The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and it not only serves as the major reference text in medieval and gender studies, but also provides an agenda for future new research.

1 - Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians
2 - Gender and the Christian Traditions
3 - Jewish Traditions about Women and Gender Roles: From Rabbinic Teachings to Medieval Practice
4 - Women and Gender in Islamic Traditions
5 - The Political Traditions of Female Rulership in Medieval Europe
6 - Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions
7 - Women and Laws in Early Medieval Europe
8 - Conflicts over Gender in Civic Courts
9 - Later Medieval Law in Community Context
10 - Brideprice, Dowry, and Other Marital Assigns
11 - Women and Gender in Canon Law
12 - Gendering Demographic Change in the Middle Ages
13 - Genders and Material Culture
14 - Gender and Daily Life in Jewish Communities
15 - Carolingian Domesticities
16 - Public and Private Space and Gender in Medieval Europe
17 - Pious Domesticities
18 - Slavery
19 - Urban Economies
20 - Rural Economies
21 - Aristocratic Economies
22 - Caring for Gendered Bodies
23 - The Byzantine Body
24 - Same-Sex Possibilities
25 - Performing Courtliness
26 - Gender and the Initial Christianization of Northern Europe (to 1000 CE)
27 - The Gender of the Religious: Wo/men and the Invention of Monasticism
28 - Women and Reform in the Central Middle Ages
29 - Devoted Holiness in the Lay World
30 - Cults of Saints
31 - Heresy and Gender in the Middle Ages
32 - Cultures of Devotion
33 - The Bride of Christ, the "Male Woman", and the Female Reader in Late Antiquity
34 - Gender at the Medieval Millennium
35 - Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism
36 - Toward the Witch Craze
37 - Towards Feminism: Christine de Pizan, Female Advocacy, and Women's Textual Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond

Judith M. Bennett teaches women's history and medieval history at the University of Southern California. She is the author of a number of books and articles on medieval women and on the feminist practice of history, as well as a popular textbook on medieval European history. Ruth Mazo Karras teaches history at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of five books and numerous articles in medieval history and the history of gender and sexuality. She is a co-editor of the journal Gender and History, General Editor of the Middle Ages Series at the University of Pennsylvania Press, and a former president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.