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This article serves as an introduction to a discussion on cultural practices relating to death in late medieval Iberia. It contends that an intersectional approach is necessary to study this topic because, while all humans die, the way they are buried, memorialized, and remembered is tied to factors such as culture, religion, class, wealth, gender, tradition, legal practices, medical knowledge, technology, and historical context. The second part of this introduction offers an overview of the articles that form this special issue, the goal of which is to gender death in order to better appreciate how late medieval women prepared for it, and how they were commemorated by those they left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares late medieval and early modern patterns of women's preaching in Strasbourg. Medieval women circumvented gendered restrictions against female preaching through performative acts of embodied devotion. This article compares the embodied sermons of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenburg and the printed sermons of Katharina Schütz Zell to discuss the change and continuity in late medieval and early modern women's preaching. Using Beverly Kienzle's definition of the sermon and Roxanne Mountford's concept of rhetorical space, I identify continuity in both's women's conformity to gendered regimes of piety. I also argue that Protestant reform shifted the location of female religious authority from embodied piety to printed sermons, but in a way that reflects a continuity with medieval traditions of female preaching. Overall this article demonstrates how women's preaching persisted within the theological and cultural changes of the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the lush visual imagery of the twenty-six visions that form the foundation of Hildegard of Bingen's first work, Scivias, the physical person of the Virgin Mary appears only once, as the Queen of the heavenly symphony in the book's final vision. The images that coalesce in the musical compositions dedicated to the Virgin in that final symphony, however, resonate throughout the rest of the work, revealing Mary's constant background presence. Moreover, analogues of traditional Marian imagery in both the text and the illustrations Hildegard designed for the work allow us to see how the Virgin exemplifies the life of the virtues from which Hildegard constructs the City of God. Finally, connections between Scivias and Hildegard's third work, Liber diuinorum operum, demonstrate that the Virgin Mary models the path of virginity that Hildegard holds up as the singular road to holy perfection for herself and the nuns under her care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines language related to family and familicide within The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno, a text attributed to a thirteenth-century Italian mystic who claimed intimate and direct knowledge of the divine, Angela da Foligno (1248-1309). Foligno's repudiation of her earthly family allowed her to assert her kinship among Christ, God, and the Eternal Word, positioning herself as a spiritual authority and aspiring to sainthood. Modern critics diverge in their assessment of Angela's visions; some read her mystic speech as empowering, while others call attention to the contradictions and inconsistencies that undermine her position as a spiritual authority. Simone de Beauvoir is the most prominent modern intellectual who critiques the life of Angela da Foligno, arguing that she engaged in mysticism in bad faith and that her writings amount to no more than a narcissistic exaltation of her own person. An examination of Angela's rhetorical strategies and her language related to family throughout The Book of Divine Consolation reveals that her mysticism, whether divinely inspired or the false product of her own ambition, was always engaged with the radical upending of traditional familial hierarchies that limit the status of women in the public sphere.Questa ricerca analizza il linguaggio relativo alla famiglia e al parricidio nel Liber della divina consolazione della beata Angela da Foligno, un testo attribuito ad una mistica vissuta nel tredicesimo secolo che rivendicava una conoscenza intima e diretta del divino, Angela da Foligno (1248-1309). Il ripudio della sua famiglia terrestre le permise di affermare la sua parentela con Cristo, Dio, e lo Spirito Santo, posizionandosi come una autorità spirituale ed aspirando alla santità. I critici moderni divergono nelle loro analisi per quanto riguarda le sue visioni; alcuni dicono che il suo misticismo è produttivo mentre altri attirano l'attenzione sulle contraddizioni e sulle incongruenze che minano la sua posizione come autorità spirituale. Simone de Beauvoir è l'intellettuale moderna più illustre a criticare la vita di Angela da Foligno, sostenendo che ella si impegnava con il misticismo in malafede e che i suoi scritti ammontano a non più di una esaltazione narcisistica della sua personalità. Una ricerca sulle sue strategie retoriche e sul suo linguaggio relativo alla famiglia attraverso il Liber rivela che il suo misticismo, che sia divinamente inspirato o il falso prodotto delle sue ambizioni, determinava lo sconvolgimento radicale della gerarchia della famiglia tradizionale minando lo status della donna nella sfera pubblica.

