Medieval Women, Material Culture, and Power

Product Description
This book argues that the impressive range of belongings that can be connected to Duchess Matilda Plantagenet―textiles, illuminated manuscripts, coins, chronicles, charters, and literary texts―allows us to perceive elite women’s performance of power, even when they are largely absent from the official documentary record. It is especially through the visual record of material culture that we can hear female voices, allowing us to forge an alternative way toward rethinking assumptions about power for sparsely-documented elite women.
This book is available as Open Access.
Review
In this impressively researched and well-written monograph, Jitske Jasperse shows once again how scholars can investigate people who have left relatively little trace in the written sources by studying the objects associated with them. [...] This is a book that accomplishes its ambitions remarkably well. One of Jasperse’s strengths is an ability to take fairly complex concepts and then explain and apply them clearly. [...] Jasperse is also fully immersed in the relevant secondary literature, including both textual and material sources. She handles historiography superbly and was clearly thorough in her research. Its relatively short length, clarity, and comparative framework would make it an ideal supplement in medieval history, art history, and women’s studies courses. Its argument is straightforward enough for undergraduate use and would also lead to thought-provoking discussions in graduate courses. -- Lois L. Huneycutt
About the Author
Jitske Jasperse is Assistant Professor of Medieval Visual Cultures in the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.