The historians in this collection are looking for ways to expand the ways we examine and write about medieval women. They are interested in the great and the obscure, and women from different times and places. All attempt to get closer to the life as lived, personified in individual stories. As such, these essays prompt us to rethink what we can know about medieval women, how we can know it, and how we can write about them to expand our insights.
This book demonstrates the diversity of women's lives in the Japanese Middle Ages. Haruko puts forward the argument that women were not confined to the roles of wife and mother, but had a variety of opportunities for social labour and participation in an expanding commercial culture.