Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

25 Record(s) Found in our database

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1. Record Number: 14136
Author(s): Eisenbichler, Konrad.
Contributor(s):
Title : At Marriage End : Girolamo Savonarola and the Question of Widows in Late Fifteenth-Century Florence [The author discusses the problems that widows encountered and considers the alternatives presented by the Dominican friar Savonarola in his "Book of the Widow's Life." His concern was that widows live in a way that was economically as well as spiritually

Source: The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy. Edited by Sherry Roush and Cristelle L. Baskins . Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Pages 67 - 80.
Year of Publication: 2005.

2. Record Number: 10854
Author(s): Simon, Anne.
Contributor(s):
Title : Reading Reading Women: Double-Mirroring the "Dame" in "Der Ritter vom Turn"

Source: Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image. Edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills . Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pages 175 - 192.
Year of Publication: 2004.

3. Record Number: 11022
Author(s): Johnston, Mark.
Contributor(s):
Title : Gender as Conduct in the Courtesy Guides for Aristocratic Boys and Girls of Amanieu de Sescás [Amanieu de Sescás wrote his poems of advice for young women and young men in the early 1290s. Johnston argues that while a few behaviors are gender specific, the poet generally emphasizes a common ethic of courtliness for nobles of both sexes. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Essays in Medieval Studies (Full Text via Project Muse) 20 (2003): 75-84. Link Info
Year of Publication: 2003.

4. Record Number: 11829
Author(s): Archer, Rowena.
Contributor(s):
Title : Piety in Question: Noblewomen and Religion in the Later Middle Ages [The author argues that historians have relied on the lives of a few exceptional women to construct a history of noble women's religiosity. In many cases religious observances were conventional and the preoccupations of a worldly life took precedence. The author briefly discusses such topics as devotional literature, marriage and liaisons forbidden by the church, widowhood, pilgrimage, almsgiving, and fouding of religious institutions. Individuals profiled include Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, and Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Women and Religion in Medieval England. Edited by Diana Wood . Oxbow Books, 2003. Pages 118 - 140.
Year of Publication: 2003.

5. Record Number: 8280
Author(s): Marín, Manuela.
Contributor(s):
Title : Marriage and Sexuality in Al-Andalus [The author examines Muslim ideas of sexuality through three texts, a religious treatise ("Kitab Adab al-nisa' " ("Treatise on the Proper Behavior of Women")), an encyclopedia ("'al- 'Iqd al-farid" ("The Unique Necklace")), and a literary anthology ("Bahjat al-majalis" ("The Beauty of Literary Gatherings")). The texts advise their male readers on rules for women's sexual conduct in order to ensure honor and legitimate heirs. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Hispanic Issues, Volume 26. Edited by Eukene Lacarra Lanz . Routledge, 2002. Pages 3 - 20.
Year of Publication: 2002.

6. Record Number: 6229
Author(s): Simon, Anne.
Contributor(s):
Title : Reading, Reading Women: Double-Mirroring the Dame in the German Book of the Knight of the Tower (1493)

Source: Seeing Gender: Perspectives on Medieval Gender and Sexuality. Gender and Medieval Studies Conference, King's College, London, January 4-6, 2002. . 2002.
Year of Publication: 2002.

7. Record Number: 8282
Author(s): Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio.
Contributor(s):
Title : The "Consells- Consejos" on Marriage and Their Broader Sentimental Context [The author examines three works of advice on marriage ("Advice of Good Doctrine which a French lady Gave Her Daughter Who Married the King of England" ("Conseyll de bones doctrines que una reyna de França dona a una filla sua que fonch muller del rey Danglaterra"), "Letter from the Marquis of Villena to His Daughter Joana" ("Letra deval scrita feu lo marques de Villena e compte de Ribagortça qui apres fo intitulat duch de Gandia, per dona Joahan filla sua quant la marida ab don Johan fill del compte de Gardona, per la qual liscrivi castich e bons nodriments, dient axi"), and "Advice from a Wiseman to His Daughters" ("Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio daba a sus hijas")) that bear structured and thematic parallels to sentimental romances. The texts emphasize women's chastity, honor, humility, and piety, but also stress a misogynous view of women's out-of-control sexuality. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Hispanic Issues, Volume 26. Edited by Eukene Lacarra Lanz . Routledge, 2002. Pages 39 - 56.
Year of Publication: 2002.

