Eileen Power Research Articles

Lives of the Sisters of Syon Abbey ca 1415–1539: Patterns of Vocation from the Syon Martiloge and Other Records

Eileen Power’s work on medieval English nunneries laid the foundation for modern scholarship. This paper explores patterns of vocation in the lives of the sisters of Syon Abbey, a major national institution founded by Henry V in 1415. The paper is part of my Syon Abbey Prosopography Project, which traced c. 600 sisters, brothers and patrons c.1400-1600. Their geographical origins show how the royal dynasties of Lancaster, York and Tudor wove their regional affinities into a national elite, contributing to the emergence of the Tudor state. Nuns from loyal families served their royal masters through prayer. Early recruits came from Sweden, and from gentry and merchant families in England’s wealthiest regions: the Midlands, East Anglia, the South West and London. A few aristocratic nuns were effectively political prisoners who entered Syon following family treason. Later recruits came from courtier families settled in counties around London. ‘Syon families’ were loyal to church and crown for generations and were at the heart of opposition to the English Reformation. Although Syon was dissolved in 1539, the sisters defiantly continued to follow the Birgittine Rule in small groups, some in exile. Collectively their lives tell the story of Syon Abbey’s early centuries.

Peasants and Polyptyques in the Ninth Century: The Peasant Hermod

Eileen Power’s peasant Bodo has influenced our vision of medieval peasants for close to a century. Her image of a busy agricultural worker and his family serving on a great ninth-century estate, drawn from a variety of different sources in addition to the polyptyque of St.-Germain-des-Prés in which he briefly appears, has become the standard for textbooks and popular accounts. In spite of Power’s laudable effort to give an account of a lower-status person to whom the modern reader could relate, we know far less about Bodo or his contemporaries than she suggests. The difficulties of learning about the life of a supposedly typical peasant are illustrated by the peasant Hermod, who appears in the polyptyque of Montier-en-Der. The polyptyques, very few in number and all using different criteria to enumerate property and income, provide a dizzying array of peasant obligations: some owed rent but not labor, some owed set amounts of both rent and labor, and some seem to have been expected to provide labor at any times. The tenants themselves had a wide variety of status, from servile to free. These people were surrounded by others about whom we have no direct evidence, but there are indications that many of them must have been free-holders, not owing rents or labor dues to anyone, indeed perhaps providing hired labor to the manor. Twelfth-century hesitancy to copy ninth-century polyptyques into cartularies suggests that peasant status and obligations had thoroughly changed in the centuries after Bodo and Hermod, making them even less typical of high medieval peasants than they had been for those of the Carolingian era.

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

The medieval historian Eileen Power (1889-1940) was one of Britain’s most eminent female historians of the first half of the twentieth century. Becoming Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in 1931, Power gained academic recognition to a degree that was difficult for women to obtain in this period. Numerous writings on Power discuss the period 1920-1921, when she travelled around the world as an Albert Kahn Fellow, considering it a formative year in her career and indicating the importance of travel for achieving scholarly success. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the significance of Power’s first academic journey in 1910-1911, when she spent a year in Paris. This stay abroad would however be equally important since it was then that she decided to pursue a career in medieval history.At the time, even if women had an academic degree, they were not self-evident, professional scholars. Therefore, the main question in this article is whether and how Power started to build her scholarly persona while in Paris, attempting to construct an identity for herself as a credible and reliable academic. This will be addressed by analysing her personal writings; specifically, her diary and her letters to her close friend, Margery Garrett.

Women Write the Past: Medieval Scholarship, Old English and New Literature

This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes by examining the translation of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together.

Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Prioress refer particularly, if confusedly, to that terrible event. Still an­ other version of the blood libel, in this case drawn from twentieth­ century bigotry, would also have been appropriate to Rex's discussion, although perhaps not available at the time: Elisabeth Orsten's account of a modern parallel, described in Florilegium 11 (1992). Of course, the evidence, even in its incomplete state in Rex's book, only serves to problematize the question still farther-why has Chaucer seen fit to make the Prioress take the hardest possible line in her narra­ tion? Ifwe reject-as who will not?-the possibility that Chaucer him­ self was a hard-liner, why has he gone out ofhis way to depict Madame Eglentyne as such? Is it to force the audience to see the Prioress as a hyp­ ocrite of the worst sort-proclaiming her devotion to the Virgin, tra­ ditionally a fount of mercy and compassion, yet reveling in vengeance upon those she hates? It is tempting, in such considerations, to fall back on the obvious, in particular the citing of GP 133-35 in conjunction with Matthew 23:25. One of the features of Rex's crisply written, suc­ cinctly argued book is that he steers clear of stating the obvious. One last quibble, or perhaps commendation. The author of this ex­ cellent book is very sparing in his secondary references. Yet can one eas­ ily escape a sense ofabsence in discovering, in a book about a fictive ac­ count of a fourteenth-century prioress, the absence of any citation to Eileen Power's 1922 classic, Medieval English Nunneries? DOUGLAS WURTELE Carleton University A.V. C. SCHMIDT, ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition ofthe A, B, C, and Z Versions. Vol. I. Text. London and New York: Longman, 1995. Pp. xv, 762. $199.95. This is a welcome book. Recent study of Piers Plowman has often em­ phasized moving beyond the individual versions of the poem and con­ sidering the work (i.e., Langland's imaginative life) as a single develop­ ing whole. We have been hampered in this pursuit by the absence ofany modern equivalent to Skeat's great parallel-text edition of 1886,1 a de1 Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1886). 294 REVIEWS ficiency Schmidt and Longman now seek to remedy. We can, of course, no longer rely upon Schmidt's self-avowed model, for Skeat's work has become passe because ofthe narrowness ofhis evidentiary basis for pre­ senting the poem and because ofthe development ofmore powerful ed­ itorial tools for studying the textual tradition (an advance due to the work of R. W. Chambers and his students, in the main of George Kane).2 Thus, all students ofLangland must be in the debt ofeditor and pub­ lisher. Once again, as previously for B. A. Windeatt's opulent Troilus and Criseyde, medievalists owe Longman profuse thanks. A Parallel-Text Edition represents an extraordinary risk venture by a commercial pub­ lisher-a central (and very lengthy) text promulgated in a form sub­ jected to scholarly scrutiny and accompanied by a substantial variant apparatus. And the book has been handsomely produced, with legible type and ample margins. Yet in terms ofscholarly scrutiny, ofSchmidt's work as an editor, this may eventually prove an unwelcome book. At this time, one cannot offer a definitive reading, quite simply because describing this volume as "sparse in explanation" is generous. The book is precisely what the title promises, text and collations only. Even though providing it here would not have substantially increased the size of a very large volume, "A full account of editorial procedure will be found in Volume II, Introduction" (p. xiii). Indeed, even page [xv}, the only information of­ fered to guide a reader in using the volume, has the look of an after­ thought. It occurs on the otherwise unused last leaf ofthe sixteen-page front matter-and is unpaginated and not typeset in the normal format. Moreover, even with the information provided, I find Schmidt's colla­ tion frequently impossible to follow. One's...

Women medievalists and the academy

Long overlooked in standard reference works, pioneering women medievalists are brought to life in this collection through memoirs, biographical essays, and interviews. The essays cover many different nationalities and disciplines - including literature, philology, history, archaeology, art history, and philosophy - each delving into one woman's life, intellectual contributions, and efforts to succeed in a male-dominated field. These strong personal histories constitute a new standard reference that speaks to a growing interest in women's toles in the development of scholarship. The collection includes such figures such as Anna Jameson, Lina Eckenstein, Georgiana Goddard King, Eileen Power, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Whitelock, Susan Mosher Stuard, Caroline Walker Bynum, and others.

