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

June 01 - 04, 2017

In 1973, Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Fonay Wemple wrote “The Power of Women through the Family” which established the paradigm for understanding elite women’s access to power in the early medieval period, and its decline starting in the late eleventh century. Since the early 1980s, the study of elite women (noble and royal) has flourished and undermined both the timing and extent of elite women’s loss of power during the High Middle Ages.  This body of work has disproved the “exceptional” status accorded to elite women who exercised power. Nevertheless, despite everything we have learned in the last forty-plus years, it is still not unusual to see studies that assume that power belonged in male hands, and that characterize women exercising power as "exceptions to the rule.” In this lightening session, we aim to share current research challenging historiographic expectations regarding women’s relationship to the execution of power, the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and the organization of institutions within the frame of the pre-modern and early modern “state.” Our expertise ranges from the history of the family, rulership, religious life, and the history of medicine, from Spain, Portugal, France, and England.