Women’s networks – their relations with other women, men, objects and place – were a source of power in various European and neighbouring regions throughout the Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary volume considers how women’s networks, and particularly women’s direct and indirect relationships to other women, constituted and shaped power from roughly 300 to 1700 AD. The essays in this collection juxtapose scholarship from the fields of archaeology, art history, literature, history and religious studies, drawing on a wide variety of source types. The volume’s aim is to highlight not only the importance of networks in understanding medieval women’s power but also the different ways these networks are represented in medieval sources and can be approached today. This volume reveals how women’s networks were widespread and instrumental in shaping political, familial and spiritual legacies.

Table des matières :

Emma O. Bérat/Rebecca Hardie – Introduction

Julia Hillner/Máirín MacCarron – Female Networks and Exiled Bishops between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages : The Cases of Liberius of Rome and Wilfrid of York
Lucy K. Pick – Networking Power and Gender at Court : An Eleventh-Century Diploma and ‘Las Meninas’
Jitske Jasperse – With This Ring : Forming Plantagenet Family Ties
Abigail S. Armstrong – English Royal Family Ties : EdwardIand his Breton Nieces
Mercedes Pérez Vidal – Female Aristocratic Networks : Books, Liturgy and Reform in Castilian Nunneries
Stephanie Hollis – Dynastic Visions : Founder Abbesses of Wilton and Barking and their Eleventh-Century Successors
Alyssa Gabbay – Mothers, Liver-Eaters and Matrilineal Descent:Hind bint‘Utba, Mu‘a ̄wiya and Nasab(Filiation) in Early Islam
Karen Dempsey – Herstory : Exploringthe Material Life of Gundrada de Warenne