This collection of thirteen essays by North American scholars provides a series of micro-biographies of individual medieval women's "lived experience," ones that aim to recover some of the nuance and emotion of women's relationships and their political connections. In their introduction, editors Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone offer a cogent overview of the historiography about medieval women, detailing how these essays both draw on established historiographical approaches and chart new avenues for writing the stories of women about whom only fragmentary records survive. Divided into two sections, Rereading Sources and Seeking the Undocumented, this collection features work by well-established second- or beginning-stage third-generation scholars of women's history.
In "The Foundation Legend of Godstow Abbey: A Holy Woman's Life in Anglo-Norman Verse," Emily Amt argues that the abbey's chronicle, which is preserved in both Latin and Middle English versions, stems from a French original written for Godstow (perhaps even by a Godstow nun). This hagiographical fragment highlights the convent's twelfth-century founder, Ediva Launceleve of Winchester, and is usefully edited and translated here. As Amt indicates, this text in French offers much about twelfth-century women's patronage of religious communities, as well as about local cults and textual production. Amt's piece will be of great value to a number of scholars, especially those focused on women's literacies but would be improved with references to discussions of medieval women's literary production by Mary Erler, Carole Meale, Felicity Riddy, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. Likewise, Nicole Archambeau's "Remembering Countess Delphine's Books: Reading as a Means to Shape a Holy Woman's Sanctity" would benefit from complementary scholarship on medieval women's literacies, as she engages eye-witness testimony regarding the orthodox religious practices of a fourteenth-century countess. Investigating the canonization inquest records, Archambeau demonstrates that Delphine de Puimichel read Gregory the Great, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, but she does not indicate if these works were in Latin or vernacular translations nor does she speculate about the countess' education or access to these works. What also would be useful is for Archambeau to consider the difficulty of parsing oral testimony in official documents (a discussion that has been very usefully considered in Joan of Arc studies).
Jonathan R. Lyon's "The Letters of Princess Sophia of Hungary, a Nun at Admont" is an elegantly written and well-argued essay that focuses on the letters sent by a twelfth-century princess who was housed at the famous German convent of Admont. Betrothed to the son of Conrad III, Sophia was sent to Germany as a young girl but never married when political relations broke down. Her letters show that this Hungarian exile was allowed to become a nun, when she was refused travel home and despoiled of her dowry. The letters, which are preserved in a large collection at Admont, illustrate the nuns' epistolary efficacy. Lyons does not address the educational training Sophia may have had (there or elsewhere) nor does he consider the nuns' possible manipulation of Sophia's messages but rightly observes that the sisters were likely instrumental in producing these letters.
In the very welcome essay, "The Missing Rusian Women: The Case of Evpraksia Vsevolodovna," Christian Raffensberger shows persuasively how western documentation can offer information about elite women who were rarely featured in Rusian sources, such as Evpraksia (also known as Adelheid and consort of Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor). While it remains suggestive, his assertion that Evpraksia's burial is an indication of her political influence on behalf of Rusʹ offers a means by which we might reassess her role. Anne R. DeWindt's "Leaving Warboys: Emigration from a Fifteenth-Century English Village" offers an engaging look at gender and migration patterns, showing how economic and social milieu shaped women's choices. Her evidence provides individual as well as family history to illustrate that women actively sought better economic opportunities, and while they may not have traveled as far as men, the documents provide evidence of "chain migration" where women from the same family or village followed others who had gone before. Most intriguing is that marriage was not a crucial factor in single women's migration, as there is little evidence that a significant percentage ever married (though lack of evidence, of course, makes this claim less of a certainty).
Jamie Smith's "Women as Legal Agents in Late Medieval Genoa" is a beautifully argued presentation of the paradoxes of law and real life, in which women were prohibited from having an active role in legal affairs but often took them on. In contrast to practices in other Italian city states, Smith has found that if no suitable males were available or if no males objected, Genoese women were allowed to participate as procurators and legal guardians. As Smith notes, this means that "historians should query what kind of informal training women would have, by fathers or husbands or perhaps, both, so that they would have the skills and knowledge to successfully maintain their families," (121) a truism for all kinds of female participation in legal and political affairs. In the final essay of this section, Amy Livingstone's "Piecing Together the Fragments: Telling the Lives of the Ladies of Lavardin through Image and Text" begins with a parish's material evidence to illustrate a female-centric iconographic programme, including a sculpture of the Virgin on the Throne of Wisdom and a painting of The Tree of Jesse showing Jesus' maternal line (an image relatively unknown in that region). Offering a prosopographical account of the Lavardin family, Livingstone argues that these women, who were active patrons of the church, were responsible for the iconography in the north side of the church. While Livingstone provides no documentation that indicates the Lavardin women commissioned these images in particular, we do know from other evidence that laity were responsible for the maintenance and decoration of the parish nave and thus Livingstone's conclusion is entirely plausible. Her essay would be supported by references to a number of similar articles on female patronage in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (University of Georgia 1996) and Reassessing the Roles of Women as "Makers" of Medieval Art and Architecture (Brill 2012).
