Seeing And Knowing: Medieval Women And The Transmission Of Knowledge (medieval Women: Texts And Contexts)

The transmission of knowledge in clerical and academic settings of the later Middle Ages has been relatively well studied by traditional scholarship. But successes achieved in other subject areas by application of a set of methodologies grouped under the rubric of 'gender studies' offered hope that valuable insights might come from application of these methodologies to medieval education. This approach invited a re-examination in gender-political terms of the definition of knowledge by clerical elites and the concomitant rejection from the category of 'knowledge' of many varieties of knowledge which did not coincide with their template. This altered view of elite education was attended by a new delineation of the world of knowledge in communities of women who were, in varying degrees, sited on the margins of the elite educational communities. Such questions as the following emerged in communications by members of the research group and were repeatedly raised in the course of discussion: what varieties of knowledge were available to communities of women? What kinds of knowledge originated in or became characteristic of women's communities? What techniques did women develop to preserve and transmit their knowledge? In what ways and with what success was women's knowledge valorized, both by authors from within these communities and by 'authoritative' figures from outside? Under what circumstances could women become authoritative originators of and transmitters of knowledge? The studies within this volume apply insights gained from gender studies to re-consider the way knowledge and learning was transmitted in medieval Europe 1200-1550. Traditional scholarship has largely concentrated on the clerical and academic context of conventional learning. It tended to focus on the contents and methods of formal education, as well as on a small group of educational institutions from which women were excluded. In this volume, authors consider how learning was transmitted outside the schools, in particular within women's communities. They raise a range of questions: how was knowledge transmitted in an oral context, what varieties of knowledge were available to communities of women? What kinds of learning are characteristic of such communities? What techniques did women develop to preserve and transmit their knowledge and how was it valorized both within their communities, and by 'authoritative' outsiders? Under what circumstances could women themselves gain authority in passing on knowledge to a wider audience? "The ten articles of this volume focus both on the perennial valorization of the content and methods of clerical/academic education, on the limitation of venues for its transmission to sites from which women were categorically excluded, and, in terms of media for the transmission of knowledge, on the attendant restriction of the techniques and media considered valid for the storage, retrieval, and communication of knowledge to those that were current in these privileged sites."--BOOK JACKET