This book provides an overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays speak to how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium.
Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that form the various contexts - of her time, and of our own - pertinent to understanding and in the fullest sense appreciating George Eliot. The dimensions of her achievement are illuminated by essays on particular facets of the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - that inform her work.
This volume presents a review of current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women's lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The companion not only offers an examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.