In order to assess your understanding of the course material and readings, you can choose from one of the following three options:

  • Weekly quizzes
  • Two short essays
  • Final Exam

Option 1: Weekly Quizzes

Quizzes with multiple-choice and short answer questions will be posted by Friday afternoon each week. The quiz must be completed by the following Friday. So if a quiz is posted on Friday May 13th, the deadline to complete the quiz is Friday May 20th at midnight.

Quiz questions will be conceptual rather than factual. In other words, they will not ask you to identify a particular date or fact about a topic but rather consider the concepts we have been exploring in lectures and readings related to that topic.

There will be 6 quizzes over the semester and students who choose this option must complete them all.

Option 2: Short Essays

For this option, students must write two short essay (4-6 pages in length) synthesizing course material from across the previous three weeks. Each essay should be a response to one of the questions listed below (there are different questions for each essay).

Essay #1 is due on May 24th and covers material from May 3rd to May 19th. It should explore one of the following questions:

  • In our first class of the semester, we read Judith Bennett’s chapter “Patriarchal Equilibrium”. What evidence of this concept do we see in the topics explored thus far in the semester? How is this concept of a “patriarchal equilibrium” useful in exploring these topics?
  • In the first few classes of this semester, we spent some time thinking about the gender ideology about women in the medieval period, focusing in particular on medicine, philosophy, religion, and law. These classes provided us with theoretical ideas about women’s lives. How do we see such theories present in the practice (or actuality) of medieval women’s lives in the other topics we considered in the first three weeks? Is there a disjuncture between the theory of medieval women and the practice of their lives?

Essay #2 is due on June 12th and covers material from May 24th to June 9th. It should explore one of the following questions:

  • In the topics we’ve explored in the last three weeks of the semester, we’ve highlighted changes in how historians have approached them in the past few decades. Take two topics as examples and discuss these new interpretations. What does a reanalysis of these topics bring to our understanding of medieval women’s lives?
  • Many of the topics we explored in the second half of our course focus on women as agents, actively engaged in different aspects of their lives. Yet we know from the first half of our course that women’s lives were constrained by ideological understandings of gender. Using examples from three topics, discuss the types of agency that medieval women had but also the ways in which that agency was perhaps challenged.

Option 3: Final Exam

For this option, students will write a final exam during the UNBC exam week (scheduled June 13th to 17th). This exam is take home and questions will be posted on Friday June 10th. You will have until Friday June 17th to complete the exam.