Medieval Women

Eileen Power was a pioneer in Women’s History and this was the first book I read when I went back to university. It’s an inspiring collection of essays on medieval ideas of women, working women in town and country, education, and nunneries. If you’re planning to write a book about women in the Middle Ages, start your research here.

Power refers to many diverse contemporary texts such as The Goodman of Paris and works by Chaucer and Christine de Pisan, which enabled me (or, which will enable you) to portray authentic detail in my own book. The essay on nunneries,… show more.

I love this book because of its contents and the history of the author. Eileen Power was a foremother as a historian of the Middle Ages and medieval women. This book is a posthumous collection of essays that brilliantly lay out the ways in which the medieval world thought about women, and then the outlines of the lives of elite women, working women (both urban women such as silk workers, and peasant women), women’s education, and women in convents. Power modeled lively, creative scholarship, taking the first steps that many later scholars of medieval women would follow.