The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages

Constant J. Mews's groundbreaking work reveals the wide world of medieval letters. Looking beyond the cathedral and the cloister for his investigations, and taking a broad view of intellectual practice in the Middle Ages, Mews demands that we expand our horizons as we explore the history of ideas. Alongside his cutting-edge work on Abelard, he has been a leader in the study of medieval women writers, paying heed to Hildegard and Heloise in particular. Mews has also expanded our knowledge of medieval music, and its theoretical foundations. In Mews' Middle Ages, the world of ideas always belongs to a larger world: one that is cultural, gendered and politicized. The essays in this volume pay tribute to Constant, in spirit and in content, revealing a nuanced and integrated vision of the intellectual history of the medieval West.

Conclusion

This chapter returns to the issues surrounding ‘voices’ and subjectivities posed in the Introduction, and reflects on what the voices of medieval women like those whose cases make up Chapters 1–3 might play in present-day debates on sex work. The chapter reflects on the final difficulty of attributing ‘complex’ subjectivity to individuals and engaging meaningfully with their experience without at least some form of objectification, a vital concern for the history of prostitution.

Secret Women

This chapter presents a case study of apparent clandestine prostitution in Zurich in 1392, embedded within an attempted prosecution of abortion of a single woman named Repplin. The chapter aims to investigate the ambiguities of the concept of clandestine prostitution and whether it offers a satisfactory means of engaging with the subjectivity of medieval women. In doing so it additionally seeks to participate in existing debates on sex and social classification in the Middle Ages in which prostitution has been central. The chapter ultimately argues that while prostitution offers a useful means of making visible the lives of marginal women, imposing categories upon past subjects is also fraught with problems. In arguing that the idea of prostitutes as ‘secret women’ can help the reader to understand the symbolic and material dimensions of Repplin’s case, the chapter also makes the case for resisting the attempt to fully ‘capture’ past subjects.

Tending the ‘Contested’ Castle Garden: Sowing Seeds of Feminist Thought

Medieval women are typically portrayed as secluded, passive agents within castle studies. Although the garden is regarded as associated with women there has been little exploration of this space within medieval archaeology. In this paper, a new methodological framework is used to demonstrate how female agency can be explored in the context of the lived experience of the medieval garden. In particular, this study adopts a novel approach by focusing on relict plants at some medieval castles in Britain and Ireland. Questions are asked about the curation of these plants and the associated social practices of elite women, including their expressions of material piety, during the later medieval period. This provides a way of questioning the ‘sacrality’ of medieval gardening which noblewomen arguably used as a devotional practice and as a means to further their own bodily agency through sympathetic medicine.

The Meaning of Imagined Pilgrimage

There is growing interest among historians of late medieval and early modern Europe in the concept of resistance for understanding women and power. Researchers are beginning to look beyond religious women’s overt and well-documented forms of opposition to reform efforts that increasingly restricted their physical enclosure; they contend that these women also resisted through more subtle cultural means, such as the devotional practice of imagined pilgrimage. Yet recent studies — including one by this author — have argued unconvincingly that late medieval Dominican nuns in southwest Germany who took mental journeys to Jerusalem or Rome thereby resisted their enclosure. This article uses an approach created by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner to check and correct this resistance model. It shows that the interpretation of what imagined pilgrimage meant to and for these late medieval women is most likely an effect of scholars’ present biases, both intellectual and sociocultural.