The study of women and gender, then, not only has offered many new insights into old problems in the history of late medieval England but has also raised new debates about such matters as differences among women, changes in the status of women across time, the social power of gender ideologies and the cultural influence of women. By thus introducing new approaches, questions and subjects, the history of women and gender is changing the ways in which we think about English history in the later middle ages. Yet, despite its complementary relationship with the broader field of late medieval English history, the study of women and gender also stands somewhat apart from it.
In contrast to the dominance of the scholarly monograph in many other historical fields, a great deal of women’s history appears in articles published in journals or essay collections.32 This speeds up publication, enhances scholarly collaboration and immensely complicates bibliographic searching. Medieval women’s history also blends popular history and scholarly history more easily than do many other historical fields (military history being one notable exception). Historians such as Margaret Wade Labarge, whose 1986 book Women in Medieval Life was aimed at both students and general readers, write within a century-long tradition that includes, among others, Georgiana Hill and Eileen Power. Moreover, in the last decade, the commercial viability of the field has virtually exploded, with teachers, students and ordinary readers creating an ever-expanding market for books on medieval women. Numerous textbooks and sourcebooks have now been published, including those by Henrietta Leyser, Helen Jewell, Jeremy Goldberg, Jennifer Ward, Mavis Mate and myself. The subject is also generating a growing number of coffee-table books, stories for children, calendars and other media aimed at popular markets.33
Perhaps the most striking professional characteristic of the field, however, is its worldwide basis. The study of medieval Englishwomen flourishes as much outside of Britain as within it, in part because historians of women and gender are relatively more numerous and better supported in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These venues are far from the archives of England, but they are rich in monographs, edited collections, journals, conferences and other media that foster the study of medieval Englishwomen. They also sometimes foster what Miri Rubin has called ‘divergent styles and preoccupations’. Rubin has especially noted that ‘American’ work tends ‘to identify themes, to reach conclusions’, whereas British work is more ‘aimed at intensive archival research’.34 Scholars working outside of Britain also often seem to be more comfortable with feminist approaches to the subject, and they are sometimes less bound by the nationalistic imperatives that still haunt the historical profession.35 Thus enhanced by the different academic cultures of different world regions, the study of women and gender in late medieval England is an unusually rich collaborative effort.
Unfortunately, marginalization is also part of the past history and present state of the relationship between the history of women and gender, on the one hand, and the history of late medieval England, on the other. When A. H. Thomas, one of the modern editors of the Calendar of Select Pleas and Memoranda of the City of London, came across the interrogation of Eleanor/John Rykener, he noted merely ‘Examination of two men charged with immorality, of whom one implicated several persons, male and female, in religious orders’.36 Given the painstaking thoroughness of the rest of Thomas’s Calendar, this bald summary effectively suppressed the gender trouble at the heart of Rykener’s case. Thomas’s editorial decision was perhaps proper for his time and is perhaps still deemed proper by some historians today. For more than a century now, excellent historians have produced top-notch work on women and gender in the later middle ages. Yet it is still possible today, as it was when Georgiana Hill, Lina Eckenstein and Florence Buckstaff were writing in the 1890s, to produce ‘good’ history that treats late medieval England as if it were a world without women.
This failure of incorporation need not be laid at the door of medieval English history alone; as Elisabeth Van Houts has noted of a recent volume of the New Cambridge Medieval History, far too much medieval history ‘is almost exclusively about men’. Nor is it a flaw found only in traditional histories; as Janet Nelson has recently observed, even in studies of medieval families and women, ‘the concept of gender, with its theoretical load and its connotations of socially constructed difference, has failed to penetrate the vocabulary of most historians’.37 Moreover, progress certainly is being made. Peter Coss, for example, has now supplemented his 1991 study of the gentry, which focused almost exclusively on men, with a study of elite women. But more progress is needed, especially because there is so much to be gained. To continue this particular example: Kate Mertes has shown how elite households could be ‘actively hostile to the presence of women’; Jennifer Ward has examined how elite women wielded influence through hospitality, patronage and charity; Barbara Harris has redefined ‘politics’ to account for the many informal ways in which noblewomen influenced court, council and country; and Mathew Bennett has begun to investigate the internal and external perfection basic to the masculinity of knights.38 In these ways and many others, studies of women and gender are sharply redefining how we think about gentility and nobility in late medieval England - and, by extension of this single example, how we think about late medieval England in general.
World History
