Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague - Softcover

`The analysis is sensitive, and the judgements sensible ... we can appreciate the useful contribution that this book makes to the history both of women and of medieval society' Christopher Dyer, History

'meticulously researched and elegantly argued book' Merry E. Wiesner, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Social History

In this book, Judith Bennett addresses the gap in our knowledge of medieval country women by examining how their lives differed from those of rural men. Drawing on her study of an English manor in the early fourteenth century, she finds that rural women were severely restricted in their public roles and rights primarily because of their household status as dependents of their husbands, rather than because of a notion of female inferiority. Adolescent women and widows, by virtue of their unmarried status, enjoyed greater legal and public freedom than their married counterparts.