Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Medieval Women, Material Culture, and Power: Matilda Plantagenet and her Sisters
ISBN: 9781641891462
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Arc Humanities Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Art and Architecture; Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Medieval and Renaissance Studies;

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.

Jitske Jasperse is Assistant Professor of Medieval Visual Cultures in the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.