Single Women in the European Past, 1250-1800

by Bennett, Judith M.; Froide, Amy M.

• ISBN13: 9780812216684
• ISBN10: 0812216687
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

When we think about the European past, we tend to imagine villages, towns, and cities populated by conventional families--married couples and their children. Although most people did marry and pass many of their adult years in the company of a spouse, this vision of a preindustrial Europe shaped by heterosexual marriage deceptively hides the well-established fact that, in some times and places, as many as twenty-five percent of women and men remained single throughout their lives. Despite the significant number of never-married lay women in medieval and early modern Europe, the study of their role and position in that society has been largely neglected.Singlewomen in the European Pastopens up this group for further investigation. It is not only the first book to highlight the important minority of women who never married but also the first to address the critical matter of differences among women from the perspective of marital status. Essays by leading scholars--among them Maryanne Kowaleski, Margaret Hunt, Ruth Mazo Karras, Susan Mosher Stuard, Roberta Krueger, and Merry Wiesner--deal with topics including the sexual and emotional relationships of singlewomen, the economic issues and employment opportunities facing them, the differences between the lives of widows and singlewomen, the conflation of singlewomen and prostitutes, and the problem of female slavery. The chapters both illustrate the roles open to the singlewoman in the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries and raise new perspectives about the experiences of singlewomen in earlier times.

Author Biography

Judith M. Bennett is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author, most recently, of History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Amy M. Froide teaches history at Miami University of Ohio. She is completing a book on singlewomen in early modern England.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
A Singular Past	1	(37)
Judith M. Bennett
Amy M. Froide
Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective	38	(44)
Maryanne Kowaleski
``It is Not Good That [Wo]man Should be Alone'': Elite Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris	82	(24)
Sharon Farmer
Single by Law and Custom	106	(21)
Susan Mosher Stuard
Sex and the Singlewoman	127	(19)
Ruth Mazo Karras
Transforming Maidens: Singlewomen's Stories in Marie de France's Lais and Later French courtly Narratives	146	(46)
Roberta L. Krueger
Having Her Own Smoke: Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400--1750	192	(25)
Merry E. Wiesner
Singlewomen in Early Modern Venice: Communities and Opportunities	217	(19)
Monica Chojnacka
Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England	236	(34)
Amy M. Froide
The Sapphic Strain: English Lesbians in the Long Eighteenth Century	270	(27)
Margaret R. Hunt
Singular Politics: The Rise of the British Nation and the Production of the Old Maid	297	(28)
Susan S. Lanser
Demographic Tables	325	(20)
maryanne Kowaleski
List of Contributors	345	(2)
Index	347