Theresa Marie Earenfight

This collection of twelve essays examine medieval women, money, wealth, and power through historical, art historical/architectural and literary studies, seeking to push beyond traditional economic studies to look at how women's access to economic resources, and how medieval people conceived of wealth and trade, affected personal interactions and gendered power relations. Some of the articles are useful and innovative—I really enjoyed Sally Livingston's take on economic rhetoric in the writings of Heloise, and found Shelly Roff's investigation of medieval and early modern women's active labour on construction sites to be fascinating. They, and the other essays which approached their topic from an empirical/historical perspective were strong, but I found myself frustrated with some of the more literary ones—Daniel Murtaugh, for instance, looks at the rhetoric of women and power in an Old French fabliau without once telling the reader the date of composition of said story, or providing a probable author or location of composition. The end result is an essay which is somewhat unmoored in time—there was no contextualisation. Recommended to be cherry-picked for some articles, but not to be read the whole way through.… (plus d'informations)