This collection of essays is the fourth in a series that publishes papers drawn primarily from an annual conference on the history of medieval and early modern women at Trinity College Dublin. Past volumes have included valuable essays on the history of women primarily in Ireland. This volume explores histories of women from a broader range of geographical areas including England, France and Spain. The editors' introduction explains the genesis of the collection and positions the essays on women within the context of gendered analysis of histories, arguing that there remain many stories to be told of how women behaved, "how they saw themselves, and how they were seen by others".
Kimberly LoPrete opens her essay on "Gendering viragos" with a salutary warning on the dangers that still exist for scholars of medieval women in assuming basic terms held the same meaning as they do in modern discourse. Words such as sex and gender; public and domestic spheres are the ones that she mentions (17). The word that she analyses in this essay is 'virago'--a word used rather rarely in the medieval period, but not holding the negative connotations that it developed in later years. She develops her argument by examining the exegesis of the term by commentators such as Isidore of Seville and argues that there was a ready pool of textual images of married or widowed viragos who were "strong yet attractive, modest yet leaders of men" that were available for use by later medieval writers on aristocratic women (29). Her overall argument is that the characteristics of the lady of the castle that were praised using the word 'virago' were viewed as natural extensions of a women's role as wife or mother of a lord, not as transgressions (37).
The next two essays analyse how two queens employed well-understood images of the roles of women to influence political events. Maia Sheridan's essay on Emma of Normandy argues that the Encomium, commissioned by Emma, was designed to further the claims of her sons as the legitimate heirs to the English throne after the death of Cnut in 1035. She argues that in order to bolster her claims, Emma-- through the Encomium--was represented as downplaying her role in the power struggles and decision-making processes of government and emphasising her passivity and ideal motherly virtues. Emma was by this time a widowed mother of sons who were disputed heirs to the throne, and Sheridan argues that her story highlights the "emphemeral nature of female power" that depended on life cycle and ability to influence others. Patrick Healy's essay on Matilda of Tuscany examines her role in the polemics surrounding the Gregorian reform and those events known as the Investiture contest. He analyses the writings of those in the court of Matilda in terms of 'political allegory' where examples from the Bible were clearly used for their resonances with the key figures of the time--Matilda herself, Henry IV, the 'anti-pope' Wibert of Ravenna. Matilda is compared with the Old Testament Deborah who judged and practiced warfare and to the Old Testament warrior women Jael and Judith. Healy argues that these references served a number of purposes including justifying Christian warfare as well as presenting Matilda in a tradition of strong female leadership.
Conor Kostick takes us beyond the heady heights of queenly leadership to analyse the women who went on the First Crusade. He begins by enumerating the wide range of sources that attest to these women, and argues that contrary to many scholars' assertions such women were not merely prostitutes but were women from every class and condition and included many single women whom the clerical authors of most of the sources viewed as particularly dangerous to the morals of the crusaders. His arguments fit well with current scholarship on women and war in medieval Europe, which now recognises the diversity of women who travelled with armies.
Richard Sims has contributed an article on women and crime in England between c. 1220 and 1348. Sims positions his study in the context of Barbara Hanawalt's classic 1974 article on the female felon and examines criminal records from the south and south-east of England. He examines two of the most common felonies in the period: murder and theft. His explanations of the legal concepts and the common-law development are clear enough that this article might be useful for teaching. However some of his assumptions about the way in which medieval women used space need some further analysis, such as when he asserts that medieval peasant women had virtually no social life and that they were nearly always confined to their homes (87).
Chiara of Montefalco and the somatic manifestations of her piety after her death are the subject of a fascinating and rich article by Cordelia Warr. In this article Warr explores the surviving canonisation documents for Chiara that describe how the nuns of her convent found the symbols of the Passion on her cut-open heart. Warr integrates analysis of this event with both contemporary funereal practices as well as the power of visual depictions of Christ at this time.
Helga Robinson-Hammerstein's article on the effects of Luther's teachings on women concentrates on the way that nuns in particular reacted to efforts to move them out of their cloisters and into lay society, chiefly through marriage. As she points out, while some women took up the reformation's ideas willingly, many others did not and argued vehemently that they wished to remain in their convents and that they believed this to be the only pious course to take.
The troubled history of seventeenth-century Ireland is the context in which Bernadette Whelan examines women and warfare. She examines in particular two periods of intensive warfare, 1641-53 and 1689-91. The core of this important essay is her analysis of the papers of the Quakers in the period. She also covers most of the roles of women in these wars: victims, perpetrators, leaders of sieges, she-soldiers, sutlers and camp followers.
Life in the courts of European kings is explored in two essays in this collection, which both emphasise the importance of networks of friendship and familial relationships to both women and men. The court of Louis XIV is analysed by Linda Kiernan for the attitudes towards both marriage and extra-marital affairs. Both were valid avenues for women to pursue lives at court and to achieve varying levels of access to the power and prestige that went with them. Alistair Malcolm examines the women of the court of Madrid in the seventeenth century, in particular the aristocratic women who attended the royal families.
One of the strengths of this collection of essays is the diversity of the methodologies that its contributors have employed, allowing readers to be led outside of their their own fields of expertise into fascinating new areas. Michael Brown's essay on the Scottish Enlightenment author John Millar is a case in point. His study of this little-known writer and thinker has revealed, as he puts it, a footnote that indicates precise and important ideas about women and marriage that he argues are fundamental to understanding the thought of Millar.
The final essay in the collection is by Colm O Conaill on divorce legislation during the French Revolution. He points out that divorce legislation was considered to be essential by the member of the Legislative Assembly and that women seem to have agreed with this as they availed themselves of the new laws in greater numbers than men did. The philosophical importance of divorce laws was that they signalled a concrete departure from the old Catholic indissolubility of marriage to a new state of secular freedom within Revolutionary France. O Conaill's essay includes analysis of the divorce petitions from women themselves, some of whom were critical of the new divorce provisions and called for modification of the laws. The essay also includes a useful appendix Summary of the Divorce legislation.
It could be argued that the only thing that the contributors have in common in this collection is that their essays concern some aspect of the history of women in the pre-modern period. While this is certainly true, there is great merit in publishing essays such as these in a generalist setting. The era of merely adding women to the historical story is near its end as we move seemingly inexorably towards nuanced understandings of the histories of women and men together in gendered history. However while so many women's stories remain unexplored, conferences and essay collections such as this are ideal formats in which to present the richness and diversity of women's lives in the pre-modern era.