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

June 01 - 04, 2017

This session stresses that univocal explanations of depictions of women roles in history are rarely sufficient and that the reliance on a binary construct of women – victim or virago, pawn or player – misreads the multi-layered intricacy of the sources and, thereby, serves to obfuscate rather than clarify the complexity of women’s experiences. These three papers draw on depictions of women warriors and female aggression from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries from a wide variety of sources – chronicles, encyclopedias, poetry, homily and hagiography – in order to stress the highly interdisciplinary and nuanced approach that is necessary when attempting to gender the master narrative of aggression, power and combat in the Middle Ages. Representations of bellicose women do change over time, but they are also layered with a plethora of meanings that are not only gendered, but also historicized, politicized, source dependant and often squeamishly ambiguous. It is, therefore, necessary to embrace many qualifications before reaching definitive conclusions regarding the meaning of specific representations of aggressive women, which need to be viewed through the greater context of the literary genre, its historical or political situation, and the emotional and intellectual world of such representations. While generally deemed transgressive, female aggression was often ambiguously treated, providing an acute lens through which to study medieval society. While focusing on the Middle Ages, this session is an important contribution to wider historical thought and practice because it emphasizes a non-binary, highly nuanced approach when gendering the master narrative.