Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200 (Medieval Culture and Society) - Hardcover

Van Houts, Elisabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333568583 ISBN 13: 9780333568583

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Synopsis

xii + 196pp, laminated board, 8vo

About this title

Review:

'Van Houts is much too experienced a historian to overstate women's contribution to the memorialising of the medieval past: what she rightly insists on, and what gives this book its cutting edge, is that women's contribution be recognised as important and distinctive...she has produced a book that's timely, path-breaking, and emphatically more than the sum of its parts.' - Janet L. Nelson, Gender and History

Synopsis:

Remembering the past in the Middle Ages is a subject that is often perceived as a study of chronicles and annals written by monks in monasteries. Following in the footsteps of early Christian historians such as Eusebius and St Augustine, the medieval chroniclers are thought of as men isolated in their monastic institutions, writing about the world around them. As the sole members of their society versed in literacy, they had a monopoly on the knowledge of the past as preserved in learned histories, which they themselves updated and continued. A self-perpetuating cycle of monks writing chronicles, which were read, updated and continued by the next generation, so the argument goes, remained the vehicle for a narrative tradition of historical writing for the rest of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth van Houts challenges this view and emphasizes the collaboration between men and women in the memorial tradition of the Middle Ages through both narrative sources (chronicles, saints' lives and miracles) and material culture (objects such as jewellery, memorial stones and sacred vessels).

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0333568583
• ISBN 13: 9780333568583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208