Despite the lush visual imagery of the twenty-six visions that form the foundation of Hildegard of Bingen’s first work, Scivias, the physical person of the Virgin Mary appears only once, as the Queen of the heavenly symphony in the book’s final vision. The images that coalesce in the musical compositions dedicated to the Virgin in that final symphony, however, resonate throughout the rest of the work, revealing Mary’s constant background presence. Moreover, analogues of traditional Marian imagery in both the text and the illustrations Hildegard designed for the work allow us to see how the Virgin exemplifies the life of the virtues from which Hildegard constructs the City of God. Finally, connections between Scivias and Hildegard’s third work, Liber diuinorum operum, demonstrate that the Virgin Mary models the path of virginity that Hildegard holds up as the singular road to holy perfection for herself and the nuns under her care.

Modthryth has been largely understood as an early example of a character archetype common in Western culture, the wicked queen. She is read as a parable warning of the dangers of allowing women to exercise power. Such a reading has anachronistically aligned the cultural attitudes of the audience of Beowulf with those found in the works of later chroniclers, such as Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, John of Worcester, and William of Malmesbury, whose accounts of historical medieval English queens such as Cynethryth and Ælfthryth, are permeated with this anxiety. However, unlike these later chronicles, Beowulf is positive in its depiction of queens exercising power. In this paper, we argue that the treatment of Modthryth is, in fact, very similar to that of kings in the poem and that she is judged by the same measure and discussed in the same vocabulary as other powerful figures. We argue that the digression should be read in terms of an entirely different cultural issue and one which has been largely ignored: the emotional difficulties of being a peace-weaver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Wulf and Eadwacer is famously difficult to interpret. The assessment of Benjamin Thorpe, "[o]f this I can make no sense" (Thorpe in Codex exoniensis: a collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry, from a manuscript in the library of the dean and chapter of Exeter. W. Pickering, London, 1842, p. 527), has largely stood. However, since the poem is complete, legible, and the manuscript is undamaged, it must have been equally perplexing to a medieval audience—unless it was contextualised. This has led some scholars to conclude that the story of Wulf and Eadwacer must have been known and that poem's narrator must be a mythic figure. The most common assumption is that she is to be identified with Signy whose story is strikingly similar. Even still it seems strange since none of the other elegies appear to have mythic narrators. However, I suggest that Wulf and Eadwacer, like many Old English texts including the riddles, Wonders of the East, or Daniel, adapts a Latin genre to a vernacular sensibility and that if an early English poet were to adapt the Heroides, Signy would be the obvious heroine to choose. Moreover, the differences in style between the Heroides and Wulf and Eadwacer are typical of the adaptations of classical models to old English literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the interest of Brazilian researchers in the fields of Ancient History and Medieval History with the issues of history teaching, especially with the teaching of these contents in basic education, is notorious. Inserting these concerns, this article explores the main pedagogical instrument of public education in the country, the textbook. Taking advantage of the subject of the thematic dossier, the article presents notes about the Middle Ages in school textbooks, specifically in the works of Fundamental Education - Final Years, approved by the National Program for Books and Didactic Material (PNLD) and indicated in the Textbook Guide-2020. The objective of the article is to discuss possible changes in the insertion and approach to content driven by the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC). For this, after presenting a panorama of the insertion of the Middle Ages in the approved manuals, the article analyzes a case, the social roles of medieval women, a subject of "object of knowledge" and "skill" of the BNCC for the 6th year of Elementary School. The work is based on seven textbooks approved in the PNLD and proposes a comparative study of the theme in the manuals. The results demonstrate the reduction of the Middle Ages content in post-BNCC textbooks and that the works continue to approach medieval women in a dissociated form from the main narrative of the chapters and in a superficial way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many late medieval Visitation images, the Virgin Mary greets her cousin Elizabeth while John and Jesus--fully formed fetuses still in the womb--can also be seen greeting each other. This seemingly unconventional image grew in popularity in medieval Germany over the course of the fifteenth century. This paper considers an antependium from Strasbourg (1410), which is currently held at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt but has been nearly forgotten in scholarly literature. The antependium's unique status as a woven image of Christ in the womb creates added meaning for both Eucharistic devotion and female viewership. Using the Strasbourg antependium as an exemplar of