Making Space: Women’s Agency within a Patriarchal Hegemony
It is often said that well-behaved women seldom make history. Yet, simply because they are not the subject of multivolume biographies does not mean that “well-behaved” women did not have agency in their daily lives. This panel seeks to highlight the agentic force of the medieval women who did not subvert the patriarchal norms of their time. How did medieval women make use of patriarchal norms to their own advantage? Specifically, how did religious women, lay or monastic, live their own lives, create their own spaces, and make their own choices within the medieval patriarchal hegemony?