A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344

by Judith M. Bennett

A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344 offers a history of medieval village life, through the experiences of Cecilia Penifader, a peasant woman who lived on one English manor in the early 14th century. This book offers insight into medieval peasant society, and is for undergraduate teaching, suitable for courses in Western civilization, medieval history, women's history, and more.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Medieval, School, European History, College

148 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 1998

About the author

Judith MacKenzie Bennett is an American historian, Emerita Professor of History and John R. Hubbard Chair in British History at the University of Southern California. Bennett writes and teaches about medieval Europe, specifically focusing on gender, women's history, and rural peasants.

Reviews

[Ruby Finlayson · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://youtu.be/xaRNvJLKP1E?si=yiCTa...

[Rowland Pasaribu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Medieval Life is more than a feminist tract of medieval history. While Bennett does explore the female story in human history, she refuses to burden her objective historical analysis with a radical feminist viewpoint. Her evocation of peasant life is both sober and well-balanced, and her speculation of what Cecilia must have been thinking and feeling in reaction to certain historical and day-to-day events is remarkably well-disciplined. Ultimately, Bennett’s book is not merely about Cecilia but about medieval peasant life in general. After all, as Bennett notes in the introduction to A Medieval Life, peasants comprised 90 percent of the medieval population, yet they are consistently underrepresented both by historians and historical documents in favor of warring kings, crusading knights, imposing bishops, and haggling merchants. In outlining Cecilia’s life and rigorously describing the society around her, Bennett provides a case study from which we may discern what a typical life was like in the Middle Ages.

[Karen Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erudite, entertaining and wonderfully written, historian Judith Bennett has done it again. Using manorial records and other documents, she's pieced together the life of a "typical" medieval peasant (and, in many ways, not so typical), Cecilia Penifader, born on the cusp of one century and who died just before the Black Death struck and changed the social structures and world view of folk forever. Using Cecilia's life and experiences - including familial and household relationships, the Great Famine, and different monarchs - Bennett constructs not just a medieval life, but by also discussing those who would have interacted with Cecilia, provides a rich political, social, religious and psychological context. Fabulous for researchers and lovers of history.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting book focused on pre-plague English peasant life. The author promises to motivate their discussion with historical documents from Cecilia's life—they deliver on their promise, but there's so little documentation that you have to give the author some leeway. In any case, a worthwhile read.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

History is the story of what resulted from the acts of great men, directly and indirectly, buffeted by fortune. Thus, in the Middle Ages, as in every age, what the common people did in their daily lives never drove history. Nonetheless, their lives can be of interest, both to specialists and generalists. Moreover, studying the common people can sometimes deepen our understanding of how history unfolded. Judith Bennett’s A Medieval Life is a very imperfect vessel through which to view one prototypical group of common men and women, English peasants of the fourteenth century, but it is still a modestly worthwhile change of pace from reading about the warriors, kings, priests, inventors, and industrialists whose actions created the West.

Bennett is a Boomer historian, whose entire career has consisted of exaggerating the importance of women in medieval history. She would no doubt not be pleased when I point out, as I often do, that the phrase “well-behaved women rarely make history” is entirely accurate, if you remove “well-behaved.” Her core method is to use “feminist approaches” to highlight what she calls the “patriarchal equilibrium.” This invented jargon simply means that the role of women has always tended to be essentially the same, private-facing rather than public-facing, in all non-ideologically driven societies, and that women’s individual income and assets are always lower than men’s as a result, if one ignores that all human societies are organized around households consisting of a partnership between men and women. No surprise, Bennett assumes, without discussion, that this differential is bad, though in reality, the natural inward-facing role of women makes it both inevitable and desirable.

Bennett’s bogus prejudgments and naked bias therefore mean that you have to be very careful reading this book, because behind every paragraph lies Bennett’s ideological aim, which is to “achieve a more feminist future” by rejecting the wisdom of the past and imposing an artificial pattern on society. Still, Bennett appears to be a competent historian in the technical sense. She analyzes difficult primary sources, always the sign of a historian willing to do the work. Most impressively, she reduced to usability the shorthand Latin records of 549 manorial court sessions held in an English village, Brigstock, between 1287 and 1348, tracing and documenting families and events through the court’s actions.

