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BOOKS: Medieval Motherhood

Sanctity and Motherhood - Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages 2

BOOKS: Medieval Motherhood

Medieval Mothering (New Middle Ages)Medieval Mothering (New Middle Ages)

Author:Bonnie Wheeler

Publisher: Routledge (August 3, 1999)

Summary

The essays in this volume move from medieval to contemporary theories about mothering, providing the reader in each instance with case studies of medieval maternal practices.

“The editors are to be congratulated on the sensitivity with which they have placed the essays in linked groupings, and the individual contributors on their scholarship. The essays are highly readable and, as well as being insightful, provide excellent guidelines for future study.” — Parergon

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“The collection provides an exciting and insightful overview of medieval mothering, one that significantly enhances our appreciation of both the medieval theory and practice of this complex activity.” — The Medieval Review

Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (New Middle Ages)Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (New Middle Ages)

Author: Mary Dockray-Miller

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (March 16, 2000)

Summary

Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England sifts through the historical evidence to describe and analyze a world of violence and intrigue, where mothers needed to devise their own systems to protect, nurture, and teach their children. Mary Dockray-Miller casts a maternal eye on Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf to reveal mothers who created rituals, genealogies, and institutions for their children and themselves. Little-known historical figures–queens, abbesses, and other noblewomen–used their power in court and convent to provide education, medical care, and safety for their children, showing us that mothers of a thousand years ago and mothers of today had many of the same goals and aspirations.

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Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400-1400 (Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West)Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400-1400 (Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West)

Author: Conrad Leyser & Lesley Smith

Publisher: Ashgate (December 1, 2011)

Summary

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying…? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so…but philosophers lead a very different life…So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.

Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination (The New Middle Ages)Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination (The New Middle Ages)

Author: Angela Florschuetz

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (March 20, 2014)

Summary

Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, Marking Maternity offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy, and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England. This book examines how Middle English romances have come to reflect the impact of dominant contemporary discourses of maternal influence and contamination upon individuals, communities, and families. Angela Florschuetz goes onto argue while these romances often reference and participate in contemporary discourses that identify the maternal with contamination, they also reframe the problem of maternal influence by focusing on the corrosive effects of these anxieties upon all levels of society.

Sanctity and Motherhood - Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages 2Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages (Garland Medieval Casebooks)

Author: Anneke Mulder-Bakker

Publisher: Routledge (May 13, 2013)

Summary

Increasingly, recent scholarship has focused on those married women and mothers in the Middle Ages who achieved holiness. The Merovingian Waldetrudis and Rictrudis; Ida, mother of the crusader king Godfrey of Bouillon; Elisabeth of Hungary and Bridget of Sweden are among them. Unlike Mary and her mother, Saint Anne (mother saints, whose sanctity was based on motherhood) these female parents were honoured despite rather than because of their children. They were holy mothers, whose status as spouses and mothers gave them a public voice and opened for them the road to sanctification. They successfully combined marriage and motherhood with a religious life and functioned as holy women in their community. Despite increasing respect, tension between the roles of saint and wife persisted. Saintly women were not expected to be happily married: the ancient prejudice against sexual passion and physical ease mitigated the enjoyment of married life. The book’s original essays focus on Northern Europe, where the cult of Saint Anne reached its climax around 1500. It does not explore Church doctrine and theology, as other studies do, but examines the religious experience of historical holy mothers and saints and how these women were perceived by their communities and their biographers.

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