Description
Book SynopsisThis volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess' disability affected her life as Byzantine empress, how one unmarried Transylvanian woman who got pregnant dealt with being the center of a court case, and how enslaved women in medieval Hungary were treated as sexual property. The hope with this volume is that it will show the many interdisciplinary ways that women on the margins can be studied in this region, and to diminish the taboo of discussing this topic to begin with.
Table of Contents
- Preface By Christopher Mielke, Andrea-Bianka Znorovszky
- Introduction By Marianna D. Birnbaum
- CHAPTER 1. Female Rebellion in the Margins of a Late Thirteenth-Century Mort de Roi Artu, by Emily Shartrand
- CHAPTER 2. A Heretic with a Distorted Face: Sophia of Montferrat, the 'Other' Empress of Byzantium, by Petra Melichar
- CHAPTER 3. Suspect Women: Prostitution, Reputation, and Gossip in Fourteenth-Century Prague, by Eleanor Janega
- CHAPTER 4. Prostitution in Urban Brothels in Late Medieval Austria, by Michael M. Hammer
- CHAPTER 5. Prostitutes and Urban Communities of Medieval Slavonia: Examples from Gradec, by Marija Karbi?
- CHAPTER 6. Prostitution in Late Medieval Dubrovnik: Legislation, Practice and Prosecution, by Gordan Ravan?i?
- CHAPTER 7. Rub-a-dub-dub, Three Maids in a Tub: Women in Bathhouses and Secondary Sites of Sex Work in Medieval Hungarian Towns, by Christopher Mielke
- CHAPTER 8. Laundry Ladies in Medieval Poland, by Leslie Carr-Riegel
- CHAPTER 9. Sexual Access to Slave Women: Árpádian Hungary as a Case Study, by Cameron Sutt
- CHAPTER 10. Fornicatrices, scortatrices et meretrices diabolares: Disciplining Women in Early Modern Hungarian Towns, by Blanka Szeghyová
- CHAPTER 11. De Ardentissimo Amore: Between Rape and Adultery – a Sixteenth-century Trial, by Alexandra Chira
