While the monetization of academic publishing has largely killed the Festschrift as a genre, those that do get published are a chance to realize the intellectual and personal impact of a scholar and become familiar with scholarship of their academic friends and relations. Medieval Work, Worship, and Power: Persuasive and Silenced Voices celebrates the career of Sharon Farmer, emerita professor of medieval history at UC-Santa Barbara, whose scholarship focused largely on northern France. While many derideFestschriften as an odd assortment of partial projects or expanded footnotes, with the occasional gem buried in their midst, the editors of this volume have put together a coherent and high-quality volume that reflects how Farmer’s methodological and thematic innovations have influenced the field more broadly. The collection grows out of two events that honored Farmer’s career, a conference at Santa Barbara on the occasion of her retirement and a session at Kalamazoo that recognized her as a “Medieval Foremother.”
Drawing from Farmer’s broad range of intersecting scholarly interests on monastic communities, women, hagiography, urban history, work, and networks, the editors of this volume have organized the twenty essays into five thematic sections. Part I, “Saints, Monks, Power, and Piety” takes its inspiration from Farmer’s ability to link the holy with the everyday, especially through her work with hagiography. Fiona Harris-Stoertz opens this section with her article “Drinking the Saints: Relic Water in High Medieval English Miracles,” where she analyzes the rise of relic water in later medieval English miracle stories. Anna Katharina Rudolph, in her article “From Runaway Wife to Sainted Queen: Scandal and the Model of Saintly Queenship in the Early Middle Ages” argues that Radegund is not the saintly outlier that many scholars assume. Rather, Fortunatus’s Vita linked her coerced marriage and domestic service to established models of queenly sanctity. “Monks as Enemies: Monastic Feud in Greater Anjou” by Tracey L. Billado-Lotson places monastic fights over property within the context of lay feuds highlighting their similar behavioral outlines and reminding us in the process of the similarities between monks and lords. “Monks and Their Frenemies: Chronicling Gender, Masculinity, and Violence in Twelfth-Century Vézelay” by Andrew G. Miller continues the discussion of inter-monastic dynamics by looking at how Hugh of Poitiers’s rhetorical strategies in his Vézelay history defined his community as it fought off challenges from Cluny.
The five essays in Part II “Women and Work,” take their inspiration from Farmer’s exploration of Paris’s silk industry. Kate Kelsey Staples’s article “The Medieval English Marketplace through the Experience of Women Upholders” traces women’s involvement in England’s used clothing industry by exploring women’s appearance in court cases about credit. The credit networks she uncovers reveal the parameters of women’s broader involvement in England’s economy. “Women’s Labor in Later Medieval France: Case Studies from Paris” by Emily Hutchison and Sara McDougall documents the wide range of women’s work in fifteenth century Paris by drawing on the court records from the Grand Châtelet. “Medieval Sheep, Women’s Labor, Boat Shuttles, Broadcloths, Tapestries, and Beguinages” by Constance H. Berman connects technology, particularly the rise of spinning wheels and boat shuttles for weaving cloth to changing patterns of women’s engagement with cloth production. Marth G. Newman’s article “Ritual Exclusion and Sacramental Transformation: Women's Work at the Edges of the Mass,” argues that despite prohibitions against women approaching the altar, their labor, such as weaving, embroidery, and laundry, enabled the mass, with images and stories of Mary weaving providing women with a way to understand this labor as religious behavior. The last essay in this section, “Between Martha and Mary: Framing Beguine Labor in Medieval France” by Tanya Stabler Miller, points to the ways that clerical discourse about beguines obscures their larger economic roles in medieval Paris. Together the articles in this section show how ubiquitous women’s labor was, even when it was only obliquely documented.
Part III: “Hitting the Glass Ceiling” continues the theme of women’s unacknowledged work, but looking not only at the kind of labor women did, but how their sex confined their contributions, even as they managed families, institutions, and careers. In the opening essay to this section, Julia F. Crisler DeSimas uncovers the fascinating career of Martine Cabot, who was a kennel master and “veterinarian” in Avesnes in the French county of Artois. Abigail P. Dowling’s article “Growing Power of Place: Urban Gardens in Late Medieval Saint-Omer, 1302-1310,” considers the metaphorical, physical, and economic significance of Mahaut d’Artois’s urban gardens. Adam J. Davis’s “Three Visionary Women Hospital Founders, c. 1300,” looks at the statutes of three hospitals founded by women in northern France to argue that founding them not only served pious impulses, but the specifics of their foundations gave scope to their particular administrative concerns. “Urban Women’s Work as Entrepreneurs and Administrators: Cloth Sellers, Abbesses, and Leaders of Hospitals in Fourteenth-Century Douai” by Sarah Hanson-Kegerreis expands on women’s managerial positions to argue that to really appreciate women’s administration of convents and hospitals, scholars need to consider both their pious directions and their commercial engagement. Rounding out this section is Giulia Giamboni’s article “The Many Lives of Pelegrina de Saladino:Mother, Testamentary Executor, Guardian, and Patroness in Late Medieval Zadar,” which traces de Saladino’s various roles as she sought to advance her family’s interests. These essays all demonstrate how varied women’s managerial roles were, and how, despite gendered expectations, they could put their individual imprint on their roles.
Drawing inspiration from Farmer’s careful use of different kinds of sources, Part IV: “Women’s Agency and Networks” considers the larger context of women’s work, and the ramifications for how they appear in our sources. “Communities of Women in Carolingian Society” by Valerie L. Garver points to how women connected across social statuses. In “A Persuasive Voice? Berengaria of Navarre and Female Agency at the Papal Curia, 1200-1230,” Richard E. Barton reexamines Berengaria’s correspondence by looking at the local context and her rhetorical strategies to show how she addressed her own political concerns. “Granting Access: Rescuing the Stories of Missing Witnesses in the Canonization Inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel” by Nicole Archambeau applies network theory to the testimony of Bartranda Bartomieua, Delphine’s maid, to recover the women and men who made up Delphine’s world. Collectively, these essays point to how casting a wide methodological net opens up new ways of understanding medieval women’s lives. Not only are social and political contexts important, but so is the material matrix into which described actions are embedded.
The final part “Interfaith Tensions and Encounters” addresses economic, material, and rhetorical interactions between Christians and non-Christians, themes made evident in Farmer’s work on immigration. In the first essay, “From Vine to Tavern: Jews, Christians, and Wine in Medieval France and Italy” Jessica Marin Elliott outlines the various ways that Jews were involved in the medieval wine trade. Anne E. Lester’s article “Finely Made, From Afar: Crusader Bourse and Histories of Reuse, Unwinding Gendered Labors in French Textile Networks” looks at surviving the purses and alms bags, or bourse, in Sens. Made out of repurposed eastern textiles, Lester argues they are a way that crusaders brough crusader culture “home.” Moreover, the dominance of women in the cloth industry points to these bourses as a way for women to participate in crusader culture. The final essay “Philippe de Mézières’ Visualizations of Gender, Crusade, and Community”byNancy Ann McLoughlin analyzes the use of the female personification of virtues and vices in de Mézières’s text Songe du viel pelerin (The Dream of the Old Pilgrim). De Mézières, a former crusader and advisor to the King of Cyprus, combined gender and crusade language to argue for reforming female behavior as a means of reforming society through the pursuit of crusade.
The themes of women, community, and labor hold these essays together, but they also manifest the rewards of attention to rhetoric, local context, administrative structure, and authorial assumption. Reading between the lines for unexplained possibilities and assumed interactions and connections offers readers methods to take to their own work. This is a lovely tribute to Sharon Farmer’s important contributions to medieval history.