Stories of Women in the Middle Ages by Maria Teresa Brolis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stories of Women in the Middle Ages by Maria Teresa Brolis Jessica L. Minieri Maria Teresa Brolis, Stories of Women in the Middle Ages ( Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2018) xviii + 187 pp. Maria Teresa Brolis argues in her monograph Stories of Women in the Middle Ages that late medieval ideas on gender, sexuality, and religion shaped the ways in which women could participate in both elite and non-elite spaces from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries in Europe. To illustrate this point, Brolis divides her monograph into two sections, "Famous Women" and "Ordinary Women," each highlighting the lives and afterlives of sixteen individuals. The first eight will be familiar to scholars of the European Middle Ages, as they include Hildegard of Bingen, Raingarde of Montboissier, Heloise of Argenteuil, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Clare of Assisi, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan, and Joan of Arc. By beginning with these figures, Brolis brings her readers' attention to the lives of women in different social positions and geographic locations than those in the second section on "Ordinary Women." This second section, with chapters on Flora, Agnesina, Ottebona, Grazia, Gigliola, Bettina, Margherita, and Belfiore, focuses on economic activity, marital practices, religious life, fashion, medicine, and travel in the Lombard town of Bergamo during the fourteenth century. With this division, Brolis provides her readers with a necessary and fascinating look at life for medieval women across regions, centuries, and social strata in order to "investigate the female condition at the centre and on the periphery of the medieval word" (3). [End Page 247] Brolis thus juxtaposes the eight queens, saints, and writers featured in the first half with the seamstresses, businesswomen, and abbesses in the second section as their lives overlapped in terms of geographic location, participation in social and economic life, and relationship to the Church. The success of this monograph therefore lies not in its individual narratives but in the ways in which these stories raise new questions about the role of gender in European life in the late medieval period. Specifically, these stories ask how geographic location and social position affected the place of women within their communities across the continent. One of the main points of connection between these "famous" and "ordinary" women derives from their shared experiences in the Italian Peninsula. This geographic focus complicates the role of women in classical Renaissance republics and kingdoms throughout the peninsula, as many of these case studies, particularly those north of Rome, lived differently than their counterparts in Angevin Naples and Aragonese Sicily. These comparisons are most apparent in the chapters on Clare of Assisi, Birgitta of Sweden, Grazia d'Arzago, and Agnesina of Bergamo, as their different experiences demonstrate that for women across Italy, the variants in governmental structure (i.e., republicanism vs. monarchy) and corresponding beliefs about gender affected the ways in which women could be active participants in their communities. The complicated relationship between Birgitta and Johanna I of Naples illustrates that women, particularly in elite and royal circles, participated in political spaces within Angevin Naples in ways that their counterparts in Bergamo, Milan, and other northern Italian cities did not. Birgitta's connection to Johanna allowed her to speak publicly about several social ills that she observed while in the city, most significantly the enslavement of Muslim women, which she described as a "scandal to witness the slave trade in a Christian country" (61). While her words did not lead to a cessation of the practice, her arguments, particularly those recorded in her Revelations, brought wider attention to the enslavement of and sexual violence perpetrated against Muslim women in the region. While Naples was not the only city she visited on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it was among the most significant cities she traveled through due to her involvement in local politics, the abolition of slavery, and her connection to the House of Anjou. In conjunction with the chapters on Clare of Assisi and Grazia d'Arzago, the histories of these figures as advocates for women inside of religious spaces (e.g., in the Bridgettine Order, Poor Clares, and the Santa Grata abbey in Bergamo) raise significant questions about ecclesiastical structures, both inside and outside...