This is an Arts and Humanities Inaugural Lecture. Inaugural lectures celebrate Arts and Humanities faculty who have been promoted to the rank of professor.
If you go by Lena Dunham’s Birdy and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s The Last Duel, most folks view the medieval woman as a poster child of oppression– forced to marry at a very young age, never allowed a voice or self-determination, and certainly forbidden to govern. Scholars of medieval history agree that misogyny and patriarchy circumscribed women’s lives. Despite this, there’s a strong consensus that elite women, noble and royal, did wield power in the early medieval period (c. 500 – c. 1000), but that their high medieval (c. 1000-c. 1300) counterparts were effectively silenced and effaced from governance by institutional and legal changes by the thirteenth century. But were they?