8. Record Number: 9337
Author(s): Udry, Susan.
Contributor(s):
Title : Robert de Blois and Geoffroy de la Tour Landry on Feminine Beauty: Two Late Medieval French Conduct Books for Women [The author argues that Robert de Blois and the Chevalier de la Tour Landry conceive of feminine beauty in very different ways. For Robert his chief concern is women's sociability and the ways to promote social interactions between members of varied classes. On the other hand the Chevalier is concerned that his daughters make good marriages and carry on his lineage. He warns his daughters that artificial beauty in the form of fashion and cosmetics only distorts the beauty that comes from God. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Essays in Medieval Studies (Full Text via Project Muse) 19 (2002): 90-102. Link Info
Year of Publication: 2002.

9. Record Number: 6722
Author(s): Bos, Elisabeth.
Contributor(s):
Title : The Literature of Spiritual Formation for Women in France and England, 1080-1180 [The author draws on letters written by such notable ecclesiastics as Peter the Venerable, Anselm, and Bernard of Clairvaux to nuns and to secular women, offering them advice on their spiritual problems].

Source: Listen, Daughter: The "Speculum virginum" and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages. Edited by Constant J. Mews . The New Middle Ages Series. Palgrave, 2001. Pages 201 - 220.
Year of Publication: 2001.

10. Record Number: 6926
Author(s): Rasmussen, Ann Marie.
Contributor(s):
Title : Fathers to Think Back Through: The Middle High German Mother-Daughter and Father-Son Advice Poems known as "Die Winsbeckin" and "Der Winsbecke" ["In particular, the essay examines the 'enabling' notions of authenticity, authorship, and paternal authority that shaped scholarship on the poems from 1845 to 1985. The trope of a father instructing his son furnished a productive framework for the overwhelmingly male professional caste of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars to 'think back through,' I will argue, as they constructed notions of conduct literature that privileged a version of paternal, secular authority and that rested at times on a nostalgic belief that didactic literature was imbued with an authentic connection to lived medieval experience." p. 109].

Source: Medieval Conduct. Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark . Medieval Cultures, Volume 29. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pages 106 - 134.
Year of Publication: 2001.

11. Record Number: 6924
Author(s): Krueger, Roberta L.
Contributor(s):
Title : Nouvelles Choses: Social Instability and the Problem of Fashion in the "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry," the "Ménagier de Paris," and Christine de Pizan's "Livre des Trois Vertus" [The author argues that the anti-fashion discourse in the three texts confirms that sumptuary laws and the criticisms of authorities could not control women's desires for new fashions in clothing. In fact in the descriptions and illustrations of fashions

Source: Medieval Conduct. Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark . Medieval Cultures, Volume 29. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pages 49 - 85.
Year of Publication: 2001.

12. Record Number: 6238
Author(s): Crum, Roger J.
Contributor(s):
Title : Controlling Women or Women Controlled? Suggestions for Gender Roles and Visual Culture in the Italian Renaissance Palace ["I suggest that Renaissance husbands may have involved women in the patronage process, the stewardship of material goods, and the education of children through works of art to involve them directly in the family's material wealth and to engender lineage-sustaining loyalty to the marital family. This message would have been reinforced by the themes of humility, chastity, obedience, and dutiful motherhood that characterize the greater part of Renaissance 'cassoni,' 'spalliere,' and domestic devotional works that these women beheld on a daily basis. And, of course, all of these goods were introduced into and helped to shape a palace environment that was itself highly gendered in terms of space, function, and communication." (Page 45)].

Source: Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins . Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, Volume 54. Truman State University Press, 2001. Pages 37 - 50.
Year of Publication: 2001.

