Women in the Middle Ages

For many years, the history of the Middle Ages was known to us primarily through the lens of traditionally male spheres of activity—presented as a sequence of battles for power and territory. That’s why women’s lives, rarely involved in political and military events, were inevitably lost in the darkness of the “dark ages.” Francis and Joseph Gies, authors of classic popular bestsellers about medieval life, piece together this lost history bit by bit in an engaging historical overview, tracing how women’s roles evolved in society over an entire millennium. The second part of the book is devoted to the biographies of eight outstanding women of the Middle Ages, including the abbess of a monastery and a composer, a British princess imprisoned for three years on political charges, the wives of an Italian merchant and a peasant. From these vivid, characteristic examples emerges a colorful mosaic of the “women’s side” of the strange medieval world. Francis and Joseph Gies’s distinctive approach is a balanced selection of facts from a wide range of sources, which makes their work interesting both to a broad audience and to specialists.