Women in the Northern Courts: Interpreting Legal Records of Familial Conflict In Early Fifteenth-Century Yorkshire

In her pioneering study of medieval English nunneries Eileen Power brought to light the plight of Katherine Northfolk, a young heiress in fifteenth-century Yorkshire. The tale evoked Power's pity in her discussion of nunneries as locations for the disposal of certain sorts of girls: the illegitimate, die deformed, the mentally ill, and the young heiress. Katherine Northfolk's enforced entrance into the monastery of Wallingwells is one of four cases which Power drew from legal sources to support her assertion that many "little heiresses" were hurriedly and unwillingly professed with little or no recourse to the law. Power's rendition of Katherine's case was as follows:

The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350-1540 by Marilyn Oliva

300BOOK REVIEWS more useful to provide a selection of more varied sources. The editor states that it was suggested to her that she should publish merely extracts of the more interesting depositions, but argues that "only a full and complete version can be truly useful." Yet the case for a full version in English has not been sufficiently made out. A.J. Forey Kirtlington, Oxford The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese ofNorwich, 1350-1540. By Marilyn Oliva. [Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, Vol. 12.] (Rochester, NewYork: The Boydell Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 271. $90.00.) This is a work of historical revision which challenges the model of late medieval female monasticism established for England by Eileen Power threequarters of a century ago. Dr. Oliva convincingly argues for a new interpretation informed by modern feminist perspectives, and more sensitive to the multifaceted service of the nunneries to their local society. These houses did not have the wealth to dominate the countryside like some of their male counterparts , but there is plenty of evidence arrayed to substantiate the relatively modest claim that they were "important features of the local landscape." Whereas Power's pioneering Medieval English Nunneries is a broad-ranging survey, Dr. Oliva confines her attention to the single diocese of Norwich and provides a detailed study of eleven religious houses for women from the midfourteenth century to the Dissolution. The difference in scale is extremely important , because generalizations supported by evidence from houses in widely different locations over more than two and a half centuries of their existence do not stand up to scrutiny, when the focus is changed to the continuous history of a coherent group of nunneries in one region. It is not simply a question of denigratory comments about the moral standards of nuns or their capacities as financial managers. Recruitment to these communities and their place in local society are demonstrably different from traditional stereotypes of aristocratic institutions. At least in Norwich diocese the nuns are drawn predominantly from the middling ranks of society and lesser gentry; office-holders are mostly drawn from the same class; and it is with such modest landowners that they seem, from wills at least, to have their closest connections. A justification in the past for neglect of the nuns by monastic historians has been an assumed lack of evidence. This study suggests strategies for addressing a problem that is not illusory, but which has almost certainly been exaggerated. Dr. Oliva has explored a wide range of sources effectively and demonstrated the significant results that the patient researcher can extract from them. At the BOOK reviews301 heart of her evidence is an examination of 3,000 wills. Paradoxically one of the significant results of her researches is to demonstrate the very small proportion of testators who left a bequest to the nuns at all. Most wills contained no legacies to religious houses, and of those that did, just 18% went to the female religious . Dr. Oliva has made an important contribution to the growing literature on medieval nunneries, which brings a breath of fresh air to tired debates and indicates directions that further research might take. It demonstrates the diversity that existed among the small religious houses, and the need for similar sympathetic studies of the many male institutions within this group. Perhaps in regional studies of this kind we might hope also to see explored the extent to which the small houses were able to adapt to the radical changes (demographic , social, and religious) of the late medieval period. John Tillotson Australian National University "Songes of Rechelesnesse": Langland and the Franciscans. By Lawrence M. Clopper. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1997. Pp. xviii, 368. $52.50.) Lawrence Clopper's "Songes of Rechelesnesse" a provocative, challenging, and fascinating book, is one of the most important studies ofWilliam Langland's Piers Plowman published in the past twenty years. It confronts directly the commonplace view that this fourteenth-century poem—along with Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale"—is the artistic culmination of the antifraternal tradition in England, a view strongly argued in Penn Szittya's highly influential book, The Antifraternal Tradition in...

