HIST/WMST 4950: Women in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

This course is a survey of the historic experience of women in the world civilizations of the ancient and medieval worlds. We shall also study issues concerning women of the early modern period, during the Renaissance and Reformation. We will survey the status of women, their legal rights, social, economic and political status, as well as their cultural contributions. We will survey sources and interpretive schools from a variety of disciplines as we attempt to reconstruct to the experience of women in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and Reformation.

The course will look at various schools of thought which attempt to understand how, why, and when women were made subordinate to men. We will look at the transition from the veneration of the Great Goddess in prehistoric cultures to the reification of women through exogamous marriage practices of early hunting and gathering societies. We shall study various interpretations of how women became subordinate within the family, and how the archaic patriarchal states arose.

Through our study of the various sources that relate to the historic experience of women, we will also see numerous examples of women who served as high priestesses and had other important roles within their societies and cultures. Cleopatra, who is pictured in the bottom image, ruled in her own right in Egypt and also attempted to extend her power to the Roman Empire through her liaisons with Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony. Nefertiti, pictured in the top image, was arguably the most beautiful women to ever have lived. While her role in Akhenaton's Amarna Revolution in unclear, she obviously had considerable power as his consort.

While there were many such powerful women in history, it is also true that the vast majority of recorded sources were left by men. According to Gerda Lerner, "Women are essential and central to creating society; they are and always have been actors and agents in history. Women have "made history," yet they have been kept from knowing their History and from interpreting history, either their own or that of men. Women have been systematically excluded from the enterprise of creating symbol systems ... Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory formation." The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986), 5.

We will explore the tension between the existence of the rich and unique historic experience of the world's women and the fact that women were excluded from interpreting their experiences. Lerner has called this tension "the dialectic of women's history." The Creation of Patriarchy, 5.

In the materials here, students and other users will find course handouts and numerous links to materials relevant to our course topics. Through the many links contained in this site, you may explore the complex nature of women's lives and their contributions.

Stay tuned for Part II: Women in the Early Modern and Contemporary World!