trends in late medieval German spirituality and art, this paper attempts to go beyond traditional scholarship's interest in spiritual pregnancy to assert that this image of Christ in the womb relates to concrete medieval ideas about maternity, childhood, pregnancy, and reproduction in general. The imagery offered in this 1410 antependium corresponds with Strasbourg's distinct interest in repopulating after the decimation of the Black Death. Focusing on female lay viewership, this paper will discuss how the Strasbourg antependium combines traditional medieval expectations of women's roles with the theme of holy motherhood to elevate the status of pregnancy. This artwork allowed male authority figures to engage with lay female spirituality and encourage population growth in uncertain, plague-ridden times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present article, we undertake the first in-depth analysis and contextualization of the funerary inscription from the tomb lid of Countess Teresa de Carrión (d. 1093), designed by the monks at the Cluniac priory of San Zoilo in Carrión de los Condes (Palencia). Focusing on the figure of a carismatic woman from the central Middle Ages, we investigate the context of the elite kin network in Castilla-León to which she pertained, as well as the deliberate construction of her memory in later centuries. The memorial discourse was created through a complex web of documentation, both visual and written, which developed in differing patterns for a range of purposes. Their ultimate common goal was to establish an attractive – and lucrative – history of the countess as monastic patron during a time when the institution was falling into progressive decadence. In unexpected results, the material evidence of the inscription opens a new window onto a little-studied moment in the history of the monastery through the deliberate elevation of a past female patron. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's abilities to participate in capital markets are widely considered a crucial aspect of their economic opportunities. Yet female involvement in (private) capital markets has received scarce attention in studies of medieval finance. This article explores the position of women in late medieval capital markets through a study of the Low Countries. By comparing two cities with opposite economic trajectories during the fifteenth century (Antwerp and Leuven), it interrogates how different economic conditions affected gender inequality in capital markets, and how women's involvement was influenced by marital status. Quantitative analysis of the registers of aldermen – which contain economic contracts of all sorts – shows that, regardless of the city's economic conditions, women's share in the capital market was relatively modest and comparable to that in other European regions. However, the characteristics of women's participation in Antwerp's booming commercial economy differed from patterns that have been conventionally described by historiography. The article shows that as investors Antwerp women held a comparable position to men and highlights the importance of never-married women as creditors. It concludes that differing economic structures and conditions in adjacent cities affected women's position in capital markets, with important implications for interregional comparisons of women's economic opportunities across (medieval) Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concept of performance to think about four fourteenth-century Portuguese monuments with effigies of elite women holding open books in their hands. It proposes looking at them as builders of a reading/praying experience aimed at engaging their viewers by converting the dead into undying performers who in turn encourage their audiences to imitate their performance. The sculpted women operate as activators of a mediation between the artwork and its audiences, the terrestrial and the celestial, the bodily and the spiritual, timelessness and mortality, the personal and the social, presence and absence, the word and silence, the contemplative and the performative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how a medieval noblewoman's positive reputation could be framed through different aspects of seigneurial power, using a case study of Jeanne de Penthièvre and her war for the duchy of Brittany. Froissart wrote about Jeanne in the three main redactions of the first book of his Chroniques. However, he focused in the Amiens manuscript on her position as an heiress and the object of her followers' loyalty, while the B text largely reduced her prominence but planted the seeds for the active military role Jeanne assumed in the Rome redaction. Such changes did not move strictly between more or less accurate reports, but engaged with different tropes that had also featured in the official portrayals of Jeanne during her lifetime. These parallel constructions of reputation reveal a plasticity to models of lordly authority even in rhetorical contexts more usually associated with formulaic and conventional representations of elite society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Florentine Dominican preacher Fra Giovanni Dominici (1355–1419) warned his female reader of the dangers to which the senses, and sight in particular, exposed the soul, reminding her of how Eve was led to sin by looking at the apple, Samson by looking at Delilah, and David in looking at Bathsheba. The Franciscan preacher Fra Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) warned against what was evidently a common practice, that of running to kiss the altar, or the sacred stone, chalice or paten, and reminded his listeners that they were to consider themselves unworthy of such privileges. The sense of touch was often instrumental in obtaining cures, as well as fulfilling ritual requirements. Yet, as the preachers show, the senses, whose site is the body, can be agents of temptation. This essay explores a range of ways in which holy images were ‘sensed’ by women in renaissance Tuscany. My concern, in particular, is with the relationship between the sense of touch and images, especially small panel paintings.

