most students enter college with little to no background in premodern history. Many find premodern primary sources, when taught with the same pedagogical scaffolding as modern sources, inaccessible due to real or perceived strangeness. These challenges can be compounded by the challenges of teaching women’s and/or gender history. This roundtable addresses strategies for productive …

Visualizing Women: Teaching Modern Images And Medieval Texts About Pre-Modern Women, Esther Liberman Cuenca

Quidditas

This paper examines two visual texts for teaching a course called “Saints, Wives and Witches” at the University of Houston-Victoria: Jennifer A. Rea’s graphic novel Perpetua’s Journey (Oxford, 2018), which illustrates the eponymous North African martyr’s third-century prison diary, and the film Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009), directed by Margarethe von Trotta, who drew on feminist readings of Hildegard of Bingen’s writings for the purposes of dramatization. The course itself followed a chronology that took students from antiquity to the early modern period and was divided into thematic units that highlighted women’s intersecting identities with regards …

What She Said: Recovering Early Modern Women’S Experiences Through Court Records, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Much of the fame of early modern England’s church courts today is based on their reputation as “women’s courts.” Because ecclesiastical law allowed women to initiate suit and to be sued in their own names, the courts’ records are full of women’s words. But the task of discovering women’s experiences through these records is a methodologically complex one. Words attributed to women, for example, come to us courtesy of the male church court clerk, whose education and legal experience shaped the written record of legal oral proceedings. And while women filing suit gives the appearance of female agency, it was …

Architectural Chastity Belts: The Window Motif As Instrument Of Discipline In Italian Fifteenth-Century Conduct Manuals And Art, Jennifer Megan Orendorf

Quidditas

Offering advice on a range of topics from the quotidian to the extraordinary, from superstition to scientific, fifteenth-century conduct manuals appealed to readers of all Italian social classes. This essay focuses specifically on manuals which prescribe behaviors for women, and investigates the reception of these precepts and the extent to which these notions informed and transformed women’s lives. Specifically, I examine one piece of advice which recurs throughout instructional literature during this time: the prescribed notion that women should remain far removed from their household windows for the sake of their honor, reputation and chastity. Widely read manuals, such as …

The Convent As Cultural Conduit: Irish Matronage In Early Modern Spain, Andrea Knox

Quidditas

Irish catholic women religious who migrated to Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries established a strong tradition of schools, hospitals and charitable institutions. Education and learning were important to Irish communities, and were recognised within Spain. Irish nuns and their convents were not part of an enclosed tradition and outreach work was a central aim. Sponsorship links between women were part of a collective plan, and cultural matronage by and for women appears to have been very effective. Censorship by the Inquisition and tridentine orthodoxy was contested by women’s religious houses which resisted censorship of book collections and art …

Wîse Maget, Jolyon Timothy Hughes

Quidditas

In Medieval German Literature, the figure of the wise man occurs repeatedly. This can be evidenced in several primary works of literature from the period. In Wolframs von Eschenbach's Parzival Trevrizent is shown to be a very wizened and understanding member of Parzival’s own family. In Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, the title figure is known to be wise before he is physically mature. However, in the critical literature on the period, there is no mention of older female characters exhibiting similar attributes as those qualities exemplified by the male figure of young Tristan, let alone younger women or girls.

Re-Visioning Renaissance Women: On The Perils And Pleasures Of Re-Viewing The Past, Sara Jayne Steen, Susan Frye

Quidditas

Two years ago, editor Sharon Beehler and the editorial board of the jour- nal Quidditas (formerly the Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association) requested that we—Sara Jayne Steen and Susan Frye—edit a gathering of essays on women in the Renaissance as one way to mark the journal’s new name and critical directions. The gathering printed here, even more than we had hoped, announces this journal’s position as interdisciplinary, historically grounded, and willing to ask of history, literature, and the arts both familiar, recurring questions and those newer questions occasioned by a variety of theoretical perspectives.

Inventing The Wicked Women Of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn, And Anne Stanhope, Retha M. Warnicke

Quidditas

In Tudor histories, perhaps more than in other histories, writers have failed to distinguish, as Judith Shapiro has pointed out with reference to anthropological literature, "consistently between the sex bias emanating from the observer and the sex bias characteristic of the community under study.” The sex and gender bias of early modern society was, of course, pervasive and ubiquitous. Prescriptive works instructed women to confine their activities to domestic and family matters. Even as litigators in the courts of law, they were disadvantaged. Generally defining women as the inferior sex, their male contemporaries judged women’s worth by their chastity, silence, …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: “Ples Acsep Thes My Skrybled Lynes”: The Construction And Conventions Of Women’S Letters In England, 1540–1603, James Daybell

Quidditas

The central themes of this essay are delineated by the contrasting examples of two female correspondents. Both women are from similar gentry backgrounds and wrote in the late 1570s to early 1590s. The first is Mary Harding, the court maid of Lady Bridget Manners, herself the daughter of Elizabeth, countess of Rutland, famed for her marriage to Robert Tyrwhit in 1594, which so greatly incurred the wrath of Elizabeth I. Only four of Mary Harding’s letters have survived, all of which were sent to her mistress’s mother in order to keep her abreast of court news, her daughter’s progress, and …

Review Essay: The Other Voice In Early Modern Europe, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. Trans. and ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. xxxii + 109 pp. $33.00.

Cereta, Laura. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Transcribed, trans. and ed. Diana Robin. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997. xxvii + 216 pp. $45.00/$19.95.

Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo). The Worth of Women. Wherein is Clearly Revealed their Nobility and their Superiority to Men. Trans. and ed. Virginia Cox. The Other Voice in …

Review Essay: Mary Beth Rose, Ed., Women In The Middle Ages And The Renaissance, Joan M. West

Quidditas

Mary Beth Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Syracuse University, 1986.

Correspondence With Women: The Case Of John Knox, A. Daniel Frankforter

Quidditas

The Reformation opened an ambiguous era for women. There were risks of losses and opportunities for gain for women who made the transition to Protestant faith. Protestant women gave up some traditional religious supports. The Virgin Mary and the female saints, who provided Catholic women with role models and sisterly patronage, were thrust aside. Priestly intercession ended, the Protestant women, like men, stood alone with their consciences in the presence of God. Women were denied the option of careers as nuns in self-governing female communities, and virginity ceased to be a respected female vocation. All women were expected to marry, …