The first essay of the second section, Valerie L. Garver's "Girlindis and Alpais: Telling the Lives of Two Textile Fabricators in the Carolingian Empire," allows us tantalizing glimpses into the lives of two ninth-century textile makers. Beginning with an embroidered cushion Abbess Alpais of Rheims (half-sister of Charles the Bald) made for St. Remigius when his body was translated into a new tomb in 852, Garver discusses not only Alpais' elite family connections but also her education, for the Latin inscription that adorns the pillow indicates that Bishop Hincmar ordered the abbess to produce the work. In analyzing the inscription, Garver places her discussion within the context of Carolingian women's learning and provides a suggestive consideration of Alpais' education and training. The lesser-documented Girlindis offers a compelling counterpoint, as it seems she was a member of a servile class. Her name--copied alongside thirteen others in a polyptych of textiles owed the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Pré--allows Garver to consider the conditions of her labor since none of her work can be identified. By analyzing together surviving textiles and written documentation, Garver demonstrates how we might recover more of women's lived experience, both elite and servant, in very early medieval communities.
Rebecca Lynn Winer's "A Peasant Family in Roussillon: Understanding the Experiences of Women in the Blanquet Parchments, 1292-1345," provides an excellent introduction to the records of a peasant family, one that discusses the economic and social conditions for widows in medieval Perpignan. Despite a number of typos that appear in this essay, it would be very useful for students in a beginning historiography class, particularly because Winer provides an appendix which offers a catalog or "digest" of the twenty-four written documents associated with the family. [Indeed, one wishes that each of the contributors to the volume had provided a similar appendix of the evidence used to frame their biographies, as this would be a very valuable teaching tool.] In "Joan de Valence: A Lady of Substance," Linda E. Mitchell examines the life of the granddaughter and final heir of William and Isabella le Marshal. Through a strong prosopographical study of this thirteenth-century family, Mitchell demonstrates the intimate relationships Joan of Valence cultivated throughout her life, from girlhood in the royal household to a political marriage to the half-brother of Henry III to a widowhood in which Joan managed her estates and maintained a busy social life.
Theresa Earenfight's "Royal Women in Late Medieval Spain: Catalina of Lancaster, Leonor of Albuquerque, and María of Castile" offers an intriguing investigation of the roles of three royal women during a particular historical moment, the overthrow of Castile in 1420. Earenfight's use of a range of medieval documents, particularly letters and chronicles, showcases well the evidence that can be brought together to illustrate women's participation in political history. The last two essays complement Mitchell's in that both focus on the daily interactions and emotional relationships medieval women developed. The first, by necessity, is more speculative: Charlotte Newman Goldy's "Muriel, a Jew of Oxford: Using the Dramatic to Understand the Mundane in Anglo-Norman Towns" poses a series of interesting questions about a woman known chiefly through royal orders confirming that her husband David could divorce her. With little other data about Muriel, Goldy considers the physical space of Jewish houses in Oxford and the location of Muriel's home as a means to illustrate a "relational map" of the interactions she may have had with both Jewish and Christian women in her neighborhood. Similarly, Katherine L. French's "Well-Behaved Women Can Make History: Women's Friendships in Late Medieval Westminster" offers a discussion of the relationships Johanna Morland developed through the patronage of her parish church, St. Margaret's in Westminster. French demonstrates that Johanna's innovative fundraising for her parish, as well as the tradition of female gifting that it engendered, provides a very different view of the lived experience of medieval women from those offered by proscriptive literary treatments of wives and widows. Like other essays in this collection, French's discussion would be enhanced by bibliography on women's cultural patronage of religious institutions.
Indeed, if there is any major flaw in Writing Medieval Women's Lives, it is that their "attempt to get closer to the life as lived, personified in individual stories, to understand the aspects of living in the past that were rarely 'recorded,'" most contributors focuses narrowly on scholarship that has been traditionally viewed as "historical" but in their goal to examine "known sources (such as letters, religious writings, accounts, or notarial records) in new ways... or combine sources (such as chronicles from very different areas, or iconography and written sources) to develop a fuller picture," (1) it seems that this focus limits the possibilities for this fuller narrative. Great gains have been made in multiple disciplines about medieval women's social and political engagement, women's literacies, and female patronage, and while this scholarship is very complementary to many of the discussions presented in this volume, it is rarely in evidence in the contributors' notes or the collective bibliography. This move, I fear, keeps the good presentations here more isolated from larger conversations about medieval women.
In closing, I would note two production problems that need to be addressed by the press: the reproduction values of the three images included are very poor and most of the genealogical tables and maps (at what can only be a space-and therefore cost-saving measure) are reproduced in ridiculously small sizes with miniscule font, masking the valuable information provided therein. It is a shame that the evidence so carefully gathered that makes the whole so valuable is minimized, for Writing Medieval Women's Lives is a strong addition to The Middle Ages Series and is an important resource for scholars and students of medieval women's history