13. Record Number: 6927
Author(s): Dronzek, Anna.
Contributor(s):
Title : Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-Century Conduct Books [The author compares texts written for boys and girls and argues that medieval ideas about gender affected both content and teaching methods. Boys learned visually, could handle abstract ideas, and did not need examples of violence to ensure obedience, while girls learned by listening, could only understand the concrete, and had to be threatened with corporal punishment regularly to preserve their sexual purity and by extension the family's honor. The texts the author analyzes are: For girls: "The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter" "The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage" "The Book of the Knight of the Tower" For boys: "The Babees Book" "Lerne or Be Lewde" "The ABC of Aristotle" "Urbanitatis" "The Lytylle Childrenes Lytil Boke" "The Young Children's Book" "Stans puer ad mensam" "How the Wise Man Taught His Son" "The Boke of Curtasye" "Symon's Lesson of Wysedome for All Maner Chyldryn." Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Medieval Conduct. Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark . Medieval Cultures, Volume 29. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pages 135 - 159.
Year of Publication: 2001.

14. Record Number: 6929
Author(s): Rondeau, Jennifer Fisk.
Contributor(s):
Title : Conducting Gender: Theories and Practices in Italian Confraternity Literature [The author explores both confraternity statutes and "laude," vernacular hymns, for their uses of gender. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Medieval Conduct. Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark . Medieval Cultures, Volume 29. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pages 183 - 206.
Year of Publication: 2001.

15. Record Number: 6925
Author(s): Ashley, Kathleen.
Contributor(s):
Title : The "Miroir des bonnes Femmes": Not for Women Only? ["To read the 'Miroir des bonnes femmes' as relating only to women, therefore, would be to misunderstand its role in the formation of new ideologies during the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The conjunction of female-based rhetoric, familial identities, and the promise of social advancement through proper conduct marks the first stage of a distinctive bourgeois ideology that will be fully articulated and culturally dominant by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the assumption, perhaps, on the part of conduct book owners that they are justifying a claim to 'noble' rank, it is in bourgeois culture that female honor is made the symbolic basis of a family's social reputation. As they cultivated that reputation and fostered a process of social advancement, fathers as well as their daughters therefore had a vital interest in owning conduct texts addressed to women." p. 102].

Source: Medieval Conduct. Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark . Medieval Cultures, Volume 29. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pages 86 - 105.
Year of Publication: 2001.

16. Record Number: 5450
Author(s): Tinagli, Paola
Contributor(s):
Title : Womanly Virtues in Quattrocento Florentine Marriage Furnishings [the author examines how behavioral ideals for both new husbands and wives, as represented on cassoni, spalliere, and other furnishings given to the bridal couple, emphasized chastity, restraint, and other virtues that contributed to a well-ordered civic society].

Source: Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza . European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Pages 265 - 284.
Year of Publication: 2000.

17. Record Number: 5443
Author(s): Zarri, Gabriella
Contributor(s):
Title : Christian Good Manners: Spiritual and Monastic Rules in the Quattro- and Cinquecento [the author surveys texts on comportment and morals addressed to different groups of women (virgins, wives, widows, nuns, etc.); authors and works discussed from the fifteenth century are Giovanni di Dio da Venezia, "Decor puellarum," "Gloria mulierum," and "Palma virtutum" and Cherubino da Spoleto, "Regola di vita matrimoniale" and "Regola di vita spirituale"].

Source: Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza . European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Pages 76 - 91.
Year of Publication: 2000.

18. Record Number: 5440
Author(s): Knox, Dilwyn.
Contributor(s):
Title : Civility, Courtesy, and Women in the Italian Renaissance [The author traces the origins of the idea of "modestia," decorum and gravity, which was the standard for both women and men; "cortesia" developed in order to give men and women a way to relate to each other].

Source: Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza . European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Pages 2 - 17.
Year of Publication: 2000.

19. Record Number: 4812
Author(s): Phillips, Kim M.
Contributor(s):
Title : Bodily Walls, Windows, and Doors: The Politics of Gesture in Late Fifteenth-Century English Books for Women [the author analyzes three romances in manuscript, a printed romance, and the courtesy text, "Book of the Knight of the Tower"; she argues that the manuscript texts are more concerned with social status than the policing of relations between women and men and harken back to the glory days of courtly life, while the printed texts appeal to a wider audience, especially the bourgeois, and concentrate on sexual respectability].

