Author: Patricia Skinner
Publisher: Longman
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
In this first book to explore women's lives in medieval Italy from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, Patricia Skinner outlines the development of women's history in Italy before exploring medieval sources for their lives. She conveys the rich variety of women's lives and experiences through new readings of the source material and newly-translated excerpts. The book is arranged chronologically, and each chapter includes a brief political overview together with a focus on key female figures in Italian history, mainly rulers, who have been neglected by surveys of medieval European women. In contrast to many treatments, the book includes substantial comparisons between the northern and southern halves of the peninsula. It also challenges some of the standard historiography on medieval Italy by demonstrating that women often did not benefit from the so-called advances in Italian political and social structures.
Author: Helen Jewell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230213790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
The period 1200-1550 opened in a time of population expansion but went on to suffer the demographically cataclysmic effects of the plague, beginning with the Black Death of 1347-51. The period dawned with a confident papacy and the Albigensian crusade against heretics and ended with the Catholic church torn apart by the Protestant Reformation. Huge challenges were affecting society in various ways, but they did not always affect men and women in the same ways. Helen M. Jewell provides a lively survey of western European women's activities and experiences during this timeframe. The core chapters investigate: - The function of women in the countryside and towns - The role of women in the ruling and landholding classes - Women within the context of religion This practical centre of the book is embedded in an analysis of the gender theories inherited from the earlier Middle Ages which continued to underpin laws which restricted women's activity, an education system which offered them inferior institutional provision, and a church which denied them ministry. Three individuals who vastly exceeded these expectations, crashing through the 'glass ceilings' of their day, are brought together in a fascinating final chapter. Combining a historiographical survey of trends over the last thirty years with more recent scholarship, this is as indispensable introduction for anyone with an interest in women's history from the late Medieval period through to the Reformation.
Author: Sarah Ifft Decker
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271093773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands examines how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how these women lived and worked. Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands of notarial contracts as well as legal codes, urban ordinances, and Hebrew responsa literature to explore the lived experiences of Jewish and Christian women in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and Vic between 1250 and 1350. Relying on an expanded definition of women’s work that includes the management of household resources as well as wage labor and artisanal production, this study highlights the crucial contributions women made both to their families and to urban economies. Christian women, Ifft Decker finds, were deeply embedded in urban economic life in ways that challenge traditional dichotomies between women in northern and Mediterranean Europe. And while Jewish women typically played a less active role than their Christian counterparts, Ifft Decker shows how, in moments of communal change and crisis, they could and did assume prominent roles in urban economies. Through its attention to the distinct experiences of Jewish and Christian women, The Fruit of Her Hands advances our understanding of Jewish acculturation in the Iberian Peninsula and the shared experiences of women of different faiths. It will be welcomed by specialists in gender studies and religious studies as well as students and scholars of medieval Iberia.
Author: Amy Livingstone
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
In Out of Love for My Kin, Amy Livingstone examines the personal dimensions of the lives of aristocrats in the Loire region of France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She argues for a new conceptualization of aristocratic family life based on an ethos of inclusion. Inclusivity is evident in the care that medieval aristocrats showed toward their families by putting in place strategies, practices, and behaviors aimed at providing for a wide range of relatives. Indeed, this care—and in some cases outright affection—for family members is recorded in the documents themselves, as many a nobleman and woman made pious benefactions "out of love for my kin." In a book made rich by evidence from charters—which provide details about life events including birth, death, marriage, and legal disputes over property—Livingstone reveals an aristocratic family dynamic that is quite different from the fictional or prescriptive views offered by literary depictions or ecclesiastical sources, or from later historiography. For example, she finds that there was no single monolithic mode of inheritance that privileged the few and that these families employed a variety of inheritance practices. Similarly, aristocratic women, long imagined to have been excluded from power, exerted a strong influence on family life, as Livingstone makes clear in her gender-conscious analysis of dowries, the age of men and women at marriage, lordship responsibilities of women, and contestations over property.The web of relations that bound aristocratic families in this period of French history, she finds, was a model of family based on affection, inclusion, and support, not domination and exclusion.
