Citizens of No Mean City: Medieval Women's History

Abstract

BlBUOGRAPHY Citizens of No Mean City: Medieval Women's History" Margaret Schaus and Susan Mosher Stuard She spoke gravely, unrolling the great scroU of history , pleading for the Humanities, prodaiming the Pax Académica to a world terrified with unrest___ Magnificent, thought Harriet, but it is not war. And then, her imagination weaving in and out of the spoken words, she saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd coUection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain.... In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realize that one was a citizen of no mean city. Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, pp. 26-27 Introduction Dorothy Sayers was trained as a medievalist. She was accomplished in Latin and produced creditable verse translations of The Chanson de Roland and The Divine Comedy. Sayers's work on Dante brought her into contact with scholars at Oxford including C. S. Lewis and Charles Wuliams . Her lifelong devotion to scholarship as weU as her marginal relationship to the academy stand as salient characteristics of the field of medieval women's history. Researchers and students would do weU to heed her story which echoes down to the present day. Among the issues from Sayers's career that strike an aU too famihar chord, the most vexing for medieval women's historians have been academic affiliation and intended audience. The terms of the larger debate have changed over time from nineteenth-century prohibitions against women's education to the current controversy over feminism's "politicization" of the curriculum, but the immediate result remains an undervaluing of scholarship about women. For example, Lina Eckenstein's classic Woman Under Monasticism appeared in 1896 and should be part of any serious collection on medieval women, but Eckenstein wrote as a scholar outside the academy with an initial audi- © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. 3 (Fall) * This is an updated and revised version of an article by the same name published in Choice 30, no. 4 (1992): 583-592. 1994 BIBLIOGRAPHY: MARGARET SCHAUS & SUSAN MOSHER STUARD 171 ence of educated women rather than professors. At issue here was her subject, not her ability to do research and interpret the historical record. Even recognized scholars in the academy harbored doubts about writing on women; as Eüeen Power, an established scholar, put it, she had her own misgivings about writing on women because the topic was deemed "light' and unworthy by her scholarly peers. She addressed the issue nonetheless, displaying considerable independence of thought in her monumental study, Medieval English Nunneries, as weU as in Medieval Women, a coUection of her popular lectures assembled posthumously by M. M. Postan. Still others outside universities who were highly educated and possessed the seldorn-acquired skills to interpret the earliest medieval records met a chilling response to their efforts. In the early decades of this century Eleanor Shipley Duckett took her first completed work to a Cambridge scholar who courteously inquired of her, "Do you want me to judge it on its own merits or as the work of a woman?" It comes as httle surprise, then, that Ducketf s important translations of early medieval women's correspondence and her pubhshed lecture, Women and Their Letters in the Early Middle Ages, were largely directed at an audience of educated women, the so-caUed "popular audience." Such "popular" works have been reclassified as scholarly in recent years because they pioneered the field and gave fastidious care to documentary evidence. The scholar's chaUenge is to identify these works. In general, women medievalists' links to the academic community remain problematic and this relationship stiU affects which books are written and which are coUected in our libraries. Publishing Patterns It is important for scholars to recognize the underlying patterns that govern a discipline's literature. One major characteristic of medieval women's history is that many significant studies appear only as journal articles or essays in coUections. This is often the case in the social sciences, but it is particularly true of women's history, which has developed...