History 456 The Politics of Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Spring 2014
Ellen Wurtzel (ewurtzel@oberlin.edu)
Class meets Wed 2:30-4:20 in King 339
Office: 307 Rice Hall
Office hrs: T 1-2 Th. 11:00-12:30 and by appt.
Course Description:
In 1986, historian Joan Scott published a now-famous
article that questioned natural sex categories and
called attention to the systems of power that are
constructed on the perceived differences between
men and women. It was an important turning point in history as a discipline. Gender has since
transformed historical analysis, moving out from women’s history to complicate fields where most
women were absent or silent. Arguably, nowhere has this transformation and its political implications
been more apparent than in medieval and early modern European history, whose fluid gender categories
have often been used to destabilize our own.
This colloquium has two aims: to examine how and in what ways gender shaped medieval and early
modern Europeans’ identities, experiences, imaginations and ideology, and also to consider the ways in
which gender studies have transformed the doing of history. We will try to answer Joan Scott’s question
for ourselves: is gender still a useful category of analysis for the medieval and early modern periods?
Does gender tell us something fundamental about pre-modern people’s lives, both men and women? What
have we gained by moving from women’s history to gender studies, and what have we lost? To this end
we will analyze historians’ work on the topics of sexuality, spirituality and science, the family, political
authority and economic production in premodern Europe. Moreover, I also hope you will not only gain
insight into some of the key historiographic debates about gender in this period but also acquire some of
the important tools of the historian. Through active discussion and written analysis of a number of articles
and monographs, we will see how historians identify good questions, deploy various methodologies,
analyze evidence and construct their arguments. Above all, I hope you will think of this course as just the
beginning in your pursuit of new and exciting directions of thought, historical or otherwise.
There will be one lecture and one film outside of class time.
This course also counts towards the GSFS major!
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Required texts
Except for these texts, all readings will be available on Blackboard under Reading Assignments; some are
available as e-resources through OBIS (will have a +) These texts will be on print reserve in the library.
Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (1996)
Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast (1987)
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992)
Katherine Park, Secrets of Women (2006)
Larissa Juliet Taylor, The Virgin Warrior: the life and death of Joan of Arc (2009)
Samuel Thomas, A Midwife’s Tale (2012)
This course welcomes different perspectives and backgrounds from within the discipline of history and
also outside it. For those without a background in European history (and even those with one!) I would
recommend having a good textbook on hand for those moments of diachronic or synchronic confusion.
Lynn Hunt et. al., The Making of the West (concise 2nd edition or 3rd edition) vol. I or Chambers and
Hanawalt, The Western Experience Vol. B The Early Modern Era, are two reliable ones.
Requirements
All work must be turned in to receive credit for the course
The breakdown of grades is as follows:
Attendance and Participation in Weekly Discussion (you may have one unexcused absence)
Response paper
Book review
Sex, Science, Spirituality medieval conversation
14th class/unit
20%
10%
15%
25%
30%
Grading based on the following: A+ 100-97; A 96-93; A- 92-90; B+ 89-87; B 86-83; B- 82-80; C+ 79-77;
C 76-73; C- 72-70; D 65-69, F below 65.
Details
1. Readings must be completed before class and brought to class, and participation in class discussions
counts heavily in the final course grade. Even if you are writing a paper for that class on one particular
reading, you should prepare all the reading and be ready to discuss it. Because there is writing involved
for every class session, it will not work to put off reading until the night before-it will take you all week
to get through everything, take notes, process and write up your thoughts.
2. Written Assignments
a. Response paper. 2 pp. Short informal assessment of the reading for the week. Please post to the
rest of the class by Sunday 8PM (before we meet on Wednesday). You should include author’s
thesis, sources and methodology and why you think the reading works or doesn’t work. We will
choose the second week of class.
b. Blackboard responses- min. 1 paragraph. Every week in Blackboard, after the assigned person
posts his/her Response paper on Sunday, you will read it and comment, based on your own views
and also points the respondent raised. Feel free to start a conversation there!! Due every Tuesday
2
by 8PM. You have a pass on skipping any one week you want and you also skip (of course) the
week you do a response paper.
c. Book Review. 2-3 pp. This is a more formal assessment of an author or author’s thesis, sources
used, methodology and significance. I want you to think about the argument and how well it works
but also how the argument was constructed. Think less about whether it is a book you like and
more whether the author answers the question she/he asked. Due on any week other than 3/19you choose. We’ll pick dates the second week of classes.
