2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Unconventional Women and Religion in the Medieval West

Gender was critical in shaping women’s experiences in the pre-modern period. Thus we propose this session for inclusion in the conference thread “Women, Gender, and Religion." By examining many centuries, diverse social classes, and assuming a transnational approach, this panel builds upon feminist methodologies to illuminate how gender empowered women's spirituality and religious practice.  

Negotiating what JoAnn McNamara termed "hostile sources," these papers argue that gender afforded medieval women unique – sometimes unconventional -- opportunities for religious agency and expression. In Merovingian Europe, women were closely associated with magic and hence were to be feared. Yet as the Carolingian reforms changed the religious landscape of Continental Europe, women's influence in supernatural and religious matters shifted. By the Central Middle Ages, as evident in the life of Countess Ermengard, women found agency as influential patrons of ecclesiastical communities and participants in emerging spiritual movements. Two centuries later, fourteenth-century rural women exercised considerable autonomy in determining their religious lives. In each case, gender shaped women's religious interactions as well as opportunities for agency.

For early medieval women, a Breton countess, and the peasant women of Catalunya, gender and religion granted them space to garner power and autonomy. Through analysis of a wide diversity of class, concepts of conventionality, time and place, the panel introduces women and their experiences, which serve not only to decenter traditional narratives but also contemporary expectations about women’s lives and agency in the pre-modern world.