Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender & Household in Brigstock Before the Plague.

Bennett, Judith. Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender & Household in Brigstock Before the Plague. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

Bennett's text aims to complicate assumptions about the state of women in late medieval England. Specifcally, Bennett plots out the narrative, initially established by early feminist scholars of later periods, that suggests women of the countryside enjoyed more pronounced agency and equality than their later, urban, or aristocratic counterparts. This narrative contends that increased urbanized and industrialized England shrunk the agency of women, some studies even going so far as to describe medieval England as a "golden age" for peasant women. Bennett calls out scholars making this claim Bennett's text seeks to complicate this narrative with a case study of Brigstock, a late medieval manor. Bennett employs this focused case study to avoid some of the issues of scholarship that overly privileges urban and aristocratic narratives of women, largely due to the simple existence of larger documentary evidence. Rather than suggesting her single case study can change this narrative wholesale, Bennett adds this as one of many such studies necessary to provide a stronger perspective of the lives of women in the medieval English countryside.

Ultimately, Bennett argues that the narrative of peasant women in this period cannot be boiled down to simple overviews like the "golden age" perspective, even within a set area such as Briggstock. Her research reveals, for example, that the subordination of women could often have more to do with marital status than gender. Married women were often assumed to be legal dependents of their husbands', or the heads of household, and therefore legal matters involving a wife were often delegated through her husband. Yet, Bennett also notes that subordination was less pronounced among widows and maidens; these two groups often held financial assets separate from the household, the widow in the form of inheritance and the maiden in side trade earned towards a future dowry. Despite their lessened subordination, however, Bennett also points to a culture of public subordination, where women in public arenas were culturally subordinated to men, and in the medieval English countryside very little in the way of private life existed. While a bit dated now, Bennett's text is an interesting look at the role of women in medieval England and a model of how to challenge scholarly assumptions.