This paper considers some basic questions about the phrase female empowerment itself, and about what has happened and should happen when this phrase is used as a means of making the spirituality of long-dead women urgent to the present.
Empowerment is now a widely-used sociological term.
This conference whose stated goal is to formulate a new narrative of female empowerment in the middle ages can be viewed as just such an attempt on the part of those of us who will attend it, acting to uncover or right the wrongs perpetrated on women in the past. If this is not a usual way of thinking about a gathering of scholarly historians, I believe it is a true one. The majority of participants however passionately we are interested in what happened will be united in the desire to do justice to the past, in celebration, grief, rage or reverence. Even the fantasy that by doing this we can make the past a better place for women to have lived may linger, in shadowy form, on the edge of our deliberations.