Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550 (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts ;11)

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