Elisabeth van Houts

This slim, useful book looks at how gender and familial networks could shape the preservation of memory in the High Middle Ages. Elisabeth Van Houts argues that though women wrote texts less often than men did, they still helped to shape the collective memory through their preservation of oral history, particularly of genealogical information. She does this by exploring both explicit references to oral testimony in texts, and also by looking at how the provenance of artefacts was established. There were a couple of points where I thought Van Houts' writes 'must have' where I would have been more comfortable with 'may have', but this is overall a well-crafted introduction to the field of memory studies and a springboard for further research.… (mer)

This is a really interesting collection of medieval primary sources in English translation—the editors have pulled together a wide range of sources relating to medieval lay women from birth to death. Conscious of the kinds of biases that usually affect such collections, they've purposefully tried to include sources from across the medieval world, from Scotland to Egypt, al-Andalus to Rus, relating to Christian, Jewish and Muslim women. It makes for interesting reading (divorces, suicides, elopements, oh my), though as with all source books it's not best suited to reading from cover to cover—it's best to dip in and out of it, for while the editors have loosely grouped the documents according to how they relate to the medieval ideal of the female life cycle, they're not otherwise organised chronologically/geographically. I'll definitely keep it to hand when putting together assignments in the future.… (mer)