The medieval era has been described as 'the Age of Chivalry' and 'the Age of Faith' but also as 'the Dark Ages'. Medieval women have often been viewed as subject to a punishing misogyny which limited their legal rights and economic activities, but some scholars have claimed they enjoyed a 'rough and ready equality' with men. The contrasting figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary loom over historians' interpretations of the period 1000-1500. Yet a wealth of recent historiography goes behind these conventional motifs, showing how medieval women's lives were shaped by status, age, life-stage, geography and religion as well as by gender. A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages presents essays on medieval women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation to illustrate the diversity of medieval women's lives and constructions of femininity.

Praise for the first edition: 'It is difficult to imagine another book in which one could find all this diverse material, and no doubt Amt's collection, in its richness, and in its genuine clarity and simplicity will takes prominent place in our expanded, diversified medieval curriculum, a curriculum that takes class, gender, and ethnicity as central to an understanding of world cultural history.' - The Medieval Review Long considered to be a definitive and truly groundbreaking collection of sources, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe uniquely presents the everyday lives and experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This indispensible text has now been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect new research, and includes previously unavailable source material. This new edition includes expanded sections on marriage and sexuality, and on peasant women and townswomen, as well as a new section on women and the law. There are brief introductions both to the period and to the individual documents, study questions to accompany each reading, a glossary of terms and a fully updated bibliography. Working within a multi-cultural framework, the book focuses not just on the Christian majority, but also present material about women in minority groups in Europe, such as Jews, Muslims, and those considered to be heretics. Incorporating both the laws, regulations and religious texts that shaped the way women lived their lives, and personal narratives by and about medieval women, the book is unique in examining women’s lives through the lens of daily activities, and in doing so as far as possible through the voices of women themselves.

A broad overview of the history of women from the ancient Greeks to today.

These volumes present an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. With six volumes covering 2500 years, this is the most authoritative history available of women in Western cultures. Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters: the Life Cycle; Bodies and Sexuality; Religion and Popular Beliefs; Medicine and Disease; Public and Private Worlds; Education and Work; Power; and Artistic Representation. This means readers can either have a broad overview of a period by reading a volume or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume.

Discusses the legal, social, and religious position of women in the Greco-Roman world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and modern era.

Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages is a volume of essays presenting the argument that with the coming of the universities women were excluded, in an apartheid of gender, from education and power. It discusses the resulting paradigm shift from Romanesque to Gothic, describing the images which women had of themselves and which the dominant male society had of them. We meet, in the pages of this book, medieval women in their roles as writers, pilgrims, wives, anchoresses and nuns, at court, on pilgrimage, in households and convents. The volume, as a «Distant Mirror» for ourselves today, seeks to present ways in which women then fulfilled the roles society expected of them and the ways in which they also subverted - through entering into textuality - the expectations of the dominating culture in order to quest identity and equality.