Unfortunately, beyond this primary research, which underpins only part of Bennett’s writing, this short book offers zero citations, only offering brief reading lists of several related books after each chapter. The life of the English peasantry has been fairly well documented over the past hundred years, through the efforts of many historians, aided by that English records survive to a greater degree than for any other European country (though apparently most of the Scottish records sank with a ship in 1661). French records, for example, were almost totally destroyed by early leftists during the Revolution. But the result of no checkable references is that we are left wondering how much of what Bennett says, usually in a conclusory fashion with a grating authoritative tone, is actual supported historical fact, and how much is propaganda added to slant the reader toward acceptance of the author’s ideology. The reader’s grumpiness is exacerbated by Bennett, within the book’s two hundred pages, repeating herself constantly, which annoys the reader by making the book feel as if it is directed at stupid people, such as undergraduates taking a remedial class.

In any case, Bennett’s method is to center her narrative around one Cecilia Penifader, a resident of Brigstock (a town still existing in the Midlands), who lived from around 1297 until 1344, dying immediately before the Black Death swept through England. This mechanism serves to hold the reader’s attention on the narrative, but is actually vaporous, because it soon becomes apparent that almost nothing is known about Penifader, except from occasional very brief technical references to her and her family in the records of the manorial court. Thus, what we get is a plausible intermittent reconstruction of her life based on what we do know about peasants of the time in the English Midlands, along with what is more specifically known about activities of the Brigstock peasantry from the court records. Most of it is plausible, and the narrative holds the reader’s attention, but it’s not really a history of Penifader herself, as this book is billed, in any meaningful sense.

The author’s choice of Penifader is not accidental. It is apparent that more detail is available about other named peasants, but Penifader was that considerable rarity, a never-married female peasant, and focusing on her allows Bennett to use Penifader to beat historical plowshares into ideological swords. The author muses constantly about her special status, when what the reader wants to know is what happened in a more normal peasant’s life. But, fortunately, we get an adequate amount of that along the way, so the focus on Penifader is not crippling to the book, though it certainly adds nothing to the reader’s understanding or enjoyment, and the subtitle of the book is false advertising.

Brigstock was a village, of about a thousand men and women, part of a larger manor. It was a royal manor, one owned directly by the king, though no king ever visited in more than two hundred years, nor, apparently, did high royal officials ever bother to drop in, even if plenty of lower-level ones did. In 1290, however, the queen of Edward I Longshanks, Eleanor of Castile, his wife of nearly forty years, mother of his sixteen children, and his constant beloved companion, died while the King was on royal progress in the Midlands. It took twelve days to transport her body to Westminster Abbey, and at each place her body rested for the night, the grieving king caused to be erected a large stone cross, which crosses were later collectively known as the Eleanor Crosses. One of the three which survive today is at Geddington, six miles from Brigstock, probably the closest any medieval king ever got to the village.

Bennett does an excellent job of drawing the physical surroundings of the peasants, as well as of describing the agricultural system within which they lived and worked. As with most English agriculture of the time, it was a mixed system, what would today be called townsmen, who never fit neatly into this ideal. Bennett carps that women did not fit into this system, but that is obviously false—she just doesn’t like how they fit into the system, where when attached to a man, as unmarried daughter or husband, the man’s role largely determined her role. Women not attached to a man, typically widows but occasionally a spinster such as Penifader, also had a defined role, which was largely independent, with most of the customary rights that a man had. Bennett does not mention it, but both widows and wives of knights or noblemen who went to the Crusades, for example, exercised most of the rights of their husbands, and nearly all of their rights over property, and the same was true, mutatis mutandis, for women of lower social status. The limitations on women who were connected to a man were simply the natural result of women adopting an inward-facing role, not some scheme of patriarchal oppression. Nonetheless, Bennett repeatedly tries to import modern leftist agitprop, wailing about the “matrix of oppression,” in a feeble attempt to discredit the entire system, without ever actually arguing that the system was bad. We are just supposed to assume it was, because feminism.

