Medieval Women in their Communities (review)

212 Reviews However, the complexity of communications and politics within livery companies limited their potential to offer members a sense of community (p. 98). Attendances at formal general meetings of the livery and yeomanry, the representative body of the Commonalty, were poor. Ward takes this as evidence undermining any hint ofgemeinschaft, associational solidarity, among guild members. It might only mean they were bored by company politics, and expressed collective solidarity on more ceremonious occasions when they paraded through the streets, ranked in their companies, as part of the entire citizen yeomanry of London. The sharpness of their sense of seniority suggests that status within a company was an important consideration for many, which makes it some kind of felt community. The citizenry of London represented a community larger than the single company, but as Ward shows, individuals rarely felt it was necessary to divide one from the others. In this book the administration and management of companies runs more or less smoothly, efficiently, sensitively, continuously and a little bit progressively from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Reformation is easily assimilated, and there is no sign beyond gaps in the records that anything terribly serious happened in the 1640s. It is in the nature of administrative records to minimise irregularities and confirm the expectations of authority. The gaps occur because the yeomen, liverymen, rank and file members and citizens of the London Companies, the representatives of the Commonalty of England (Salters' Company document, 1638, cited p. 92.), were engaged in another struggle, one that more fully expressed their membership of a community which 'Metropolis' is too small to encompass. David Rollison Department of History University of Western Sydney, Macarthur Watt, Diane, ed., Medieval Women in their Communities, Cardiff, Universi Wales Press, 1997; paper; pp. xii, 250; R.R.P. £14.95. Medieval Women in their Communities is a collection of ten interdiscipli essays originating from the research presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the Gender and Medieval Studies Group at the University of Wales. In the words of the editor, the purpose of the book is 'to explore . . . some of the complex and diverse relationships between w o m e n and their communities in pre-modern Europe' (p. 7). The contributors are historians and literary scholars, all of w h o m are w o m e n from tertiary institutions mostly in England but also in other countries such as Germany, the United States, and N e w Zealand. Although the title suggests a broad coverage of w o m e n in their communities in the Middle Ages, and the collection does include research on communities in various areas across Western Europe, such as Germany, France Reviews 213 and Italy, most of the essays deal with communities in medieval England. As the blurb on the back cover points out, the main focus of the collection is on 'the lives of w o m e n in religious communities in late medieval Europe', though i t should be noted that the lives of w o m e n in secular communities are also considered. For the most part, the time-frame is the period between 1200 and 1500, with some essays, such as that by Patricia Skinner, including evidence from earlier periods. Diane Watt's introduction not only provides the usual overview of the essays in the collection but also has a useful discussion of the term 'community', its meaning both in the Middle Ages and the present day, as well as the notions of individuality, subjectivity and identity, particularly in relation to feminist theories. As Watt points out, the study of community is a developingfieldand, overall, the collection has a sense of excitement about it since it offers m u c h original research in an area where there is still considerable scope for new information and discoveries. Given that these essays deal with an area of scholarship that is relatively new, however, the collection as a whole would have benefited from the inclusion of a list of texts for further reading and research in this particular field rather than the separate bibliographies at the end of each essay which necessarily include references to works...