Review of Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, 2 Vols

At the 2003 International Congress at Leeds, a panel posed the question of whether feminist medieval studies can be said today to be "pressing or passé." Far from signalling the obsolescence of feminist investigations into the Middle Ages, the posing of such a question reflects the extent to which feminist scholarship, and in particular the study of medieval women, has consolidated its position within the larger field of Medieval Studies. Similarly, the appearance of a watershed resource such as Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia is a clear sign not of only how far scholarship on medieval women has come over the past three decades or so, but also how indispensable gender has become as an analytical category that informs our understanding of the medieval period.