Women's lives in medieval Europe: a sourcebook (review)

Abstract

Reviews Amt, Emilie, ed., Women's lives in medieval Europe: a sourcebook, N e w York and London, Routledge, 1993; paper; pp. viii, 347; R.R.P. AUS$32.00 [distributed in Australia by the L a w Book Company]. One of the most flamboyandy mistaken predictions in twentieth-century academia must be the oft-touted decline of women's history, due to the inadequacy of its source materials. This pessimism, of course, was predicated on the assumption that 'history' means primarily political or politico-religious history, and 'social history' concerns mainly class relations. Amt's edition both demonstrates the transformation of mainstream historiography during the last twenty-five years and provides welcome redress to the problems of providing students with easy access to the primary sources of the new histories. Yet her work also raises methodological problems of researching the histories of the powerless and unvoiced. A glance at the contents page highlights disciplinary metamorphosis. Twenty five years ago, source-books tended to be comprised of chronologically-ordered extracts of government business: political tracts, royal proclamations, acts of parliament, chronicles, papal bulls, etc. Extraordinarily enterprising editors might add economic statistics and literary excerpts. In Amt's collection the only governmental and authoritative writings to retain anthological value concern the ordering of such phenomena as marriage, dowry, and adultery. The collection sparkles with extracts from wills, autobiographies, saints' lives, household accounts, coroners' rolls, manorial courts, and archaeologically-derived house-plans. Clearly, historians wishing to study women's lives in the past have been forcedtoanalyse a whole new world of historical subjects: marriage, family, practical medicine, domestic rather than national economies, unpaid as well as paid labour, and paid work such as prostitution, which had formerly been ignored. The source material we now read is consequendy very different. So voluminous and wide-ranging has the historiography become that even Amt's array of documents sometimes disappoints. Though her section on marriage contains long-awaited translations of important medieval theories, notably Gratian's views on the making of marriage and the early marriage liturgies, it cannot encompass the wealth of meanings now 224 Reviews attributed to medieval marriage and the many shifts in its construction and practice during the medieval centuries. In the section on 'Health and safety', A m t touches lighdy on warfare, childbirth, the diseases of women as catalogued by the alleged woman doctor Trotula of Salerno, the plague, leprosy, medieval sanitation, and practising w o m e n physicians. This selective approach necessarily ignores the complex history of medical views regarding embodied gender differences. Lastiy, A m t is to be congratulated on including house plans. She is, perhaps, inspired by Annaliste historians, who, to recover the experience of the illiterate, included artefacts, aerial photography, and serial statistics in their repertoire of historical sources. Yet in view of the doubtful literacy of many medieval women, it is, perhaps, surprising that Amt so seldom ventures beyond the textual record. Apparendy she considers visual evidence as not 'historical', (p. 7) and she does not include it. There are no illustrations of archaeological artefacts. There are also no extracts from thetellingstatistics on survival, marriage age, and death collected by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber in their monumental work onfifteenth-centuryFlorence. These comments may be taken as suggestions for future editions rather than criticisms of the present one. The 'perfect' anthology is a mirage. To its credit, Amt's collection contains, alongside such predictable extracts as those from Dhuoda's and Christine de Pisan's writings, more exciting finds. Leonor Lopez de Cordoba's autobiography tantalizingly sketches the precarious situation of late-medieval Spanish noblewomen. Caesarius of Aries' Rule for nuns provides an excellent corrective to that school of research which derives a unilinear and primarily male history of monasticism from the Rule of St. Benedict. Importantly, sections on Jewish, Muslim, and heretic women, though short, prompt fascinating reflections on the medieval intersections of gender, ethnicity, and cultural diversity. One of the most intriguing extracts, for instance, concerns the negotiations, largely between males, surrounding the position of a Jewish wife considering conversion to Christianity. This tale, however, raises in acute form a final critique. Amt admits that most evidence about medieval women is...