The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France

Penny Schine Gold provides a bold analysis of key literary and artistic images of women in the Middle Ages and the relationship between these images and the actual experience of women. She argues that the complex interactions between men and women as expressed in both image and experience reflect a common pattern of ambivalence and contradiction. Thus, women are seen as both helpful and harmful, powerful and submissive, and the actuality of women's experience encompasses women in control and controlled, autonomous and dependent. Vividly recreating the rich texture of medieval life, Gold effectively and eloquently goes beyond a simple equation of social context and representation. In the process. she challenges equally simple judgments of historical periods as being either good or bad for women. ["The Lady and the Virgin"] presents its findings in a form that should attract students as well as their instructors. The careful and controlled use of so many different kinds of sources . . . offers us a valuable medieval case study in the inner-relationship between the segments of society and its ethos or value system.OCoJoel T. Rosenthal, "The History Teacher " Something of a tour de force in an interdisciplinary approach to history.OCoJo Ann McNamara, "Speculum" [A] well-written, extremely well-researched book. . . ." The Lady and the Virgin "is useful, readable, and well informed.OCoR. Howard Bloch, "Modern Philology "" Frontmatter List of Illustrations (page ix) List of Tables (page xi) Foreword (Catherine R. Stimpson, page xiii) Preface (page xv) Acknowledgments (page xxiii) 1. Secular Image: Women in Chanson de Geste and Romance (page 1) 2. Religious Image: The Iconography of the Virgin Mary (page 43) 3. Religious Life: The Monastic Experience (page 76) 4. Secular Life: Control of Property (page 116) 5. Conclusion (page 145) Selected Bibliography (page 153) Index (page 177) Works of imaginative literature written in the vernacular provide vivid portrayals of the interactions between men and women in the secular sphere.