Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, 1066-1500

Book excerpt: Jennifer Ward's recent book on later medieval English noblewomen argued convincingly the importance of those women's roles in shaping and structuring their world. In the present volume, she adds new dimensions to her work. She goes back further in time, situating changes as well as continuities in noblewomen's lives against the nobility's social and political evolution over the centuries from the eleventh to the fifteenth, and, in line with the aims of the series, she opens up the evidence, some of it hitherto unpublished, and presents it accessibly to what will surely be a wide audience.