Eileen Power's Asian journey, 1920-21: history, narrative, and subjectivity

This article analyses the travel writings of the British medieval historian, Eileen Power (1889-1940), during her year-long journey around the world in 1920-21 as the first and only female awarded a travel fellowship administered by the Trustees of the University of London in the years following the First World War. Drawing upon a comparative reading of her official Report to the Trustees and her private diary record of her ‘Tour du Monde’, we examine the various dimensions of subjectivity and identity evident in her narrative of the journey, interrogating the difference which gender makes in the relationship of European travellers to empire. In addition, we examine how the narrative of her journey and subsequent historical narratives were part of those Orientalist forces/discourses which produced and were produced by the West's relationship to the East in the first half of the twentieth century.

Eileen power's asian journey, 1920-21: history, narrative, and subjectivity

Abstract This article analyses the travel writings of the British medieval historian, Eileen Power (1889-1940), during her year-long journey around the world in 1920-21 as the first and only female awarded a travel fellowship administered by the Trustees of the University of London in the years following the First World War. Drawing upon a comparative reading of her official Report to the Trustees and her private diary record of her ‘Tour du Monde’, we examine the various dimensions of subjectivity and identity evident in her narrative of the journey, interrogating the difference which gender makes in the relationship of European travellers to empire. In addition, we examine how the narrative of her journey and subsequent historical narratives were part of those Orientalist forces/discourses which produced and were produced by the West's relationship to the East in the first half of the twentieth century.

Book ReviewsA Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940. By Maxine Berg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+292. $69.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940. By Maxine Berg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+292. $69.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).Elaine ClarkElaine ClarkUniversity of Michigan—Dearborn Search for more articles by this author University of Michigan—DearbornPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 70, Number 3September 1998 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/235132 Views: 3Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Early Abbesses, Nuns and Female Tenants of the Abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen

A major problem for the student of a relatively new discipline or sub-discipline is the construction of a framework within which to operate. In the case of the economic, social and legal position of women in the Middle Ages the only clear thing is that the lines are slowly being redrawn, although more perhaps with respect to the central Middle Ages than to the earlier period. In fact, despite the paucity of evidence there has always been a surprising degree of agreement about the early Middle Ages. A wide range of authors from Lina Eckenstein to Eileen Power, Lady Stenton and Suzanne Wemple have regarded the period, from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries, as one of ‘rough equality’ (to use Stenton's words) between men and women in general, and as a period of veneration, even elevation, of female religious. As for the later period, there is a much wider range of opinion, much of it conflicting. Speaking of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, in a popular general work, conclude that: ‘Evidence of the general improvement in the status of women is fairly extensive.’ The elevation of marriage to sacrament status in the twelfth century is undoubtedly seen by some as part of this process: ‘C'est dans la réforme du mariage qu'il faut chercher les germes les plus vigoureux de l'amélioration dont bénéficie la condition féminine à partir du XIIe siècle, même si cette amélioration n'est ni continue ni générate.’ By contrast, other works suggest that an earlier golden age for women came to an end in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an even more male-dominated feudal society reached its zenith in terms of order and definition.

