Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague

by Judith M. Bennett

Unlike most histories of European women, which have typically focused on the 19th and 20th century elite, this study reconstructs the public lives of peasant women and men during the six decades before the Black Death of 1348-49. Drawing on the extensive records of the forest manor of Brigstock, Judith Bennett challenges the myth of a "golden age" of equality for medieval men and women. Instead, she ably shows that women faced profound political, legal, economic, and social disadvantages in their dealings with men. These disadvantages stemmed more from women's household status as dependents of their husbands than from any notion of female inferiority; consequently, adolescents and widows participated much more actively than wives in the public life of Brigstock. Women in the Medieval English Countryside demonstrates not only how enduring the subordination of women has been throughout English history, but also how firmly that subordination has been rooted in the conjugal
household.

Genres: Medieval, Nonfiction, Medieval History, Gender Studies, History

338 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Judith MacKenzie Bennett is an American historian, Emerita Professor of History and John R. Hubbard Chair in British History at the University of Southern California. Bennett writes and teaches about medieval Europe, specifically focusing on gender, women's history, and rural peasants.

Reviews

[Tristan Cullum · Rating 3 out of 5]

A classic, but I found it a bit outdated. I also think she puts public influence on too much of a pedestal vis-à-vis private/informal influence, and the concluding chapter was especially disappointing in this respect in its comparison of peasant with feudal women's status. The book is written in a tortuously repetitive manner.

[mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Undeniably informative but also unnecessarily repetitious. The tables are the best part of this, as the data regarding the gender divide of the time is readily seen. Her analysis regarding why that divide existed is also interesting, if circuitously presented with her points being repeated over and over. The appendix on the methodology would have been better served as simply the first chapter, as it is both that informative and that indispensable for understanding the presentation of the data in the tables and the explanations offered. Because of the limited source documents, the subject does not readily lend itself to a narrative, but there's one that could have been had if the chapters had been based on the families and individuals focused on from the manorial records instead of the topical approach she used, but that is admittedly secondary for a scholarly work. The first two and the last two pages of the last chapter form a rather succinct summary of the work, such that this is one book I wish I had skipped to the end to read the final chapter first as that would have made reading the rest easier.

[Allison Thurman]

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