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Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages

Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women’s activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women’s challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life.

These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.

312 pages | 14 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 1989

Medieval Studies

Women's Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction
Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale
Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett
Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe
Monica Green
Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law
James A. Brundage
The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England
Ruth Mazo Karras
Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture
Susan Groag Bell
The Ladies’ Tournament: Marriage, Sex, and Honor in Thirteenth-Century Germany
Sarah Westphal-Wihl
A Female University Student in Late Medieval Kraków
Michael H. Shank
The Conversion of Women to Ascetic Forms of Christianity
Ross S. Kraemer
Women’s Monastic Communities, 500-1100: Patterns of Expansion and Decline
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
The Origins of the Beguines
Carol Neel
Creating and Recreating Communities of Women: The Case of Corpus Domini, Ferrara, 1406-1452
Mary Martin McLaughlin
About the Contributors
Index

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