Don’t underestimate Viking women

“To assume that Viking men were ranked above women is to impose modern values on the past, which would be misleading,” cautions Marianne Moen. She has been studying how women’s status and power is expressed through Viking burial findings. Her master’s thesis The Gendered Landscape argues that viking gender roles may have been more complex than we assume.

 Exploring new perspectives of Viking society is a theme which also will be the focus of the forthcoming Viking Worlds conference in March 2013, where Moen is a member of the organising committee.

 Our assumptions of gender roles in viking society could skew the way we interpret burial findings, Moen points out. She uses the 1904 excavation of the Oseberg long boat to illustrate the point. Rather than the skeleton of a powerful king or chieftain, the ship surprisingly contained two female skeletons. “The first theories suggested that this must be the grave of queen Åsa mentioned in Snorri’s Ynglinga saga, and that the other skeleton was her slave servant,” says Moen. Åsa Haraldsdottir was the mother of Viking king Halfdan the Black.

 However, later carbon dating revealed that the buried ship was from around 834 AD - a date which made this theory unfeasible. But the idea of a queen mother and her servant became persistent amongst archaeologists.

Click here to read this article from Science Nordic

Click here to read her thesis The Gendered Landscape: A discussion on gender, status and power expressed in the Viking Age mortuary landscape

Click here to learn more about the Viking Worlds Archaeology Conference, which will be held in Oslo

A deathbed will from medieval Cairo

In April 1143, a well off Egyptian woman made some out-of-the-ordinary requests from her deathbed.

Anyone who elects to leave instructions in a will obviously has something to bequeath that is worth recording. After S.D. Goitein discovered numerous testaments in the Cairo Geniza, he published the texts of a number of wills in the Sefunot annual in their original Judaeo-Arabic with his Hebrew translation, and some appear in English in his five-volume work, A Mediterranean Society (i.e. see vol. 5:153-155 for the case below).

The wife of Abu Nasr, a highly successful merchant from Aleppo, made a deathbed statement in April, 1143. Her family, namely her parents and brother, all resided in the three-story house that she owned.

Two years earlier, this building had been given to her as a gift by her father, Abu ’l-Muna, who had been careful about legalizing the transfer and documented the transaction with the Muslim authorities. This gift included the clear condition that as long as he, his wife and son lived, they could never be evicted from the apartment on the third floor. He made certain to have his son-in-law present when this stipulation was made, so that it could not be changed or challenged at a later date. If the two men were to have a falling out, it would not be farfetched to imagine that Abu Nasr might attempt to be rid of his in-law’s presence.

Click here to read this article from The Jerusalem Post


See also Bodleian Libraries Cairo Genizah collection now available online

Interview with Sylvia Federico on Women in the Peasants' Revolt

The CBC Radio show As it Happens interviewed Professor Sylvia Federico of Bates College about her research on Women in the 1381 Peasant's Revolt. You can download the podcast here. The seven minute segment appears at about the 25 minute mark of the podcast.

Click here to visit the As it Happens website

Click here to read Peasants' Revolt: The time when women took up arms

Peasants' Revolt: The time when women took up arms

Until now the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 is largely believed to have been led by a mob of rebel men, but new research shows women played an important role in orchestrating violence against the government.

Today people are used to the idea of women being in the military. Some are already pressing for the right to fight on the front line. And women fighting as insurgents has been a fact of conflicts from Vietnam to Sri Lanka. But there's a growing feeling historians have overlooked their role in medieval rebellions like 1381's Peasants Revolt.

 On 14 June 1381, rebels dragged Lord Chancellor Simon of Sudbury from the Tower of London and brutally beheaded him. Outraged by his hated poll tax, the insurgents had stormed into London looking for him, plundering and burning buildings as they went.

 It was the leader of the group who arrested Sudbury and dragged him to the chopping block, ordering that he be beheaded.

 Her name was Johanna Ferrour.

Click here to read this article from the BBC


Click here to read A Hotbed for Dissidence: Southeast England in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

Research examines the ‘abortionist saints’ of medieval Ireland

A recent article on sexuality and childbirth in early medieval Ireland reveals some surprising attitudes towards abortion held among the Christians during this period, and that hagiographical texts recount four Irish saints performing abortions.

 'Of Vanishing Fetuses and Maidens Made-Again: Abortion, Restored Virginity, and Similar Scenarios in Medieval Irish Hagiography and Penitentials', by Maeve Callan, appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Callan examines a wide range of hagiographical works and other sources from medieval Ireland. She writes, “these accounts celebrate saints who perform abortions, restore female fornicators to a virginal state, contemplate infanticide, and result from incest and other ‘illegitimate’ sexual unions. Moreover, the texts themselves generally reflect a remarkably permissive attitude toward these traditionally taboo acts, an attitude also found in Irish penitentials and law codes.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

UMKC conference to celebrate Medieval nuns’ literary contributions

The letter to Eadburga expressed thanks for the previous goods sent from Minster-in-Thanet and asked for yet another favor — a special copy of the Epistles of St. Peter.

