Family Lives of Medieval Women

Women in the Middle Ages led fascinating and often wildly differing everyday lives, depending on their social class and family situation. However, to date this rich variety of experience has not been fully brought to light, because books on the general subject of ‘life in the Middle Ages’ tend to have multiple chapters devoted to men of different classes (kings, lords, knights, merchants, tradesmen, monks, and so on) and then one chapter at the end entitled ‘women’, as though the female half of the population was some kind of homogenous mass! But women’s experiences varied just as much as men’s did, and in this book we will turn the spotlight on them, in lively and interesting detail, as we meet women of all social classes and learn about their lives.A number of medieval women have been the subject of previous studies and biographies. However, they tend to be the exceptional figures who broke the mould, which leads us to ask: What about the women who were not exceptional, who did not blaze a new trail? What was life like for the vast majority who were obliged to live within the constraints imposed on the female half of the population? This book will provide answers to these questions, shedding light on the full breadth of their experiences for the first time.