Table of Contents

1: Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras: Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians
Part I Gendered Thinking
2: Dyan Elliott: Gender and the Christian Traditions
3: Judith R. Baskin: Jewish Traditions about Women and Gender Roles: From Rabbinic Teachings to Medieval Practice
4: Jonathan P. Berkey: Women and Gender in Islamic Traditions
5: Amalie Foessel: The Political Traditions of Female Rulership in Medieval Europe
6: Katharine Park: Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions
Part II Looking through the Law
7: Janet L. Nelson and Alice Rio: Women and Laws in Early Medieval Europe
8: Carol Lansing: Conflicts over Gender in Civic Courts
9: Marie A. Kelleher: Later Medieval Law in Community Context
10: Susan Mosher Stuard: Brideprice, Dowry, and Other Marital Assigns
11: Sara McDougall: Women and Gender in Canon Law
Part III Domestic Lives
12: Maryanne Kowaleski: Gendering Demographic Change in the Middle Ages
13: Katherine L. French: Genders and Material Culture
14: Elisheva Baumgarten: Gender and Daily Life in Jewish Communities
15: Rachel Stone: Carolingian Domesticities
16: Sarah Rees Jones: Public and Private Space and Gender in Medieval Europe
17: Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane: Pious Domesticities
Part IV Land, Labor, Economy
18: Sally McKee: Slavery
19: Kathryn Reyerson: Urban Economies
20: Jane Whittle: Rural Economies
21: Joanna H. Drell: Aristocratic Economies
Part V Bodies, Pleasures, Desires
22: Monica H. Green: Caring for Gendered Bodies
23: Kathryn M. Ringrose: The Byzantine Body
24: Helmut Puff: Same-Sex Possibilities
25: E. Jane Burns: Performing Courtliness
Part VI Engendering Christian Holiness
26: Lisa M. Bitel: Gender and the Initial Christianization of Northern Europe (to 1000 CE)
27: Albrecht Diem: The Gender of the Religious: Wo/men and the Invention of Monasticism
28: Fiona J. Griffiths: Women and Reform in the Central Middle Ages
29: Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker: Devoted Holiness in the Lay World
30: Miri Rubin: Cults of Saints
31: John H. Arnold: Heresy and Gender in the Middle Ages
32: Kathleen Ashley: Cultures of Devotion
Part VII Turning Points and Places
33: Kate Cooper: The Bride of Christ, the "Male Woman", and the Female Reader in Late Antiquity
34: Constance H. Berman: Gender at the Medieval Millennium
35: Martha C. Howell: Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism
36: Laura Stokes: Toward the Witch Craze
37: Roberta L. Krueger: Towards Feminism: Christine de Pizan, Female Advocacy, and Women's Textual Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond

About the Author

Judith M. Bennett teaches women's history and medieval history at the University of Southern California. She is the author of a number of books and articles on medieval women and on the feminist practice of history, as well as a popular textbook on medieval European history.
Ruth Mazo Karras teaches history at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of five books and numerous articles in medieval history and the history of gender and sexuality. She is a co-editor of the journal Gender and History, General Editor of the Middle Ages Series at the University of Pennsylvania Press, and a former president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

Reviews

`a monumental undertaking. It has to be stated straight away, though, that this book is also an intellectually monumental and much-needed project that brings together the latest scholarship and thinking on women and gender studies... Bennett and Karras are to be congratulated on establishing a handbook that brings together an exciting range of the most up-to-date research on gender.'
Gabriele Neher, History Today
`Students will appreciate the Handbook for its helpful introductions, while more advanced readers and specialists in the field will find the new interpretations, provocative thinking and illustrative material inspiring. The volume ought to be on everyone's bookshelf or, in electronic form, bookmarked on one's computer. The editors should be congratulated on having gathered together the very best in current scholarship.'
Elisabeth Van Houts, English Historical Review