This article examines the origins, development and management of the extrados (non-dotal assets, that is, goods over and above the dowry) in Genoa and Liguria from the mid twelfth to the end of thirteenth century, when several restrictions on the capacity of married women to act freely were introduced. The wide sample of mostly unpublished notarial documents collected for this study makes it possible not only to arrive at a proper definition of the extrados, but also to evaluate in what ways married women could acquire and accrue goods beyond their dowries which, at least formally, were supposed to remain separate from their husbands’ property. The many instances in which women and their husbands appear in transactions where non-dotal goods were involved enable us to assess how these goods were used in family strategies and to what extent the introduction of restrictive legal prescriptions matched actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medieval women, according to theorists whose positions were informed by standard classical tropes, suffered from an "excess" of emotion, which barred them from positions of political authority. Eleanor of Aquitaine--queen, countess, and mother of kings--belies this categorization. As a political actor, especially in defense of her own territories and as regent of her sons' kingdom of England, Eleanor deployed emotional expressions strategically in order to elicit patronage and support from other political leaders. Although many historians have discussed the career of Eleanor of Aquitaine, most emphasize her anomalous position, based on the presentation of her made by contemporary chroniclers such as Roger of Hoveden and Ralph de Diceto. Unlike her husband, Henry II, whose emotional outbursts usually resulted in disaster--vide the Becket debacle--Eleanor's use of emotion reinforced her position of authority and was underscored by her claim of legitimate emotional distress as mother and as regent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, minority voices have been muted by the dominant majority (usually male). As a result, it is often assumed that the muted minority had no voice at all. While this has been found to be true in some situations, it is not true in all situations. It is no secret that the medieval Church was extremely male dominated and that women served a very small role in the Church. However, that does not mean that women had no voice at all. Many women played a significant role in the medieval Church by finding their own way to contribute to the dominant male culture. Julian of Norwich was one such woman. Acting as a Christian mystic in the Church, Julian was able to make major contributions to the Church body by engaging muted group theory (MGT), centuries before MGT surfaced. Scholarship on rhetoric and medieval women is sparse. The aim of this essay is to shed some light on medieval women's rhetoric by exploring the rhetorical strategies of Julian of Norwich to engage MGT in the medieval Church and provide a voice for the voiceless women of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we tend to define empowerment in terms of confrontation and competition, and read medieval texts for affirmation that women are disempowered by their patriarchal culture, redefining empowerment might help us see another side to the story and appreciate more fully that, as today, female voices cannot be so easily pigeonholed. Close analysis of three strong female characters--Lucrece, Melior, and Urake--from the twelfth-century French romance Partonopeu de Blois demonstrates that these characters are empowered in the sense that they are in control of their own choices, confident in their pursuit of their own desires, and successful in achieving those goals. The titular hero, Partonopeu, is one of their projects and he is shaped by each of these women as they educate him and cultivate his innate potential. They play to their strengths in using extensive planning, covert action, manipulation, and deception as they strengthen the social system. They are depicted as positive figures who achieve both private and public success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Links between women and confraternities in medieval Andalusia were extraordinarily rich, that is, women were present and took part in these institutions, beyond platitudes. These links were related to economic, social and, specially, welfare relations, which were one of the main factors to explain the extraordinary success experimented by confraternities during the end of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. But there were also links which connected women and confraternities during the afterlife, trough a wide range of religious dispositions present in testaments. For all those reasons, we can deduce that during this period confraternities provided women with some services and established with them some relationships on equal terms than if they were men.

