garfieldOne of the many harmful legacies of the male domination over medieval studies has been the way that the achievements of female writers have been downplayed and erased. Contrary to popular belief, women in the middle ages were not universally illiterate, and many extremely valuable texts were authored by women. Julian of Norwich, for example, was not only a brilliant writer but also a proficient theologian.
_&@garfiald semi serious question - how much does the Renaissance project of masculinizing Europe tie into this? I'm much more familiar with Asia and only really know European history via colonialism, but this was something more Europe oriented historians talked to me about in brief.
@_ampersand Hmm well it depends on what precisely you're talking about, every era of European history has had its own construction of the "middle ages". So that the idea of the Middle Ages as this dark, regressive era which was reversed by the renaissance didn't really appear until the late 17th century. But if I had to assign blame to a single group for the erasure of female authors in particular, it would have to be the Romantics.
@garfiald Interesting! So even in the 16th century, there wasn't a self-consciousness about the Renaissance as a "break" with the middle ages?
That's a little more consistent with my understanding of historical subjectivity than the narrative I'd heard growing up.
@_ampersand Oh absolutely 100%. Every single piece of the narrative I was personally taught at school about the Renaissance being a sudden upheaval of previous ways of living and thinking was at best exaggerated, at worst completely made up. The people of the Renaissance were not interested in erasing the Middle Ages, rather, they engaged with medieval ideas a writers very directly
@garfiald Ok cool, good that I'm following.
So the narrative I grew up on, "cyclical time vs linear time," was it just never really "cyclical" in the middle ages or is it more like the divide just starts centuries later than pop historians claim?