Abstract
Thirty years ago, historian Joan Kelly Gadol asked a now-celebrated historiographical question: Did women have a Renaissance? Kelly answered negatively, arguing that major intellectual and cultural changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had happened only for men.1 She implied further that men had effectively denied women full participation in the major developments of western history. Since then, three decades of historiographical response have helped historians rethink women’s participation in every period of the European past. Some scholars have pointed out the exceptional women who took part in and even helped direct mainstream trends and events. Others have responded to Kelly with a discrete history of mothers, wives, workers, servants, and other females who dwelt beyond the direct influence of easily defined political events or intellectual and artistic movements.2
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Notes
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© 2007 Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz
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Bitel, L.M. (2007). Period Trouble: The Impossibility of Teaching Feminist Medieval History. In: Chazelle, C., Lifshitz, F. (eds) Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12305-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12305-3_12
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