Book Reviews

Great Britain and Ireland T. C. Smout, ed., Scotland since prehistory: natural change and human impactN. M. Herbert, ed., A history of the county of Gloucester, V: the Forest of DeanColin Platt, King Death: the Black Death and its aftermath in late medieval EnglandDel Sweeney, ed., Agriculture in the middle ages: technology, practice, and representationMark Overton, Agricultural revolution in England: the transformation of the agrarian economy, 1500‐1850Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts, eds., Pleasure in the eighteenth centuryAdrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds., Markets, market culture and popular protest in eighteenth‐century Britain and IrelandBarry Reay, Microhistories: demography, society and culture in rural England, 1800‐1930Edgar Jones, True and fair: a history of Price WaterhouseMichael Turner, After the Famine: Irish agriculture, 1850‐1914Roger Middleton, Government versus the market: the growth of the public sector, economic management and British economic performance, c. 1890‐1979Andrew Marrison, British business and protection, 1903‐1932James Foreman‐Peck, Sue Bowden, and Alan McKinlay, The British motor industryPeter Scott, The property masters: a history of the British commercial property sector General Gary Herrigel, Industrial constructions: the sources of German industrial powerVolker R. Berghahn, ed., Quest for economic empire: European strategies of German big business in the twentieth centuryPaul Bairoch and Martin Körner, eds., La Suisse dans l'économie mondiale/Die Schweiz in der WeltwirtschaftIvan T. Berend, Central and eastern Europe, 1944‐1993: detour from the periphery to the peripheryWendy Davies and Paul Fouracre, eds., Property and power in the early middle agesJonathan Dewald, The European nobility, 1400‐1800: new approaches to European historyAnn Goldgar, Impolite learning: conduct and community in the republic of letters, 1680‐1750Iain R. Smith, The origins of the South African war, 1899‐1902Augustus J. Veenendaal, Slow train to paradise: how Dutch investors helped build American railroadsElmus Wicker, The banking panics of the great depressionDeborah Oxley, Convict maids: the forced migration of women to AustraliaStanley Lebergott, Consumer expenditures: new measures and old motivesJack Goody, The East in the WestG. D. Snooks, The dynamic society: exploring the sources of global changeElliott A. Krause, The death of the guilds: professions, states, and the advance of capitalism, 1930 to the presentMaxine Berg, A woman in history: Eileen Power, 1889‐1940

A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940, by Maxine Berg

<i>A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940,</i> by Maxine Berg

A woman in history: Eileen Power, 1889-1940

This book tells the fascinating story of the life and work of Eileen Power, a major British historian who once ranked in fame alongside Tawney, Trevelyan and Toynbee. Using letters, diaries and reminiscences, Maxine Berg recreates the life of this charismatic personality, describing, for the first time, Power's remarkable intellectual and scholarly achievements at a time when she was acting very much outside the conventional female role. Her ability, coupled with her vivid writing and pioneer radio broadcasts, made Eileen Power's unique approach to history compelling reading and listening to a whole generation. Dr Berg sets Eileen Power's historical writing in the political and cultural framework of the interwar years, and shows how this early writer of women's and medieval social history helped to create a broad, comparative economic and social history for the succeeding generations.

Under the Western historian's eyes: Eileen Power and the early feminist encounter with colonialism

Readers will recognise in my title a reworking of the title of Joseph Conrad's 1911 novel Under Western Eyes. This novel is not usually discussed together with Conrad's 'colonial novels'. It relates a European history and focuses on difference and similarities within what studies of colonialism classify as the West.2 In the novel the West's other is Russia. The 'western eyes', through which the story of a group of Russian revolutionaries and its labyrinthine relations with Czarist autocracy and international anarchism is filtered, are the eyes of a 'dense occidental'3 whom Conrad endows with the power to

Actives and Contemplatives: The Female Religious of the Low Countries before and after Trent

