Just over 25 years ago the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of York launched a new interdisciplinary MA pathway ‘Women and the the Later Medieval World’ and at much the same time hosted an international conference entitled ‘Medieval Women’.
Since that time the study of medieval women has evolved considerably, though interest in the study of gender and particularly masculinity has raised questions as to how we now relate to and engage with the study of women’s lives and experience in the medieval past. Recent scholarship has moreover returned to some of the questions that were pioneering a quarter of a century ago, particularly in relation to the ‘status’ of women after the Black Death. By revisiting the theme of medieval women, this conference seeks to explore where scholarship, particularly scholarship first inspired by the ‘Women and the Later Medieval World’ has taken us.
This then is both an exploration and a celebration. It is also an opportunity to welcome scholars from Central Europe who a quarter of a century ago saw their world transformed by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of authoritarian communist regimes. We are delighted that the conference is supported by the Department of History of the Palacky University, the Czech Republic.
Programme
Thursday 7 July
16:00 REGISTRATION
16:30 WELCOME
16:45
Isobel Davis (Birbeck, UK) The Woman Question – then and now
Rachel Moss (Oxford, UK) (B)Romance and Rape Culture in Late Medieval England
18:30 Wine Reception
Friday 8 July
09:15
Daniela Rywiková (Ostrava, Czech Republic) Sin and Death Gendered: Female Identity in the Late Medieval Pastoral Care and Visual Culture
Gerhard Jaritz (CEU, Hungary/KREMS, Salzburg, Austria) Late Medieval Visual Culture and the Constructions of Female Space
11:00 Coffee break
11:15
Hollie Morgan (Lincoln, UK) Where the Magic Happens: The Lady’s Chamber in the Late-Medieval English Imagination
Kim Phillips (Auckland, NZ) The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and Female Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society
13:00 LUNCH
14:00
Marija Mogorović Crljenko (Pula, Croatia) Marriage and Concubinage in Istria during the Transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Times
Vicki Blud (York, UK) Unspeakable Acts and Queer Medieval Women
15:45 Tea break
16:15
Beata Możejko (Gdańsk, Poland) Women in the medieval Hanseatic city of Gdańsk,: Sources and research problems
Deborah Youngs (Swansea, UK) ‘In most humble wise sheweth and compleyneth….’: female plaintiffs and Star Chamber in early Tudor England and Wales
19:00 Speaker’s Supper
Saturday 9 July
09:30
Teresa Phipps (Nottingham, UK) Locating Women: Gender and Space in Borough Court Records
Jeremy Goldberg (York, UK) Material Girls Revisited: Problematising the Social and Economic Position of Women in Later Medieval England
11:15 Coffee Break
11:30
Michaela Antonín Malaníková (Olomouc, Czech Republic) Guardianship or Partnership? Property Relations of Spouses in Late Medieval Czech Towns
Cordelia Beattie (Edinburgh, UK) Did married women stop making wills in fifteenth-century England?
13:15 Lunch
14:30 Round Table: Medieval Women: Where Next?
Medieval Studies at York 