Author: Katherine L. Jansen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 620
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Book Description
Medieval Italy gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles, the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare, and the vernacular poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The texts highlight the continuities with the medieval Latin West while simultaneously emphasizing the ways in which Italy was exceptional, particularly for its cities that drove Mediterranean trade, its new communal forms of government, the impact of the papacy's temporal claims on the central peninsula, and the richly textured religious life of the mainland and its islands. A unique feature of this volume is its incorporation of the southern part of the peninsula and Sicily—the glittering Norman court at Palermo, the multicultural emporium of the south, and the kingdoms of Frederick II—into a larger narrative of Italian history. Including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Lombard sources, the documents speak in ethnically and religiously differentiated voices, while providing wider chronological and geographical coverage than previously available. Rich in interdisciplinary texts and organized to enable the reader to focus by specific region, topic, or period, this is a volume that will be an essential resource for anyone with a professional or private interest in the history, religion, literature, politics, and built environment of Italy from ca. 1000 to 1400.
Author: Elma Brenner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0861933397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
An investigation into the effects of leprosy in one of the major towns in medieval France, illuminating urban, religious and medical culture at the time.
Author: Leonie V. Hicks
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843833291
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Presenting new light on the reality of religious life in Normandy, the author uses ideas about space and gender to examine the social pressures arising from such interaction around four main themes: display, reception and intrusion, enclosure and the family.
Author: Natasha R. Hodgson
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843833321
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Women's role in crusades and crusading examined through a close investigation of the narratives in which they appear. Narratives of crusading have often been overlooked as a source for the history of women because of their focus on martial events, and perceptions about women inhibiting the recruitment and progress of crusading armies. Yet women consistently appeared in the histories of crusade and settlement, performing a variety of roles. While some were vilified as "useless mouths" or prostitutes, others undertook menial tasks for the army, went on crusade with retinuesof their own knights, and rose to political prominence in the Levant and and the West. This book compares perceptions of women from a wide range of historical narratives including those eyewitness accounts, lay histories andmonastic chronicles that pertained to major crusade expeditions and the settler society in the Holy Land. It addresses how authors used events involving women and stereotypes based on gender, family role, and social status in writing their histories: how they blended historia and fabula, speculated on women's motivations, and occasionally granted them a literary voice in order to connect with their audience, impart moral advice, and justify the crusade ideal. Dr NATASHA R. HODGSON teaches at Nottingham Trent University.
Author: Patricia Skinner
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191653187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
'Rich in gold and cloths'? This is the first full-length study of the history of medieval maritime republic of Amalfi that addresses both the internal political, social, and economic history of Amalfi - as an independent city-state, under Norman rule and as part of the Kingdom of Sicily - and the history of its diaspora, those Amalfitans who left temporarily or permanently and whose activities contributed to the image of their home city as a thriving centre specialising in the luxury end of the market. In reuniting these two disparate strands of its history, Patricia Skinner argues that, instead of being seen in opposition to each other, the very different evidence presented by the internal documentary archives and the narrative accounts of external observers can and should be utilised to reconstruct the ties which bound the emigrants to their home city. By taking a prosopographical approach, she reveals the presence of Amalfitans in many parts of the Italian peninsula and further afield in the Mediterranean. At the same time, she critically re-examines some of the externally-generated views of Amalfitan wealth, suggesting that these may have as much - or more - to do with literary and patronage networks as with the actual situation on the ground.
Author: Joanne M. Ferraro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350179728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Marriage in Europe became a central pillar of society during the medieval period. Theologians, lawyers, and secular and church leaders agreed on a unique outline of the institution and its legal framework, the essential features of which remained in force until the 1980s. The medieval Western European definition of marriage was unique: before the legal consequences of marriage came into being, the parties had to promise to engage in sexual union only with one partner and to remain in the marriage until one of the parties died. This requirement had profound implications for inheritance rules and for the organization of the family economy; it was explained and justified in a multitude of theological discussions and legal decisions across all faiths on the European continent. Normative texts, built on the foundations of the scriptures of several religious traditions, provided an impressive intellectual framework around marriage. In addition, developments in iconography, including sculpture and painting, projected the dominant model of marriage, while social, demographic and cultural changes encouraged its adoption. This volume traces the medieval discussion of marriage in practice, law, theology and iconography. It provides an examination of the wider political and economic context of marriage and offers an overview of the ebb and flow of society's ideas about how expressions of human sexuality fit within the confines of a clearly defined social structure and ideology. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.