Source: Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy. Edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol M. Meale, and Lesley Johnson Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts . Brepols, 2000. Pages 185 - 198.
Year of Publication: 2000.

20. Record Number: 5557
Author(s): Caciola, Nancy.
Contributor(s):
Title : Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe

Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History , 42., 2 (April 2000): Pages 268 - 306.
Year of Publication: 2000.

21. Record Number: 5449
Author(s): Ajmar, Marta.
Contributor(s):
Title : Exemplary Women in Renaissance Italy: Ambivalent Models of Behaviour? [the author argues that exemplary women from the classical past and from the ranks of the saints often embodied values that were more advanced than those in Italian Renaissance society; figures like Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus renowned for her eloquence, were reinterpreted to emphasize her domestic and maternal strengths rather than her public skills in oratory; the author concludes, "The consideration of exemplary women actually enlarged the boundaries of the Renaissance notion of woman and generated a reappraisal of a woman's capacity for attaining virtue--but not her status or her role in society." (Page 260)].

Source: Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza . European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Comparative Studies in Society and History , 42., 2 (April 2000): Pages 244 - 264.
Year of Publication: 2000.

22. Record Number: 5957
Author(s): Jacobus, Laura
Contributor(s):
Title : Piety and Propriety in the Arena Chapel [the author argues that the "Early Life of the Virgin" frescoes in the Arena Chapel were intended in part to convey models of behavior to the wife, mother, and daughter of Enrico Scrovegni, the patron; using devotional works and secular conduct literature the author argues that the ideals for upper class women's behavior (modesty, chastity, courtliness, humility, charity, and attention to their husbands and families) were linked to piety and represented by Giotto in the images of the Virgin and other holy women].

Source: Renaissance studies : journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies , 12., 2 (June 1998): Pages 177 - 205.
Year of Publication: 1998.

23. Record Number: 10211
Author(s): Herrin, Judith
Contributor(s):
Title : Femina Byzantina: The Council in Trullo on Women [The author looks at the canons from the Quinisext Synod (also known as the Council of Trullo) which concern women. They fall into three broad areas: church services, monasticism, and lay women's behavior. In regard to church services, Canon 70 forbids women to speak during the liturgy. Issues of concern in women's monasticism included the overly elaborate clothing worn by women when they took the veil and the need for priests' wives to join monasteries. Lay women's behavior needed curbing during festivals, at public baths, when dancing, and during ceremonies that smacked of paganism. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: Dumbarton Oaks Papers , 46., ( 1992): Pages 97 - 105. Journal issue titled: Homo Byzantinus: Papers in Honor of Alexander Kazhdan.
Essay reproduced in Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium. By Judith Herrin. Princeton University Press, 2013. Pages 115-132.
Year of Publication: 1992.

24. Record Number: 10520
Author(s): Casagrande, Carla.
Contributor(s):
Title : The Protected Woman [Writers of didactic and pastoral literature aimed at women classified their intended female audience in various ways (by marital status, age, social status, or family role), but these texts shared many of the same values. They state that since women are weak and inconstant, they cannot be their own guardians and must submit to the authority of men. Instead of living in the public sphere, women should focus on the domestic sphere and discipline themselves. These texts discourage excessive attention to exterior concerns like clothing and cosmetics and instead encourage cultivating the inner virtues of chastity, humility, modesty, sobriety, silence, industriousness, and mercy. Title note supplied by Feminae.].

Source: A History of Women in the West. Volume 2: Silences of the Middle Ages. Edited by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. Dumbarton Oaks Papers , 46., ( 1992): Pages 70 - 104.
Year of Publication: 1992.

25. Record Number: 10521
Author(s): Vecchio, Silvana.
Contributor(s):
Title : The Good Wife [Pastoral literature aimed at women helped spread church doctrine on women’s duties in marriage, often using examples from the lives of virtuous Biblical figures like Sarah or of female saints. These writings and others (like sermons) support the Aristotelian doctrine of marriage as a relationship between unequal partners; the wife must be faithful and submit to the will of her husband. The article also provides an overview of social views on the role of the husband as master and guide to the wife and family as well as the wife’s supplemental role in household management and the education and raising of children. Title note supplied by Feminae.].