ACTIVES AND CONTEMPLATIVES: THE FEMALE RELIGIOUS OF THE LOW COUNTRIES BEFORE AND AFTER TRENT BY Craig Harune* The study of religious women in early modern Catholicism is now indisputably a growth-industry.1 It is a good time, therefore, to con- *Mr. Harline is an associate professor of history in Brigham Young University. He wishes to express his gratitude to Jodi Bilinkoff, Walter Simons, and Paula Kelly for their comments and bibliographical suggestions, as well as to the several institutions that have supported the research from which this article grew, especially the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Idaho Research Council, and the College ofFamily, Home, and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University. Abbreviations: AAM = Archive of the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels NAGN = Nieuw Algemene Geschiedenes der Nederlanden¦This article is based on secondary materials (especially works in English) for conditions outside the Low Countries, and on both archival and secondary materials for conditions within. For a more general review of the literature on female religious, see the opening bibliographical note to my Burdens ofSisterMargaret (New York, 1994). A sample of useful works for the particular subject of contemplatives and actives includes , for the medieval period, Clifford H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (New York, 1984); Lina Eckenstein, Women under Monasticism (New York, 1963); Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge, 1922); John R. H . Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order. . . to the Year 1517 (Oxford, 1968); William A. Hinnebusch, O.P., The History of the Dominican Order. . . to 1500 (New York, 1966); Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (Kent, Ohio, 1977); Lillian T. Shank and John A. Nichols (cas.). MedievalReligious Women. Vol. II: Peaceweavers (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1987); Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women inMedievalFrance(Chicago, 1991 ); and, for an excellent introduction to the medieval actives in the Low Countries, Vols. Ill and IV of the new Algemene Geschiedenes der Nederlanden (Haarlem, 1979). For the early modern period see Outram Evennett's assessment of religious in The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1968); such overviews as Joyce Irwin's "Society and the Sexes," in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis, 1982); Kathryn Norberg's "The Counter-Reformation and Women, Religious and Lay," in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, ed. John O'Malley (St. Louis, 1988); F. Ellen Weaver's "Women and Religion 541 542ACTIVES AND CONTEMPLATIVES front a lingering problem in the generally healthy enterprise: the relative development and importance of active and contemplative orders. Three themes stand out in my reading of the historical literature on this subject: ( 1 ) that the first significant and lasting emergence of an "active" spirituality or apostolate among women religious occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, (2) that this type of spirituality was characteristic of early modern religious sensibilities, and (3) that the decrees and agents ofthe Council ofTrent successfully militated—at least for many decades—against the involvement of women in an active apostolate and insisted that they submit to longapproved contemplative forms. My intent is not altogether to refute these themes, but to suggest possibilities for refinement and further research, especially through illustration of conditions in the Catholic Low Countries—an area where none of the themes is very useful at all. in Early Modern France," Catholic Historical Review, LXVII 0anuary, 1981), 50—59; and such synthetic contributions as Owen Hufton and Frank Tallett, "Communities of Women, the Religious Life, and Public Service in Eighteenth-Century France," in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, eds. Marilyn J. Boxer et al (Oxford, 1987); Merry Wiesner, "Nuns, Wives and Mothers: Women and the Reformation in Germany," in Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, ed. Sherrin Marshall (Bloomington, Indiana, 1989); Sherrin Marshall, "Protestant , Catholic, andJewish Women in the Early Modern Netherlands," in the same volume; William Monter, "Protestant Wives, Catholic Saints, and the Devil's Handmaid: Women in the Age of Reformations," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2d edition, edd. Renate Bridenthal et al. (Boston, 1987). Helpful specialized works were Robert Lemoine, Le Droit des Religieux, du Concile de Trente aux...

Eileen Power and Women's History

Gender & HistoryVolume 6, Issue 2 p. 265-274 Eileen Power and Women's History MAXINE BERG, MAXINE BERGSearch for more papers by this author MAXINE BERG, MAXINE BERGSearch for more papers by this author First published: August 1994 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1994.tb00006.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume6, Issue2August 1994Pages 265-274 RelatedInformation

A New Look at the Reformation: Aristocratic Women and Nunneries, 1450–1540

Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically inThe Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. InBecoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”

Entrepreneurs and the social sciences

Abstract The burden of occupying the first established chair of business history at the. London School of Economics (and indeed the first in Britain) is happily lightened by the knowledge that the field is by no means as bereft of research and scholarship as this priority implies. The first two professors of economic history appointed at LSE fifty years ago, Eileen Power and R.H. Tawney, made distinguished contributions, to the study of medieval traders and to the impact of puritanism on the capitalist ethic. Their successors have maintained this interest in business history. T.S. Ashton's study of the business of Peter Stubs of Warrington was one of the building blocks from which his picture of the Industrial Revolution was built. Charlotte Erickson's study of British industrialists remains the classic account of their social and educational origins and career patterns between 1850 and 1950. Donald Coleman and Theo Barker, well before they joined with other scholars to found the Business History Unit, wrote company histories of Courtaulds and Pilkingtons. Nor is this work on the history of business confined to members of the economic history department or to the past: in other departments important work in the history of accounting has been undertaken for example by Professor Yamey and Professor Susan Strange who has developed studies of the history of international business institutions.