In today’s class, we will start exploring the frameworks that prescribed ideas about women in medieval Europe. We’ll begin with discussions of women’s bodies in medical and philosophical texts. Gender ideology in medieval Europe was greatly influenced by philosophical and medical ideas from ancient Greece and Rome which were then blended with Christianity (sometimes quite awkwardly).
To Watch (for online students only)
Powerpoint slides: #2-Philosophy and Medicine
To Read
Note: This looks like a lot of reading but many of them are quite short documents. Also, they contain some pretty strange ideas about women’s bodies so be prepared!
Hippocrates, “On Virgins” and “Diseases of Women”
Galen, “On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body”
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals
Innocent III, “On the Horrors of Menstrual Blood”
Hildegard of Bingen, “Causes and Cures”
All readings available:
To Do
Reading historical sources is a skill that requires asking and answering a series of questions designed to help understand the context in which this material was produced, how that context affected the creation of the document and its contents, as well as how to pull meaning out of the material presented. For those students unfamiliar with reading historical sources, I’ve provided a guide, using one of the sources assigned for today’s class as an example. It’s available here:
As we’ll see over the course of this semester, reading historical sources as a method of understanding women’s lives in medieval Europe is somewhat different. In today’s class, we’ll explore why we need to look at historical sources differently when studying medieval history from the perspective of women. We’ll also consider the theoretical ideas about women’s bodies that our sources present and what they can tell us about how women were perceived.
In person students
Some questions to consider for our class today:
- Why do historians have to ask different questions of historical sources when they examine them from the perspective of women and gender?
- What are some of the limitations of using the assigned sources for understanding medieval women?
- What ideas about women’s bodies do these sources present?
- What perspective of women do these sources provide us with?
- What commonalities do you see across these sources? What similar ideas do they present? Do you see any distinctions? If so, what?
Online Students
The above questions will be posted in your chatboard channels as a means of developing discussion about the assigned readings. Students who are signed up to lead the online discussion are responsible for monitoring your classmates’ comments and responding to them to keep the discussion going. If there are questions that arise that I can help with, you can tag me on the chatboard @dwl but I’ll also make sure to read through everyone’s comments.
Comments should be posted before Sunday April 8th at midnight.