It is a sure sign of the maturing of a field of enquiry when attempts to summarize its findings begin to appear. Among medievalists, the study of women has been notably vital in the last generation or so. Here Helen M. Jewell takes on an ambitious task: to offer an overview of the lived experience of medieval Englishwomen through a survey of available sources and recent scholarship. "It is healthy to want to know what women in medieval England did, and what they could do, but this will not be achieved by presenting them in isolation from the whole society in which they actually lived "(2). Jewell intersperses anecdotal evidence with her consideration of available sources and recent scholarship. At its best, especially regarding work and the necessary adaptability of women of all social stations, the book lives up to its promise of illuminating the lives of its subjects.
A substantial Introduction first treats the study of English medieval women in the last century. Jewell proceeds to review the extant source material, written, visual, and material. She concludes with a discussion of the practical and ideological disadvantages peculiar to insular medieval women. The title of Chapter 1, "The background: women in England before 1100," suggests that Jewell sees the Anglo-Saxon era less as a subject in itself than as context necessary to understand the developments of subsequent centuries. The next three chapters, which comprise the heart of the book, are organized according to a division "derived from class but angled by what women did"(24). Chapter 2 discusses non-noble women of the countryside, Chapter 3 urban women, and Chapter 4 women of the landed classes, from queens to the admittedly anachronistic category of local gentry. The fifth chapter, "Women and religion," covers nuns, recluses, lay piety, and finally Lollard women and witches. A brief Chapter 6 refers to scholarship on medieval Continental women and draws attention back to the untapped potential of both written sources, especially tax and court records, and interdisciplinary work in archeology, anthropology, and medicine. True to her self- identification as a member of the "optimistic school of women's history," Jewell ends by noting what she finds to be the two most significant accomplishments of the study of medieval women: the discrediting of an overgeneralized and static view of medieval women's lives, and the now-standard inclusion of women in social historical scholarship.
Such a summary suggests some of the strengths of the book. Jewell has read widely, she calls attention to the importance of interdisciplinary study of medieval women, and her approach is often refreshingly commonsensical. She remarks, for example, that Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret Beaufort are hardly typical, but their accomplishments show what was possible for women operating under the best circumstances time and place allowed. Jewell also cautions against simplistic views of women's lives evolving unidirectionally across the medieval centuries, either steadily toward emancipation or in decline after a golden age. The decision to organize the discussion by class, with the agrarian poor and only marginally more fortunate urban dwellers coming first, is a salutary reminder that the great majority of medieval women, indeed medieval people, lived in obscurity and under difficult material circumstances. Those circumstances, the author shows, and changing life stages, required women to be flexible, skillful jugglers of multiple responsibilities which changed over time. (Jewell encourages further study of court records, one set of which she has herself edited, precisely because they offer the most telling glimpses into the lives of ordinary women.) Discussing the property rights of Anglo-Saxon noblewomen, Jewell cites a will in which one woman bequeathed two slave sisters to different beneficiaries as evidence of "how one woman's property rights made a chattel of another woman's person"(35). Regarding the near-absence of female voice in the extant records, Jewell notes that "Educational opportunity in the Middle Ages was very much a matter of class, and only within class was it a matter of gender"(16). It is not clear why gender is necessarily a subcategory of class, but the point that few medieval English men could read, either, is typical of Jewell's determination to see her subjects in broad social and economic contexts. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 as a unit are quite useful as summaries of the recent scholarly findings which similarly place women in those contexts.
The individual chapters, however, pose some difficulties. The chapter on the Anglo-Saxon era, which foreshadows the rest of the book in its organization into sections on women in countryside, towns, the aristocracy, and religion, is too brief to be effective: law codes of Ine and Cnut are cited in the same paragraph without regard to the four centuries that separate them. Much of the chapter is similarly general and moves around indiscriminately in time and space. The best work is in the central chapters on country, city, and noble women, but even here the exposition is sometimes disjointed, masses of often entertaining anecdotal detail left in ambiguous relationship to the summary of scholarship. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are emphasized at the expense of the twelfth and thirteenth. This is particularly true of the chapter on urban women, which begins by telling us that about 10 percent of the medieval English population lived in towns, a contention neither explained nor documented. What is a "town" in this context? Is the figure equally valid for the early twelfth century, the early fourteenth, and the late fifteenth? Nearly a third of the footnotes in this chapter cite the work of P.J.P. Goldberg on post-plague Yorkshire. The absence of "sophisticated economic evidence" before about 1250 seems an insufficient excuse for lopsided coverage when there is a good deal of code and charter record from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here Jewell duplicates, or at least reflects, half of an all-too-familiar pattern: scholars who study medieval women find inspiration in the heroic figures of the early Middle Ages and then information on those who lived in the era of copious written records from the later thirteenth century forward. To her credit, Jewell does not fall into the trap of romanticizing the early period, but she leaves the central Middle Ages largely unexplored. The exception is the chapter on women and religion, especially the sections on nuns and recluses, which devotes some space to the twelfth century. After that, though, when attention turns to pious laywomen and heterodoxy, the post-1350 bias reasserts itself.
Given her evident knowledge of recent scholarship, Jewell is surprisingly hesitant to take sides in historians' controversies, and it is hard to discern a coherent point of view beyond the desire to bring readers as close to the real experience of medieval women as the sources will allow. (Alas, the book presupposes too much familiarity with medieval English sources and terminology to be useful for most American undergraduates.) Despite her appreciation of interdisciplinary approaches, Jewell is suspicious of literature as a source of historical study, perhaps because imaginative writings have been the focus of what she calls "some of the more extreme feminist expositions of recent years, which polarise by gender behavior in the past according to feminist ideologies which belong to the transient present"(vii). Yet she claims that "Poetry is essentially a phrasing of generalized experience"(12) and uses literary sources throughout the book, especially effectively in the chapter on women's rural experience. Historians are sometimes sloppy about their use of literary evidence, to be sure, but the notion that any records subject to quantification are ipso facto superior and hermeneutically transparent is naive. It is a happy thought that perhaps the scholarship on medieval English women is already too copious to be summarized in one short book. This one might have been more helpfully titled "Women and work in later medieval England" (since Jewell views even monastic vocation as a "career opportunity" for landed women). From that perspective, Jewell has done a real service. Her book will serve well advanced students and scholars of the Middle Ages who want an up-to-date and often lively description of the activities of ordinary and extraordinary Englishwomen. It both shows what has been learned and suggests what more might be learned through focused archival investigation and in broad, comparative syntheses - just what a professed optimist's work should do.