Brigstock was not isolated. It was part of a web of several villages, each easily within walking distance and each of which held its market on a different day of the week, so that many people constantly visited other villages. Moreover, strangers frequently passed through, from pilgrims to merchants to itinerant workers. There were no immigrants from abroad, of course; the fiction put about today that England “has always been a nation of immigrants” is pure malicious invention. England received almost zero immigrants for a thousand years, until its rotten elites in the past several decades deliberately imported wave after wave of destructive aliens.

The common idea, fed by modern films, that medieval peasants lived in a cloud of ignorant fear, uncertain and afraid of what lay past the edge of their fields, is far from the truth. Their lives, at least the lives of English peasants, who were rarely subject to the immediate effects of war, were very secure. The only threats they faced were from nature—weather, failed crops, and disease. During Pennifader’s life, from 1315 to 1322, England suffered from famine—in part because England at the time had around five million inhabitants, a figure it would not reach again for four hundred years. Famine tested social ties, and increased minor disputes in the court, such as illicit boundary marker movements and theft of crops, and it killed old people and the young. But this was nothing new, and the system was robust and high-trust enough to withstand such problems without collapsing (something probably not true about modern England, or America).

The security of the peasantry consisted in part of a robust and reliable system of justice. Most arguments, complaints, and crimes were settled in the manorial court. But the king and the nobility administered many other levels of courts, all of which were available at need to the people. Serious crimes, for example, had to be tried by specially-designated agents of the king, who also employed coroners to investigate any death that seemed out of the ordinary. The rule of law, in other words, was ubiquitous and strong.

This justice system was much better in many ways than ours. In no area is this more apparent than in trials by jury, where for the residents of Brigstock the jury of one’s peers was exactly that. Today, most jurors are ignorant members of the underclass, with little in common with anyone not in the underclass, easily swayed by politically-motivated prosecutors and often eager to advance their political goals or release their co-ethnics from punishment. No better example exists than the gross injustices, yet to be punished with extreme punishments as they must be, perpetrated by the Regime against the heroes of the January 6th Electoral Justice Protest. All trials were held in a type of kangaroo court with judges openly biased against the defendants, using jurors from the District of Columbia, one hundred percent leftist government clients, many of sub-retarded intelligence, manipulated by tyrannical prosecutors spending hundreds of millions of dollars to unleash political terror. Peasants in Brigstock, transported to the twenty-first century, would be appalled at how our rulers have eroded the rule of law, and would probably deem our system a mechanism instituted by Satan to destroy society.

Punishments for infractions were mostly small fines, and sometimes, Bennett says, imprisonment. Bennett does not expand on the latter; I would have been interested to know how that worked, given that there were no jails and any lengthy imprisonment would have imposed a significant burden on the community. To my knowledge, imprisonment was almost never used in medieval times for minor crimes. This may simply be an error by Bennett, though that seems odd given her granular focus on the data. Nor does she mention corporal punishment, which was generally in medieval times often used, and much easier to administer for mid-level crimes than imprisonment, as well as providing an immediate salutary lesson to the community. Neither is capital punishment mentioned, but it must have also been used by royal officers for significant crimes—although those apparently were extremely rare, house burglary being the only major crime mentioned.

Bennett reasonably competently covers most important aspects of peasant life, among them religious belief. The author’s skepticism is on display, but at least she doesn’t evidence contempt for her subjects, and manages to convey how religious belief saturated the daily lives of European peasants. She does get some facts wrong. For example, Christian churches, then and now, are not oriented toward the East because that is the direction of Jerusalem (though a mosque, or rather the mihrab, is oriented toward Mecca, which may be her confusion), but primarily because the East is the direction from which Christ will appear at the Second Coming. (Among the Eastern Orthodox, at least, this is also why the heads of those buried are set so when they sit up at the General Resurrection they will face the glory of Christ—except for priests, who are sometimes buried so they will face their flock when they rise.) She also halfheartedly endorses the ludicrous claim, pushed by a handful of modern-day homosexuals to justify their practices, that the Church offered “liturgies for uniting two men.”