 Along with Bishop Boniface’s “thank you” was a quantity of gold, to be pounded flat or powdered by the clever fingers of the monastic scribes, for gilding the hand-written book’s Latin letters. When trying to convert the “carnally minded” Germans in the early 700s A.D., it paid to be a little flashy. 

 This Anglo-Saxon bishop/missionary to the pagan tribes was not writing to a house of Kentish monks, however. Eadburga was an abbess, one of hundreds, if not thousands, of nuns involved in copying books throughout the Middle Ages. In our collective cultural misconception, fed by clever advertising (remember the “It’s a miracle” Xerox ad?), cartoons and movies (“The Name of the Rose”), this job is largely thought of as a monk’s — read, “man’s.”

 Yet cloistered women also underpinned European civilization, noted medievalist Virginia Blanton, “another part of the past which, when I was in school, did not appear in our history books.”

Click here to read this article from The Kansas City Star

Click here to visit the Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe II website

The ideal medieval Jewish woman

Whenever one reads about Jewish women in medieval Ashkenaz, the name of Dolce of Worms is certain to appear. (Dolce is derived from the Latin for pleasant or charming). Her life is described in the famous elegy composed by her widowed husband which is his version of “A Woman of Valor” (Proverbs 31). This poetic composition is preceded by two paragraphs in prose that provide graphic details of her death in 1196.

The poem contains the author’s name, R. Elazar, in an internal acrostic; its content portrays an ideal woman who seems to have been involved in an unbelievable number of activities. Dolce and Elazar were German Jewish pietists, known as Hasidei Ashkenaz. Thus the emphasis in the elegy on her piety, her God-fearing lifestyle and her saintliness are part and parcel of the values of this society.

It seems as though Dolce never sat still for a moment, or at least not according to her husband’s account. She engaged in the usual wifely activities expected of an Orthodox woman, cooking for her family and allowing her learned husband to be totally involved in Torah study and good deeds and encouraging her sons to study. This might seem to have been enough to occupy her time, but Elazar was nowhere near finished. As it turns out, Dolce was busy spinning thread for tefillin and for binding books as well as scrolls. According to this report, she sewed approximately 40 Torah scrolls and prepared the wool for prayer shawl fringes.

Click here to read this article from the Jerusalem Post

Research Re-examines Role of Maya Women

Contrary to popular belief, women played a central role in Maya society before the arrival of Spanish explorers in the early 16th century, a University of California, Riverside graduate student has discovered. That finding is significant for modern Mayan women, whose status in society rapidly diminished under Spanish colonial rule and remains so today, according to Shankari Patel, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology.

Patel’s groundbreaking research, which included extensive fieldwork in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and an examination of previously uncatalogued artifacts in the British Museum, has won her the 2011 Dissertation Award from the American Anthropological Association’s American Feminist Association (AFA) and the AAA Minority Dissertation Fellowship. Patel expects to complete her dissertation, “Journey to the East: Pilgrimage, Politics, and Gender at Postclassic Yucatan,” and graduate in June.

The AFA described her reinterpretation of the archaeology and history of the Maya as “compelling.”
Patel, a native of Hawaii who grew up in Echo Park, Calif., said she became interested in the role of Maya women while touring the Yucatan Peninsula.

“Maya culture has been described by scholars as male-dominated. But I found many towns named for women, and female deities on the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula,” she explained. “I started asking how women came to be removed from religious institutions and activities, and from the history of the region.”

Click here to read this article from the University of California-Riverside

Minnesota professor receives funding to research medieval religious women in Germany

In the past year, Jennifer Deane, associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota Morris, has received two grants: the University of Minnesota Grant-in-Aid-of-Research and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, which fund her research on the “beguines” or lay religious women of medieval Germany. The grants have enabled her to make several trips to archives and libraries in Germany, and to share ideas and research findings with European colleagues.

