Session Abstract

In recent years historians have begun to understand and analyze the many ways that objects functioned in the past. Moving forward from the assumption that objects have social lives and in turn create social networks and enact and affirm relationships, this session explores the connections between women and objects during the Middle Ages. To this end, papers engage a series of questions meant to forward the study of gender and material culture. In what ways can women’s interactions with material culture tell us about women’s lives that textual sources do not? Did women interact with certain objects differently from men? How did these interactions shape women’s spheres or the perception of women’s actions in public or private? Did medieval women have specific and defining relationships with certain objects and if so, why? How did these interactions underline religious or social identities and were these identities expressed differently by women than by men? Is there a unique relationship between women’s history and material culture precisely because of the textual imbalance favoring male authors and subjects in medieval sources? In turn, is the study of material culture necessary for understanding more of the dimensions of women’s history in the past? Papers will also address issues of methodology and the use of material culture. What sorts of insights do objects offer that texts do not? Moreover, how should objects or material culture be “read”? What are the specific challenges that medievalists face when dealing with material culture, particularly given the limited survival of medieval objects? The social life of objects speaks clearly to the social constructions of gender in the Middle Ages. Through three case studies, this session seeks to address this process.