Of all the stereotypes that obscure the truth of the Middle Ages, one primary example is the extent of the power women held in society. While being a woman in the Middle Ages was no doubt a struggle through misogyny and a lack of options within one’s assigned gender role, there were still loopholes to be found within societal and cultural constraints. Women in medieval times were not the waifs subjected entirely to rape and loss that we often imagine – they often found ways to navigate and negotiate power within the trappings of the Catholic church, to fight back against their would-be tormentors, and to use the trends of the time to establish their own agency.
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Bibliography
Archambeau, Nicole. Souls Under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence. New York: Cornell University Press. 2021.
Bernstein, Hilary. Lecture 8, Part 2: War, Schism, and Spirituality. 2022.
Cole Joshua and Carol Symes. Western Civilizations: their history and their culture, volume 1. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 2020.
de Pizan, Christine. The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, edited by Charity Cannon Willard and translated by Sumner Willard. University Park, PA, 1999.
Larrington, Carolyne, editor and translator. “The Condemnation of Joan of Arc by the University of Paris, 1431,” in Women and Writing in Medieval Europe. New York, 1995.