For years, Deane has been passionate about studying the lay religious women of medieval Europe often known as “beguines”, whose hundreds of independent communities were mainly centered in the Low Countries, the Rhine region, France, and German-speaking lands. Beguines were not nuns, but single laywomen who gathered in pious households and observed a chaste and humble lifestyle in some ways similar to that within a monastery. However, they were also deeply embedded in local communities, had strong connections to secular and religious authorities, and provided charitable service such as prayer and teaching children. Despite their modest and innocuous existence, beguines’ semi-religious status drew inquisitorial attention in the fourteenth century, distorting their image to this day—for those who have even heard of them.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Women portrayed as the causes of “wars and other evils” in Roman mosaics

Research coordinated by Carlos III University in Madrid (UC3M) analyzes the images of women in Roman mosaics and their impact on the collective consciousness of feminine stereotypes. In many cases, the research concludes, the images pointed to the female as the cause of wars and other evils.

Numerous images of women appear in Roman mosaics. The majority are inspired in mythology – goddess, heroines and other protagonists of countless legends – although other flesh and blood women, probably dominae, their daughters, handmaidens and servants, are also documented. “The most significant aspect of these images is the different roles they reflect and their contribution to the construction of certain stereotypes, not just in the Roman world, but also throughout history and up to the present”, points out Luz Neira, Associate Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Humanities: History, Geography and Art, and a researcher at UC3M’s Institute of Culture and Technology.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Ancient depiction of childbirth found at Etruscan site in Tuscany

An archaeological excavation at Poggio Colla, the site of a 2,700-year-old Etruscan settlement in Italy’s Mugello Valley, has turned up a surprising and unique find: two images of a woman giving birth to a child.

Researchers from the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project, which oversees the Poggio Colla excavation site some 20 miles northeast of Florence, discovered the images on a small fragment from a ceramic vessel that is more than 2,600 years old. The images show the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a mother represented with her knees raised and her face shown in profile, one arm raised, and a long ponytail running down her back.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

When pregnancy gets you out of a bad relationship – female slaves in medieval Spain

Recent research has uncovered that female slaves in the Spanish city of Valencia were using a novel way to escape their enslavement – they got pregnant with their master’s child. In the article “As if she were his wife”: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Late Medieval Spain, Debra Blumenthal examines 33 cases found in the archives of the Spanish city between 1425 and 1520 where female slaves sued to get their freedom on the basis that they bore the children of their male masters.

One such case was a Russian woman named Rosa, who was purchased by Arnau Castello while he worked in the city of Naples. At the time, she was according to the archival records, “a pretty, young, white slave woman between eighteen and twenty years of age.” During their stay in Naples, and after they returned to Valencia, Rosa and Arnau were lovers, even after Arnau married. She bore him two children – Lucrecia and Julia, both of whom died in infancy. Later, in 1476, Rosa went to Valencia’s city courts to demand she be released from slavery, invoking local laws which stated, “Any Christian man who lies with his female slave and has a son or daughter by her, that son or daughter should immediately be baptized and both the mother and the son (or daughter) shall be free.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Invasion of the Viking women unearthed

So much for Hagar the Horrible, with his stay-at-home wife, Helga. Viking women may have equaled men moving to England in medieval invasions, suggests a look at ancient burials.

Vikings famously invaded Eastern England around 900 A.D., notes Shane McLeod of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia in the Early Medieval Europe journal, starting with two army invasions in the 800's, recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The Viking invaders founded their own medieval kingdom, 'the Danelaw', in Eastern England.

"There is some archaeological evidence for early Norse female settlement, most obviously oval brooches, but this evidence is minimal. The more difficult to date evidence of place names, personal names, and DNA samples derived from the modern population suggests that Norse women did migrate to England at some stage, but probably in far fewer numbers than Norse men," begins the study.

Click here to read this article from USA Today

Debunking a myth: In medieval Christianity, dissection was often practiced

Studying dead women’s cut-up bodies was not what Katharine Park originally set out to do. “I was writing a social history of medicine in Florence, a topic I chose basically just because I got to go” to that fabled Italian city, she joked.

But while working in those ancient halls amid so much beauty, Park said, “I kept finding stories about women’s bodies being cut up. I remember I came across one entry in a diary, where the husband says his wife died, and he requested her to be autopsied. I was like, huh? Autopsy?”

Most scholars assume that autopsy and dissection were taboo in medieval Europe; if they were conducted, they were illicit and done only on the bodies of criminals by intrepid scientists and doctors, flying in the face of clerical authority in the name of pursuing knowledge.

But Park, the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science, discovered quite another story in the Florentine libraries. “This was a very wealthy, patrician woman. The story didn’t compute. And I kept finding little tiny bits and pieces about female bodies being opened over the years. By the late ’90s, I had a critical mass of the stuff, and it all felt so counterintuitive. It was time to see what it was all about.”

Click here to read this article from the Harvard Gazette

Helen Castor's 'She-Wolves' taste power in medieval England

Helen Castor's very readable "She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth" is, she writes, "the kind of book I loved to read before history became my profession as well as my pleasure." It's full of beautiful, imperiled ladies; fearless knights; and remarkable, often unbelievable turns of fortune.

