IMC 2025: Sessions
Session 1008: Female Lives, Status, and Property
Wednesday 9 July 2025, 09:00-10:30
| Organiser: | IMC Programming Committee |
|---|---|
| Moderator/Chair: | Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, Department of History, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York |
| Paper 1008-a | Banishing Women: Monastic Confinement of Elite Women in the 12th and 13th Centuries (Language: English) Index terms: Politics and Diplomacy, Religious Life, Women's Studies |
| Paper 1008-b | Peasant Women, Land, and Manorial Law in England, c. 1280-1500: A Hampshire Case Study (Language: English) Index terms: Law, Local History, Social History, Women's Studies |
| Paper 1008-c | A Tale of a Ring: Debating Medieval Jewish Women's Adornment (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Hebrew and Jewish Studies |
| Abstract | Paper 1008-a: Monastic confinement and the use of convents could provide men with a means of removing women from their path to political or financial aspirations. While it was not unusual for high-status women to retire to convents in widowhood, others were forced into monastic life. This paper examines the monastic confinement of medieval elite women in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as Anna Komnene and Arda of Armenia, focusing on the consequences for these women. How did women respond to their monastic confinement? Did they find freedom in monastic life? Exploring themes of consent and considering parallels to imprisoned queens, this paper aims to rethink the potential agency of women forced into monastic confinement. Paper 1008-b: Women have been increasingly included in legal histories of medieval England, but this has largely been limited to noble and urban women. The situation and legal activities of rural peasant women has been mostly ignored despite the wealth of evidence available. Using manor court rolls, this paper aims to shed further light on this topic by showing that peasant women were more active than previously believed. It will demonstrate how women in several Hampshire manors engaged with their local courts in the context of inheritance and landholding and how this was influenced by their networks, marital status, and wealth. Paper 1008-c: A tale of a ring: debating medieval Jewish women's adornment. A fascinating debate regarding Jewish women's rings in the Middle Ages emerged out of the most unpredictable of sources: medieval Jewish rabbinical sources. It appears that Jewish women's rings in medieval society was a topic of debate among the rabbis of the period. These debates provide us with a new perspective on Jewish women's daily life, their costumes' adornments and on their relations with Christian women. Both Jewish sources of the period and modern studies point to major changes in Jewish women's adornment customs. These changes were part of cultural and economic developments in Christian society, which affected Jewish women's adornment: Jewish women preferred to follow Christian women's fashion codes rather than following their own community's laws. This paper will consider these new perspectives on the transformation of women's customs of adornment and the conflicts that resulted from this change. |