Other than this, we also get an explanation both of the importance of kin, the extended family, and of the household, which included both family members and servants, either long-term or short-term (young unmarried people often worked as either seasonal field hands or household servants to other peasant families). Naturally, any household with a man was headed by that man, or one of the men within it. Bennett outlines inheritance customs as well; Brigstock had the “unusual custom” that “the youngest son inherited the lands his father had himself inherited, and the eldest son inherited the lands his father had purchased during his life.” Contrary to the popular perception, primogeniture was far from universal in England. In practice, however, parents took great care, if at all possible, to ensure that all children (and female children if unmarried) received some inheritance, often giving them “animals, furnishings, cash, or other commodities,” as well as dowries for the girls.

We also get a good exposition of the household economy, which overlaps quite a bit with Mary Harrington’s historical analysis in her excellent Feminism Against Progress. In short, both men and women participated actively in the household economy, with each performing tasks best suited to his or her sex, creating a flexible interdependence that made it very difficult to be unmarried. For example, ale was extremely important, consumed in large quantities by every family, and women did most of the brewing, both for home consumption and for sale. Women also administered childbirth, which Bennett bizarrely complains meant “even the first moments of life were a gendered experience.” Men did the harder and dangerous tasks, which is why records show their frequent deaths by accident, just as today.

The system Bennett describes sounds almost idyllic. Not to Bennett, of course; she has to lecture the reader “there is no reason for us to wax nostalgic about the ‘community of the [village]’ in Cecilia’s day,” without giving us a single reason not to wax nostalgic, other than we are to assume that patriarchy is bad, even when all the evidence leads inexorably to the opposite conclusion. Thus, Bennett whines that “Cecilia lived outside the peacekeeping mechanisms of the community,” because she was the rare example of a woman not under the governorship of a man. That is, she was not part of the usual system of coverture, where the woman was “covered” by the man, although in practice she relied heavily on her brothers after her father died. Nor was she in a tithing. Bennett’s conclusion is both false and silly; the manorial records themselves show Penifader was very much within the peacekeeping mechanisms, and that any complaint or dispute she had was dealt with no differently than any other. Bennett’s real complaint, weak sauce, is that Penifader wasn’t treated as if she were identical to a man, able to “expand her social relationships” by being a juror or being required to stand as security for someone who had been fined, as men were for relatives or men in their tithing.

The author, in her concluding chapter, does at least say that patriarchy “is not women versus men.” The reader imagines that maybe we are turning to a realistic view, but then we learn that this is because, you see, male homosexuals are also harmed by patriarchy, the poor dears. Again and again, she returns to the supposed “pay gap,” and tries to show the “patriarchal equilibrium” dominates social relations. Any non-ideological observer, though, knows perfectly well that the reason some women make less money than men today is women’s choices, and that women otherwise make more than men and have far more rights than men, due to laws that force active discrimination against men at every level and in every aspect of our society. The less said about this chapter, the better. Just skip it.

In sum, I can’t really recommend this book. On the other hand, if you’re trapped on a desert island with only this book and some trashy fiction, it’s probably worth reading between trying to spear fish or collect rainwater. That’s your life tip for today.

[Janene · Rating 4 out of 5]

The person who wrote this book did ALL the dirty work. In Medieval times, there were no journals, for sure not kept by common people, so a consistent form of documentation of daily life was made in the form of manor court roles. Something like notes from city council meeting, but even more mundane. :) Basically a record of the goings on, generally recorded on a week to week basis, who took what from whom within the Manor, things done right, things done wrong -- and what was going to be done about it. Judith Bennett is a historian, and she must be a pretty patient one because she read through ALL of the Manor Court records from a certain time period, in Brigstock (about 100 miles north of London). These were in Latin by the way! Then somehow she did the tedious work of piecing together the life story (or at least a pretty thorough sketch) of a peasant woman of very little consequence, Cecilia Penifader.

Why did I read this book? I'm not really sure, it seemed interesting --- to get a glimpse of something beyond the big and loud things -- the plagues, conquests, coronations and crusades, and understand what life was like for a common person, an ordinary woman named Cecilia. She lived in a time when there were three distinct groups/classes: those who work, those who preach, those who fight. Cecilia was one who worked, but she was a landholder, so more privileged than most. She never married or had children. She wisely used all she was given and was even able to expand her stewardship during her lifetime.