Medieval Conversation. 5-7 pp. After reading several books/articles on medieval notions of sex
difference, sexuality and spirituality, you will take one of those themes and put several readings in
conversation with each other. Do these authors reinforce each other’s work, criticize or provide
new directions? Due Friday, March 21 12PM. Turn in electronically with honor code.
d. 14th Class. 8-10 pp. Due the last class, May 7. This presentation and paper creates an imagined
14th topic for this course. It could be inserted anywhere in the syllabus (you are not restricted
chronologically except by the boundaries of the course). In your paper, make the pitch. You should
describe the topic and explain why it is something that fits into this course syllabus and is worthy of
inclusion. You may choose a cluster of texts, a mix of monographs and articles. Then, discuss the
state of the field. What kinds of historical work has been done on it, and what readings would you
choose to go with it? What are the strengths of those readings, and limitations? We will listen to all
the choices and then vote on them-and use the winner next time this is taught!
Guidelines for all written work: There are only a few simple rules. 1. Be clear in your writing, specific
rather than general in your claims, and faithful to the sources themselves. 2. Proofread!! 3. Please, please,
please number your pages! 4. Papers should be one and a half or double-spaced, with at least 1” margins
but not more. 5. When you are using primary sources and other historians’ work, you will need to include
footnotes and a bibliography. To do this, refer to some of the reference guides from the Oberlin History
Department that I have posted on Blackboard. When in doubt, get in touch with me.
Disabilities: If you have specific physical, psychiatric or learning disabilities and require
accommodations, please let me know early in the semester so that your learning needs may be
appropriately met. You will need to provide documentation of your disability to Jane Boomer in the
Office of Disability Services in Peters G-27/G-28.
Lateness: Unexcused late assignments will be penalized by dropping 3 points from your grade every day a
paper is late.
Plagiarism: All work turned in for this course must be your own. The College requires that students sign
an "Honor Code" for all assignments. This pledge states: "I affirm that I have adhered to the Honor Code
in this assignment." For further information, see the student Honor Code which you can access via
Blackboard>Lookup/Directories>Honor Code. If you have questions about what constitutes plagiarism,
especially in the context of group assignments, please see me or raise it in class.
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Schedule of Classes and Assignments
Part I: Theory, History and Methodologies
February 5: The Historian’s Dilemma
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Readings
-Alice Kessler-Harris, "Do We Still Need Women’s History?" Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 7,
2007
-Toby Ditz, The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from
Early American Gender History” Gender and History 16: 1 (2004): only read 1-11 (mid-page), 26-27
(conclusion)
-Joan Scott, “Gender, A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review vol. 91
no. 5 (Dec., 1986): 1053-1075 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376
February 12: Getting Medieval
How has the agenda of medieval women’s history changed since 1970? Feminist history? What are the
key issues to consider, according to these authors- power, sexuality, patriarchy, economics? Is history still
the history of men?
Readings
-Georges Duby, “The diffusion of cultural patterns in feudal society,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans.
Cynthia Postan (1977), 171-177, originally published Past & Present (1968)
-David Herlihy, “The Natural History of Medieval Women” (1978) in Women, Family and Society in
Medieval Europe: historical essays, 1978-1991 (1995) 57-68
-Frances and Joseph Gies, Women in the Middle Ages (1978) 3-12
Judith Bennett, “The Master and the Mistress” in History Matters (2006): 128-152
Part II: Medieval Religion, Science, and the Body
February 19: Spiritual Femininity
How does Bynum characterize the historiographical debate about late medieval spirituality, and how does
her intervention change that debate? Can a study of medieval saints’ lives tell us about women’s
religiosity? What’s the connection between women and food? Is there are difference between abhorring
and disciplining the body?
Reading:
-Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast (1987), Chapter 1, Chapters 4-10
February 26: One and Two Seeds, Three Genders?
What is the body, to you? What was the body to someone in the Middle Ages? Sex/gender roles?
Sexuality? What were women’s and men’s characteristics? Was it a binary gender system? What was the
relationship between ideas of male/ female, masculine/feminine bodies in medical and alchemical
discourses to other discourses—theological and social?
