Gender in the early medieval world
Subtitle: East and West, 300-900
By: edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith.
Contributors: Brubaker, Leslie.; Smith, Julia M. H.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Cambridge, U.K; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 333
Subjects: Sex role -- Europe -- History -- To 1500; Women -- Europe -- History -- To 1500; Men -- Europe -- History -- To 1500; Feminist theory; Europe -- Social conditions -- To 1492
Description: "Gender analysis is one of the most probing ways to understand both power and cultural strategies in pre-industrial societies. In this book sixteen scholars on the cutting edge of their disciplines explore the ideas and expressions of gender that characterised the centuries from c. 300 to 900 in milieux ranging from York to Baghdad, via Rome and Constantinople. Deploying a variety of disciplines and perspectives, they draw on the evidence of material culture as well as texts to demonstrate the wide range of gender identities that informed the social, political and imaginary worlds of these centuries. The essays make clear that although the fixed point in the gender systems of the period was constituted by the hegemonic masculinity of the ruling elite, marginalised groups, often invisible as historical subjects in their own right, were omnipresent in, and critical to, the gendered discourses which buttressed assertions of power."--BOOK JACKET
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : Gendering the early medieval world / Julia M.H. Smith; title: Gender and ethnicity in the early Middle Ages / Walter Pohl; title: Clothes maketh the man : power dressing and elite masculinity in the later Roman world / Mary Harlow; title: Social transformation, gender transformation? The court eunuch, 300-900 / Shaun Tougher; title: Sex, lies and textuality : the Secret history of Prokopios and the rhetoric of gender in sixth-century Byzantium / Leslie Brubaker; title: Romance and reality in the Byzantine bride shows / Martha Vinson; title: Men, women and slaves in Abbasid society / Julia Bray; title: Gender and politics in the harem of al-Muqtadir / Nadia Maria El Cheikh; title: Dressing conservatively : women's brooches as markers of ethnic identity? / Bonnie Effros; title: Gendering courts in the early medieval west / Janet L. Nelson; title: Men, women and liturgical practice in the early medieval west / Gisela Muschiol; title: Gender and the patronage of culture in Merovingian Gaul / Yitzhak Hen; title: Genealogy defined by women : the case of the Pippinids / Ian Wood; title: Bride shows revisited : praise, slander and exegesis in the reign of the empress Judith / Mayke de Jong; title: 'What is the Word if not semen?' Priestly bodies in Carolingian exegesis / Lynda Coon; title: Negotiating gender, family and status in Anglo-Saxon burial practices, c. 600-950 / Dawn Hadley.