Aneta Pieniądz - Böcker

This book presents a comprehensive overview of women's activities in various spheres of life in medieval Poland and its neighbouring countries, seeking to move beyond the commonly accepted perspective of queens and higher nobility from the social elite to rural women, townswomen and poor noblewomen.The authors provide the broadest possible overview of these women's activities, encompassing their domestic, religious, economic, and cultural lives. Women are presented as active characters, not merely as objects of male actions. The limits of this activity were set by a system of norms and values and the resulting power relations within and outside the family. A fundamental problem in the study of women in the Middle Ages is the limited number and type of surviving sources, as well as their chronological and geographical distribution. Their voices are barely audible and almost always mediated. Despite these difficulties, the source material from the medieval period proves abundant enough to allow the contributors to take a broad look at the fate of women and their roles in many aspects and perspectives.This volume will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in the history of women and their significance in medieval society.

The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.