In 2016, I began teaching a Global Middle Ages history course to first-year students at my university. In one year, the course went from one section to five, and I knew I’d struck a nerve with students. (We currently teach 7 sections a year.) I cobbled together works from around the world to share with my students, but we lacked an overarching text. In 2017, I set out to create a new textbook on the Global Middle Ages. I had been teaching the History of Women since 2013 and I approached the global middle ages from that same feminist and global lens. Approaching the global medieval in this way gave me the freedom to find comparisons and commonalities across the world. As Joan Kelly’s foundational work showed us over 45 years ago, the historical development of men’s history has differing affects on women (and other peoples outside the strict binary). I could use that same framework to look at China and Europe, India and the Islamicate – each area and peoples have their own, intricate developments that we can discern and disseminate to our students.
The textbook, Global Medieval Contexts, was published in July, 2021. For this talk, I’d like to focus on Chapter 9, Religion from 1300-1500, which is focused specifically on women. This chapter discusses the rise of affective religious experiences, particularly practiced by women, that permeated several faith traditions. This chapter, along with the one focused on peasant lives, is the one my students are most affected by. And it was using a targeted feminist methodology that allowed me to find a way to study a global past in ways that center the humanity and singularity of individual cultures.