Women's Space

Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary collection addresses the location of women and their bequests within the single most important public and social space in pre-Reformation Europe: the Roman Catholic Church. This innovative focus brings attention to gender and space as experienced in the medieval parish as well as in monastic and cathedral space. Through provocative handling of historical content and theory, the contributors explore strategies of exclusion and of inclusion and note patterns of later writers who neglect or rewrite records of female presence. Essays on the York religious cycle, the chronicle of the monastery at Ely, and The Book of Margery Kempe explore how medieval writers used texts as fictive spaces on which to graft responses to the gendered uses of real church buildings. These text-based essays are juxtaposed with tightly focused archival research in art history and history on Florentine patronage and English parish seating, as well as with more broadly synthetic studies on access of women to shrines and on gendered left-right placement in ritual art.