Writing Medieval Women's Lives

Medieval women's history is entering a new stage. In the last thirty years medievalists have recovered the sources about women, and have moved women to the foreground of narratives to view society from their vantage point. The historians in this collection are looking for ways to expand the ways we examine and write about medieval women. They are interested in the great and the obscure, and women from different times and places. All attempt to get closer to the life as lived, personified in individual stories. As such, these essays prompt us to rethink what we can know about medieval women, how we can know it, and how we can write about them to expand our insights.

Charlotte Newman Goldy is an associate professor of History at Miami University. She is the author of The Anglo-Norman Nobility in the Reign of Henry I, The Second Generation, "The Shiftiness of a Woman: Narratizing the Anstey Case" in Historical Reflections/Rflexions historiques, and "A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Woman Crossing Boundaries: Visible and Invisible" in The Journal of Medieval History. Amy Livingstone is a professor of History at Wittenberg University. She is co-editor of the journal Medieval Prosopography. She is author of Out of Love for My Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000-1200, several articles on medieval women and aristocratic family life, and co-editor of Medieval Monks: ideals and Realities: Essays in Honor of Richard E. Sullivan.