Published in 2018 (first published 1978)
304 pages
6 hours and 49 minutes
Frances Gies and and her husband Joseph Gies were historians and writers who collaborated on a number of books about the Middle Ages as well as wrote individual works. The works by Gies and Gies are respected amongst historians and archeologists, and are on the recommended reading lists of a number of universities.
What is this book about?
Reissued for the first time in decades, this ambitious work of Medieval scholarship by bestselling historians Frances and Joseph Gies traces the stories and fates of women in Medieval Europe over the course of a millennium.
Medieval history is often written as a series of battles and territorial shifts. But the essential contributions of women during this period have too often been relegated to the dustbin of history. In Women in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies reclaim this lost history in a lively historical survey that charts the evolution of women’s roles through this period and profiles eight individual women in depth. We learn of Hildegarde of Bingen, a noted composer and abbess who founded two monasteries; Eleanor de Montfort, a thirteenth-century Princess of Wales who was captured by Edward I and held as a political prisoner for three years; and women of somewhat more modest means, such as the spouse of an Italian merchant and a peasant’s wife.
Drawing upon their various stories, talented historians Frances and Joseph Gies—whose books were used by George R. R. Martin in his research for Game of Thrones—offer a kaleidoscopic view of the lives of women throughout this tumultuous period.
