The lady & the Virgin: Image, attitude, and experience in twelfth-century France

Women in Culture and Society

by Penny Schine Gold

Penny Schine Gold provides a bold analysis of key literary and artistic images of women in the Middle Ages and the relationship between these images and the actual experience of women. She argues that the complex interactions between men and women as expressed in both image and experience reflect a common pattern of ambivalence and contradiction. Thus, women are seen as both helpful and harmful, powerful and submissive, and the actuality of women's experience encompasses women in control and controlled, autonomous and dependent.Vividly recreating the rich texture of medieval life, Gold effectively and eloquently goes beyond a simple equation of social context and representation. In the process. she challenges equally simple judgments of historical periods as being either "good" or "bad" for women."[ The Lady and the Virgin ] presents its findings in a form that should attract students as well as their instructors. The careful and controlled use of so many different kinds of sources . . . offers us a valuable medieval case study in the inner-relationship between the segments of society and its ethos or value system."—Joel T. Rosenthal, The History Teacher"Something of a tour de force in an interdisciplinary approach to history."—Jo Ann McNamara, Speculum"[A] well-written, extremely well-researched book. . . . The Lady and the Virgin is useful, readable, and well informed."—R. Howard Bloch, Modern Philology

Genres: History

182 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1985

Reviews

[Hannahcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm glad I found this book because it was my introduction to Penny Schine Gold, who is now one of my favorite non-fiction authors and now I must read everything she has ever written.

This book has lots of photographs and well-cited resources into a topic often glossed over by general history books. My biggest takeaway was that the early church factions often relied on women to swell its numbers until it was big enough to ignore co-ed and women-centric monasteries. It's something I'm thinking about a lot and trying to portray fairly in historical fiction.

[Katharyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

HISTAM 340: Medieval Women