Readings:
-Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (1993),
169-227
-Leah DeVun,
“Animal Appetites,” GLQ (forthcoming)
-Anna Abulafia, “Bodies in the Jewish‐ Christian Debate,” in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds., Framing
Medieval Bodies (Manchester, 1994), 123–137
-Martha Brozyna, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages, selections
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Thursday, February 27, 4:30 PM, Hallock Auditorium. Special Lecture by Leah DeVun, associate
professor of history at Rutgers University: “Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of
Surgery.” Attendance Required! We will spend some class time coming up with questions for Professor
DeVun.
March 5: Learned Masculinities
To Karras, masculinity is not a natural attribute of men; it is constructed in particular ways. Do you agree
with this characterization? What did different groups of men ‘use’ to define themselves? How might one
write a different history of masculinity?
Readings:
-Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men (2003)
- Guild Rivalries, Town-Gown Controversies in Oxford and Paris and A Scholar in Paris,” in Maryanne
Kowaleski, Medieval Towns: a reader (2008): 139-48; 277-80; 288-289
March 12: Women Warriors?
Why is Joan of Arc so perpetually fascinating? Do you think she makes a good biographical subject, and
why? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the biographical form of history writing? Was there
ever a period in which elite women’s power equaled men’s, and if so, why did it change? Under what
circumstances and by what means were women able to access power, and how was their ability to wield it
affected by prevailing gender norms?
Readings:
-Larissa Juliet Taylor, The Virgin Warrior: the life and death of Joan of Arc (2012)
-Megan McLaughlin, The Woman Warrior, Women’s Studies 17 (1990)
“Trial of Joan of Arc” in Patrick Geary, Readings in Medieval History, (Toronto, 2010): no. 50
March 19 The Birthing of Modern Science
What is this book a history OF exactly? What story is Park tracing here? Does she see the idea of the
body itself changing in the later Middle Ages? If so, what does she see as the causes of those changes?
Does Park agree with Laqueur that the one-sexed body dominated pre-modern medical and philosophical
texts? Carolyn Merchant, eco-feminist and historian, in her book entitled The Death of Nature (1980)
famously argued that Nature, benignly feminized prior to the Enlightenment (wild but benevolent), was
reconceived as a woman needing to be mastered, dominated and dissected during the Scientific
Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. Do you think Park is offering a similar kind of trajectory in
Secrets of Women?
-Katherine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2006)
Friday, March 21 12PM Due: 5-7 page Medieval Conversation on sex difference, sexuality, the body
or spirituality
March 26 Spring Break!
Part III. Economic, social and political orders
April 2: Patriarchal Equilibrium and Market Change
What was women’s labor status at the end of the Middle Ages, according to Bennett? Why? (advent of
capitalism, demographic changes, marriage patterns, etc.) Was it marked by continuity or crises? Too
diverse to categorize? Was there ever a golden age?
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Reading:
-Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (1996)
April 9: Renaissance Feminism?
Readings:
-Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds.
Bridenthal, Koonz, and Stuard (1987) 175-201.
-Margot King, Skim “Virgo and Virago: Women and High Culture,” in Women of the Renaissance (1991)
157-239
-Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England
(2009) (selections)
April 16: Family Politics
Reading:
-Sam Thomas, A Midwife’s Tale (2012)
- Transcription of Bridget Hodgson’s will: http://samthomasbooks.com/document-transcripts/hodgsonwill.html
- David Harley, "Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch," Society for the Social
History of Medicine (1990): 1-26
*Special class guest: Sam Thomas, author and teacher at University School in Shaker Heights, OH
April 23: Gender, Sexuality and Witchcraft
Readings:
-Julian Goodare, “Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” Social History vol. 23 no. 3 (1998): 288-308
-Laura Weigert, “Autonomy as Deviance: Sixteenth-Century Images of Witches and Prostitutes,” in Paula
Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II, eds., Solitary Pleasures: the historical literary and artistic discourses of
autoeroticism (NY: Routledge, 1995): 19-41
-E.J. Kent, “Masculinity and male witches in old and New England, 1593-1680,” History Workshop
Journal 60 (2005): 69-92
April 30: Gender and the State
Readings:
-Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992)
*Sunday May 4: Film showing: Ridicule (Patrice Leconte, director, 1996)
May 7: Make your pitch!
Presentations on the 14th class of the semester. Paper due at the beginning of class.

The group of readings on witchcraft was created by Oberlin student Allison Chomet in 2011,
when she received the most votes for her 14th class pitch. And now it’s in the syllabus!
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