This history of the early European middle ages combines the rich literature of women's history with original research in mainstream history and traditional chronology. Beginning at the end of the Roman empire, the book recreates the lives of ordinary women and their personal stories. It uses the few documents produced by women, along with archaeological evidence, art, and the written records of medieval men.

This history of the early European middle ages combines the rich literature of women's history with original research in mainstream history and traditional chronology. Beginning at the end of the Roman empire, the book recreates the lives of ordinary women and their personal stories. It uses the few documents produced by women, along with archaeological evidence, art, and the written records of medieval men.

Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe New Perspectives Edited by Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz In "Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe," six historians explore how medieval people professed Christianity, how they performed gender, and how the two coincided. Many of the daily religious decisions people made were influenced by gender roles, the authors contend. Women's pious donations, for instance, were limited by laws of inheritance and marriage customs; male clerics' behavior depended upon their understanding of masculinity as much as on the demands of liturgy. The job of religious practitioner, whether as a nun, monk, priest, bishop, or some less formal participant, involved not only professing a set of religious ideals but also professing gender in both ideal and practical terms. The authors also argue that medieval Europeans chose how to be women or men (or some complex combination of the two), just as they decided whether and how to be religious. In this sense, religious institutions freed men and women from some of the gendered limits otherwise imposed by society. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus exclusively either on masculinity or on aristocratic women, the authors define their topic to study gender in a fuller and more richly nuanced fashion. Likewise, their essays strive for a generous definition of religious history, which has too often been a history of its most visible participants and dominant discourses. In stepping back from received assumptions about religion, gender, and history and by considering what the terms "woman," "man," and "religious" truly mean for historians, the book ultimately enhances our understanding of the gendered implications of every pious thought and ritual gesture of medieval Christians. Contributors: Dyan Elliott is John Evans Professor of History at Northwestern University. Ruth Mazo Karras is professor of history at the University of Minnesota, and the general editor of The Middle Ages Series for the University of Pennsyvlania Press. Jacqueline Murray is dean of arts and professor of history at the University of Guelph. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin--Madison Lisa M. Bitel is Professor of History, Religion, and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is author of "Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland." Felice Lifshitz is Professor of History and Fellow of the Honors College at Florida International University. Her books include "The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia, 627-827." The Middle Ages Series 2008 168 pages 6 x 9 3 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-2013-1 Paper $19.95s 13.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0449-0 Ebook $19.95s 13.00 World Rights History, Women's/Gender Studies Short copy: "Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe" seeks to explain the convergence of religion and gender in medieval Christendom. Essays in the volume examine how Europeans identified themselves as women, men, and Christians, and how these identities influenced religious belief and practice in everyday life.

For more than twenty years, Maria Paula Acuna has claimed to see the Virgin Mary, once a month, at a place called Our Lady of the Rock in the Mojave Desert of California. Hundreds of men, women, and children follow her into the desert to watch her see what they cannot. While she sees and speaks with the Virgin, onlookers search the skies for signs from heaven, snapping photographs of the sun and sky. Not all of them are convinced that Maria Paula can see the Virgin, yet at each vision event they watch for subtle clues to Mary's presence, such as the unexpected scent of roses or a cloud in the shape of an angel. The visionary depends on her audience to witness and authenticate her visions, while observers rely on Maria Paula and the Virgin to create a sacred space and moment where they, too, can experience firsthand one of the oldest and most fundamental promises of Christianity: direct contact with the divine. Together, visionary and witnesses negotiate and enact their monthly liturgy of revelations. Our Lady of the Rock, which features text by Lisa M. Bitel and more than sixty photographs by Matt Gainer, shows readers what happens in the Mojave Desert each month and tells us how two thousand years of Christian revelatory tradition prepared Maria Paula and her followers to meet in the desert. Based on six years of observation and interviews, chapters analyze the rituals, iconographies, and physical environment of Our Lady of the Rock. Bitel and Gainer also provide vivid portraits of the pilgrims-who they are, where they come from, and how they practice the traditional Christian discernment of spirits and visions. Our Lady of the Rock follows three pilgrims as they return home with relics and proofs of visions where, out of Maria Paula's sight, they too have learned to see the Virgin. The book also documents the public response from the Catholic Church and popular news media to Maria Paula and other contemporary visionaries. Throughout, Our Lady of the Rock locates Maria Paula and her followers in the context of recent demographic and cultural shifts in the American Southwest, the astonishing increase in reported apparitions and miracles from around the world, the latest developments in communications and visual technologies, and the never-ending debate among academics, faith leaders, scientists, and citizen observers about sight, perception, reason, and belief.

In Land of Women, Lisa M. Bitel systematically recovers the almost-lost society that women and men created together in Ireland. Europe between the coming of Christianity and the year 1000 has been portrayed as a world where women were either subservient to men or in rebellion against them. Bitel argues, however, that the women and men of early medieval Ireland did not always submit to patriarchal ideals of institutionalized oppression. Bitel analyzes the social roles, both restrictive and empowering, played by women in Ireland between about 700 and 1100. She focuses first on sex, love, marriage, and motherhood. She examines the economic strategies that women developed and the social networks they built in the face of men's desire to restrict their mobility. In the process, she explains the often conflicting ideas about women expressed by the writers of medieval Irish texts - a small group of literate men vowed to a religion that has always been ambivalent toward the female sex - which derived from both Christian and secular Celtic heritages. She concludes by examining the violent and powerful images of women common in the medieval literature of Ireland, asking why men's texts consistently depicted women negatively when men and women interacted in a wide variety of ways. Ultimately, Bitel maintains, early Ireland hosted a set of gender relations every bit as flexible, contradictory, and complex as our own.

Isle of the Saints recreates the harsh yet richly spiritual world of medieval Irish monks on the Christian frontier of barbarian Europe. Lisa Bitel draws on accounts of saints' lives written between 800 and 1200 to explain, from the monks' own perspective, the social networks that bound them to one another and to their secular neighbors.