Voluntary urban reclusion in late medieval Italian cities remains a field of research yet to be fully investigated. The phenomenon has ancient roots in early Christianity but, in the late Middle Ages, acquired previously unknown dimensions or, at least, visibility. This paper compares the results of research conducted by Allison Clark Thurber on Siena and of Eleonora Rava on Pisa, highlighting in both cases the unique characteristics of the phenomenon within each city, as well as the nature of the relationship among reclusion, local community, and municipal institutions. Despite the different documentary sources and contrasting attention civil institutions gave to recluses, both cities demonstrated varying types and degrees of the phenomenon of voluntary urban reclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates a little discussed aspect of female pilgrimage in the High Middle Ages: companionship. Drawing on evidence from miracle collections produced in twelfth-century England, it examines the identities and motivations of individuals recorded as accompanying women on their journeys to local healing shrines. The article establishes that women travelled with a variety of companions ranging from husbands and parents to neighbors and hired guides, but it also reveals that the frequency with which women are depicted on pilgrimage with a companion is surprisingly low. Putting these findings into context, the article assesses both the social reality and the cultural representation of female pilgrimage in these texts, and considers how and why some elements of women's companionship in twelfth-century miracle accounts challenge our general conceptions of female mobility in the Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire is the property of Belin Editeur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores how tales of difficult births found in medieval miracle narratives can contribute to our understanding of the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in twelfth-century England. While rare in the early collections, pregnant and parturient women are increasingly visible in the miracula from the later twelfth century. This paper seeks to explain why childbirth miracles began to appear more frequently and became more medical in character. The discussion centres on the two miracle collections belonging to St Thomas of Canterbury, written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury in the 1170s. Explanations for the more frequent appearance of childbirth miracles are found, not in the changing relationship between humans and saintly intercessors, nor in the contemporary interest in the maternity of the Virgin Mary but in the specific context of the cult of St Thomas and the new emphasis given to lay testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have studied in depth the relations among Christian, Muslim and Jews in Medieval Iberia, but they have largely ignored Christian, Muslim and Jewish women. This essay focuses on the role of these women in Medieval Iberia. It looks at their activities in the household as well as in the society in general, and especially at relationships between women of the three communities. It analyzes whether these women contributed toward a harmonious society and whether they fostered separatism or integration. It also points out how, as well as taking care of their children and tending to other domestic tasks, these women served as defenders of the cultural identity of their communities, especially in times of persecution. Although excluded from religious activities, Muslim and Jewish women in particular helped maintain the religion and culture of their ancestors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can anything be reclaimed from the self-denigrating rhetoric of medieval women in the Christian tradition? This article investigates how feminists might retrieve the Christian virtue of humility by journeying through nine of its functions in the work of the thirteenth-century German beguine, Mechthild of Magdeburg. As a rhetorical strategy, authorizing tactic, and tool of moral formation, Mechthild's 'sinking humility' retains a surprising relevance for feminist women and men today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]