Pause a moment if you feel this topic is limited to the romance reader, or primarily to women. Castor's story spans four centuries of English and European history, from the 1100s to the accession of Mary Tudor. The author is a fine scholar and an equally fine storyteller.

Click here to read this review from the Cleveland.com

Historian dispels myths about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the role of women on the Second Crusade

One of the popular images of the Crusades is the story of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine taking 300 of her ladies-in-waiting with her on the Second Crusade during the years 1147-49. While this particular tale has long-been debunked, a recent article has shown that many other aspects of Eleanor’s role, and the overall effort of women during the Second Crusade has been emphasized too much.

Conor Kostick’s article, “Eleanor of Aquitaine and the women of the Second Crusade,” which appears in the book Medieval Italy, Medieval and Early Modern Women: Essays in Honour of Christine Meek, shows that female participation was likely much smaller during the Second Crusade than it was for the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. Kostick believes that the crusade preaching that took place in the lead up to the march to the Holy Land was more aimed at getting people with a military background to commit to the crusade, and avoided encouraging non-combatants, including women, into participating.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Study examines the same-sex relationships of Medieval Arab Women

A recent article suggests that lesbian activities of women in the medieval Arab world were far more common and open than is commonly believed, or would be considered acceptable in today’s Middle East. In the article, “Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women,” Sahar Amer describes the large amount of material related to this topic, as well as the difficulty in accessing some of these records.

Click here to read this news article from Medievalists.net

Art of yore

Through painstaking research, historically accurate technical detail and participation in the Society for Creative Anachronism, Vancouver artist Sharow Burrows seeks the visionary feminine side of the Middle Ages.

In a cheerfully cluttered home studio on Vancouver's East Side, artist Sharon Burrows is busy re-creating the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. Burrows, a retired Jungian-oriented therapist, creates authentic hand-bound parchment books, illuminated scrolls, Byzantine-style icon paintings and delicate embroidery.

The dazzling art works reflect Burrows' enchantment with the past and what its arts and crafts have to tell us about past eras and the human condition.

Reflecting a lifelong interest in feminism, women's history and spirituality, Burrows has focused much of her art work on the figure of Saint Mary Magdalene.

The first illuminated manuscript book she hand-crafted, in 1997, was about the life of the saint. The leather bound text is graced by a loving copy of an icon-style portrait Burrows first saw years ago in Florence. The original is by the 13th-century Italian artist known as the Master of the Magdalene. The book features other illustrations done in a similar visual style and a text, the Legend of Mary, done in classic medieval calligraphy.

Click here to read this article from the Vancouver Courier

Women workers could be found on the medieval construction site, study finds

According to a recently published study, women could be found working on construction sites, if only occasionally, including in specialized roles such as carpenters and masons. The research is found in the article, “Appropriate to Her Sex?” Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, by Shelley E. Roff.

She surveyed a wide variety of records from throughout Western Europe, including tax records, inventories of wages paid on construction sites, and municipal accounts, and discovered numerous instances of women working alongside men on construction sites as far back at the 13th century.

Click here to read this news article from Medievalists.net

Repackaging Female Saints’ Lives for the 15th-Century English Nun - lecture at Vassar College

Medievalist Virginia Blanton will discuss “Repackaging Female Saints’ Lives for the 15th-Century English Nun” on Friday, April 9 at Vassar College in New York State. Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 4:00 pm in Taylor Hall, Room 203.

Virginia Blanton is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she serves as doctoral faculty in English and Religious Studies. Her research focuses on medieval hagiography and religious ritual, as well as the representations of women in religious culture.

The research for this lecture is based on Professor Blanton's discovery of a 15th century manuscript at Cambridge University, which contains a manuscript that contains accounts of 19 female saints.

“When I first read the manuscript, I did not fully realize how important it might be,” Blanton told the Miscellany News. “[The legendary] provides some evidence of the text being used in ways we did now know it had been, especially by women."

Blanton is the author of Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615, which was awarded the Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship First Book Prize in 2008. She is co-editor of Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach and of Medieval Women in Film. She also edited two issues of the Medieval Feminist Forum and serves on the editorial board of Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art. Her current projects include Reading Nuns: A Critical Edition of a Middle-English Legendary, co-edited with Veronica O’Mara, and the monograph Shaping English Identities: Sanctity and Devotion in Late Medieval England.

This talk, sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the C. Mildred Thompson Fund of the Department of History, the Department of Religion, and the Media Studies and Women’s Studies Programs.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available. Directions to the Vassar campus are available at www.vassar.edu/directions.

Sources: Vassar College, The Miscellany News