Gender, Memory and Documentary Culture, c.900-1300

What is it about?

How was the world of medieval documentation and memory creation affected by gender? This question is central to the essays collected here, which bring together aspects of gender and documentary culture that are usually studied only in isolation. Covering the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the volume offers a broad geographical reach – England, France, Flanders, Germany, Spain – and an array of sources, from charters, letters and court proceedings to seals, iconography, and illumination. There is a particular focus on lay female communities, including women’s collective legal action in pre-Conquest England, documentary initiatives of Castilian peasant widows, and urban Flemish women’s sealing practices. Re-examinations of noblewomen’s centrality – and erasure – in charters focus on Ermengarde of Brittany, Mathilda of Boulogne and Berengaria of Navarre. Contributions on gender and historical writing explore their development in Ottonian courts, tenth-century English coronation portraits, Orderic Vitalis’ Historia Ecclesiastica, and French chroniclers’ rhetorical strategies for writing noblewomen’s rage. Further chapters consider monastic spaces, including women’s houses at Auxerre and Marcigny and at Holy Trinity, Caen, and explore women’s memory preservation efforts, at Spanish houses – San Salvador de Oña and Santa María de Piasca – and a community at Bouxières. This volume demonstrates the new insights that can be gleaned by viewing various processes, such as legal disputes and monastic narratives and foundation, through a gendered lens.

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Photo by Neutron on Unsplash

Photo by Neutron on Unsplash

Why is it important?

From English queens to Flemish nuns to destitute Spanish widows, the broad sweep of this volume pulls together aspects of gender, memory and documentary culture. While these elements are often studied in isolation, the texture of the relationship between them, throughout the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, is teased out here, providing an ideal compendium to a new field of analysis. The essays incorporate a wide array of contexts: lay and ecclesiastical manuscript culture, rhetorical agency, manuscript and cartulary production and dissemination. Documentary materials are here conceived inclusively—charters, letters, seals, court cases, medical treatises, iconography, illumination. Chapters also engage memory in both the secular world and monastic contexts, such as women’s violence in French chronicles, Ottonian women’s dynastic strategies, preservation initiatives by abbess and nuns at Bouxières, Burgundy, and Normandy to enshrine the past, and an attempt to erase women’s voices set in Spain. Further highlights include uncovering gender-specific legal networks constructed by early English women, and the revenge of nearly-erased noblewomen, Ermengarde of Brittany, Berengaria of Navarre, and Matilda of Boulogne.