Super accessible writing, especially for a topic or time period some people may think of as a little bit of a snooze. :) I thought it was an interesting read! It was clear that the author's specialty bends towards women's studies, as she points out some of the obvious inequalities between men and women, citing how some still persist today.

3.5 stars rounded up.

Loved the chapter on the ritual year, description of Easter, May Day celebrations, and other holidays and traditions. Even the most humble and hard-working peasants took time off to enjoy these milestones and I loved knowing that and learning more about what that would have looked like. P.S. they were almost always drinking ale, just because it was more available and actually more safe than water -- only sometimes in excess to inebriation.

Hook of Hamate - a bone in the hand that calcifies during puberty. Something that helps archaeologists determine age. Never knew about this bone! :)

Loved learning about how the tithings because a sort of check and balance within the community. It took collective effort to keep things in order. They didn't have police officers, there was an understanding and an obligation and friends and neighbors "policed" each other.

[Paul Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book. I like that it was semi-chronological. Chapters treated subjects, like "Parish, Belief, Ritual", "Kin and Household", and "An Economy of Makeshifts", but Bennett arranged them in roughly chronological order. Although Cecilia Penifader was the focus, Bennett drew informative thoughts from many other sources. Bennett struck a good balance between a biography of Cecilia and a general or historical commentary on her community and life around her. It addressed current concerns, but still acknowledged that Cecilia lived in a different world, with a significantly different perspective, than we do.

It enriched my view of medieval Britain and of history in general.

I would give this book four stars, except that I would have never read it had it not been left in my home.

[Jordie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of repetition, but I needed it. I learned a great deal about the customs and laws of land-owning, land-working, and daily life in medieval 1300's. And of the court system, religious practices and festivals... other aspects of life I'm now forgetting...

I'd always been confused about the relationship between peasants and landlords during this medieval period. Who were the land-owners? What is a manor, and what role did manorial lords or ladies have in the lives of the peasants? Etc... I'm a little less confused now. And if I re-read the chapter from this book that explains this relationship in detail, and took the time to write it down, I'd not be confused at all.

I love the unassuming, matter-of-fact tone Bennett's voice has.

[Edmund Roughpuppy · Rating 1 out of 5]

A bad idea, with predictable result.

I rarely review a book I didn't finish. I do so now, in order to warn my fellow readers against wasting time and money. The author's idea is to tell us about life in medieval England through the eyes of a real person, Cecilia Penifader. Problem: she knows almost nothing about this person. The author admits to this dearth in the introduction.

Follows page after page of speculative connections between known history and the mysterious Cecelia, about whom we learn nothing of interest.

This kind of history can be written well. An example is "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" by Barbara W. Tuchman. This book, far superior in substance, style and biographical interest, also costs less than 25% of the new paperback price of "A Medieval Life" from Amazon. It appears "A Medieval Life" has been required reading in college classes; another reason to question the necessity of college.

[Maxwell Dightman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Bennet's writing style. She makes it really easy to understand what Cecelia's life likely consisted of, her day-to-day, how she was viewed by English peasant society and vice versa, and by connecting her life in Brigstock to the greater historical trends of the time, I got a greater grasp of what living in the Late Middle Ages might have been like. Bennet clearly does her research carefully and makes sure to not overspeculate. I found this to be a very digestible and fascinating read. It's amazing that Bennet was able to humanize a woman from the Medieval peasantry, a group of people who have generally been refused that privilege.

[Sam Stoddard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had the burdensome and odious task of slogging through this book for my Graduate studies in Medieval History. If you’ve ever wondered what the human embodiment of half-bangs, horn rimmed glasses, a septum piercing, blue hair, and thin-line tattoos masquerading as a historian would think of Medieval Europe and women’s place in it, wonder no more. For Bennett both fully embodies that persona and offers you her unbridled and undisguised feminist takes on Historical contexts. Boring, laborious, eye-rollingly ideological, and predictable.

[Laurel Bushman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an interesting subject and I learned quite a lot about peasant life in Medieval times. My less than glowing rating is because of the writing style. It felt like slogging through a text book, with many, many numbered lists and repetitions. There were also abrupt changes of subject within each chapter. Maybe they made more sense if you saw the pages, but as an audio book it was weird. Maybe this actually IS a textbook?? It was hard to get through and I was relieved to be finished by the end.

