Writing off medieval women as “arrogant” and"infatuated"

[syntinen_laulu]

Did anyone here watch the first episode of Helen Castor’s BBC series ‘She-Wolves’, about English medieval queens, last Wednesday?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01bgpm7/ ( Read more... )

Comments

[dorsetgirl]

I never studied history formally, so I would never have thought to question where such opinions were coming from, in terms of their propagators' world-view and prejudices. I'm very pleased to have had the concept pointed out to me and will remember this in future!

[syntinen_laulu]

Glad my post was useful!

Our moral and social values are a long way removed from those of medieval people - especially medieval monks, who got to write a lot of the chronicles - that it's as well to take a long hard look at any of the judgements they make and say 'do we agree?' But their assumptions about women in particular were so blatantly at odds with ours that it's clearly ludicrous to accept any judgement of a woman's actions without at least picking it up, shaking it a bit and seeing if it stands up before repeating it. Yet historians do.