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Reviewed by:
  • Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages ed. by Sue Niebrzydowski
  • Kim M. Phillips
Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages. Edited by Sue Niebrzydowski. Gender in the Middle Ages, 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. xiv + 153; 8 b/w illustrations. $90.

Historians of medieval women have increasingly come to recognize the importance of age and life cycle in assessing feminine representations and experiences in medieval Europe. A number of studies in article or book form have examined female childhoods, youth, and old age. The importance of marital status has, at the same time, been well-recognized so that the legal status, life experience, and cultural imagery surrounding maidens, wives, widows, and life-long singlewomen have merited close study. As Sue Niebrzydowski asserts in her Introduction to Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages, medieval women’s midlife phase has not previously been granted similarly close attention. Studies of the categories of wife and widow, and indeed of the adult singlewoman, have gone some way to remedy this neglect, but Niebrzydowski is correct in her perception that mature womanhood has been studied less in relation to age categories and life cycle than to marital status. This edited collection of eight original essays plus a thematic Introduction begins the process of filling a scholarly gap, yet the focus on “middle age” poses certain problems that remain difficult to resolve.

Of the nine pieces in the volume, the first three items—Niebrzydowski’s “Introduction,” Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker’s “The Age of Discretion: Women at Forty and Beyond,” and Sara Elin Roberts’s “Seeking the Middle-Aged Woman in Medieval Wales”—offer the fullest consideration of “middle age” in medieval age-schemes and its applicability to women. Mulder-Bakker maintains that, for medieval women, forty marked the onset of middle age, though the other essays in the collection unsettle any such sense of certainty. Mulder-Bakker asserts that “if we call to mind the well-known holy women of Germany and the Low Countries, or Britain for that matter, we discover that they were almost all past forty as they embarked upon their public lives” (pp. 22–23). In view of this apparent pattern, Mulder-Bakker suggests “the Age of Discretion” (though “Age of Authority” might be more apt) as an appropriate term to express the autonomy and influence that [End Page 379] became available to women on reaching their fortieth year. This is certainly an interesting observation, though a more wide-reaching survey of medieval women in publicly-recognized positions of influence would be needed to ascertain its validity. One can think of women from other parts of Europe whose experience would seem to fit this picture (for example, St. Bridget of Sweden), but others (such as Elizabeth of Schönau or Catherine of Siena) challenge it. Nonetheless this stimulating essay, along with Niebrzydowski’s wide-ranging and thoughtful Introduction, offers a theoretical framework for the volume.

Mulder-Bakker’s essay is also distinguished for introducing German women such as Katherina Tucher and Gertrude of Ortenberg to an English-language audience who will be more familiar with the women discussed in the collection’s later essays, notably Christina of Markyate, Margery Kempe, and Margaret of Anjou. Readers seeking novel approaches to medieval women’s studies will also welcome Sara Elin Roberts’s study of women in Welsh legal codes and literature, which pays more attention than the other contributions to questions of terminology. The Welsh word gwraig, she shows, was used to distinguish a mature woman from maiden or girl (morwyn and merch) or old woman (gwrach). This close attention to language enables Roberts to seek women in Welsh sources whom one might validly designate as “middle-aged.” Also clearly focused on the volume’s theme is Sue Niebrzydowski’s “‘Late hir seye wht sche wyl’: Older Women’s Speech and the Book of Margery Kempe,” which carefully unpacks the problem of composition and voice in Margery Kempe’s Book and employs evidence from modern studies on gender and the “linguistic life course” to argue for the growth of confidence and individuality in women’s speech as they leave youth and enter...

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