[Leiki Fae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent little text written for undergrads. Dispels the myth of the the standard, static peasant experience during the Middle Ages.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling, nice ambiance, some repetition though, and then it gets a little boring.

[Davis Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very textbook-like and clearly meant for younger readers. Still interesting.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and easy to read.

[Anna Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love you Judith Bennett

[Keegan Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book about medieval europe, bar none. Dispels illusions left and right.

[Stuart Roderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

great insight into what life was actually like in medieval england. Fairer and cleaner than one might think.

[britt · Rating 3 out of 5]

very accessible + lowkey made me giggle sometimes

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slender volume is a very nice teaching tool for entry-level students of history. It demonstrates the ways in which historians use evidence and context to develop narratives and understand the past. It also demonstrates the use of historical methods to understand the lives of "ordinary" people, rather than the elites who are generally represented as "more important" in traditional historical research. Bennett does this by examining the court records of a small town in Brigstock and creating a convincing biography for an unmarried peasant and small businesswoman of the early fourteenth century. She includes relevant illustrations, a good glossary of medieval terms, and a short index of subjects. The book is written in a style which most students will enjoy, although challenging enough to be of value to the more advanced as well as the beginner. It evokes a past, as much as possible, "wie es wirklich war," devoid of modern stereotypes and fantasies, but which remains all the more compelling because it is plausible.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to be intended for use as a textbook in an introductory college course on medieval European history. I think it fits the bill very well. It's quite short, but it packs a lot of information in its less than 150 pages. The information is general enough to be broadly useful (with suggestions for further reading on specific topics), and there's some explanation as to the historiography involved. The author chose the old method of looking at a single, real person from that era whose life happened to be well-documented, and then reconstructing the world around them.

Having already read many books on medieval history, I didn't learn very much from this one. But I think this would be a great book for college freshmen to start out with in their history classes. A good video companion would be Terry Jones's excellent Medieval Lives series.

[Sarr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very informative, written very eloquently and so that it is understandable to a wider ranger of people. I am a history major and often am assigned books that are very dull and heavy with information but this one is informative and written in a story-like manner that keeps you wanting to read more. It provides an example of one peasant family and gives you insight into their life that makes you feel as if you are taking a trip back in time, Judith really allows you to almost relate to the family she chooses to portray in the book. Also before reading this book I had many preconceptions as far medieval life (from being exposed to films) that were incorrect to say the least, this book really clears up those misconceptions we tend to have about medieval life.

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

My perception of English peasantry before I read this book was limited to their depiction in Monty Python ("Bring out yer dead!"). That's no longer the case now, obviously. Well-written, really illuminates Cecilia Penifader's life in spite of the lack of raw information on it, and features clear descriptions of the fine distinctions between manor, parish, and village.

[Hildegart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just finished reading this book for a college class I am taking on the Late Middle Ages. There is a lot of information on the pages! That being said, the reason that I did not give it a higher rating is that Bennett uses Cecilia is a way to make the story more personal. I found this very distracting and speculative.

[Lauren Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great look at medieval life through the life of one particular person, her family, and her village. It's written for people of all audiences, from history buffs to people who know very little about the subject, so it's easy to follow and all aspects of life are explained clearly and in a way that's entertaining and somewhat fun to read.

[Cate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the life of Cecilia Penifader and of Brigstock. There is lots of speculation which makes the historian uncomfortable, but it provides a very good basic view of small-town life, just beware of the speculation.

[Brent Lambell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book quite a bit for a textbook style of work. It was well thought out and well researched. Even the casual reader would be able to get something valuable from the story of a somewhat unique and interesting women of the middle ages.

[LPR · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for English 396: Medeival Women Writers
Very interesting read about the actual nuances of peasant life in the Middle Ages. Uses a specific case study in an intriguing way to teach about or open up questions about the Middle Ages as a whole.

[Brady Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good in depth look at the medieval lifestyle through the eyes of a 13th century englishwoman. Obviously can't bw a complete biography due to the lack of available primary sources, but the book uses Cecilia as a basis for reconstructing an average social, economic, and gendered life.