I'm glad you bring this up ReneZ,
In this field as in many others, women were not only present, their presence was normal. Medieval manuscripts created by women are not a rarity.
There's nothing extraordinary about the fact that there would be medieval women You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. (see more here too), or doctors or any other non-physically demanding profession (although there were also women in these too, eg. mining and warfare). They were present in almost all corporations, either alongside men or in their own corporations.
What is incredible to me is that people today should find this surprising, and that the article ReneZ links to should even need to be written.
I guess it stems from the general view of the medieval period as "dark ages" of oppression, when in reality, the middle ages are a time of considerable social progress, among other things in the promotion and expansion of the role of women in all fields, in stark contrast with antiquity.
If we are going to look for times when women were really discriminated against and excluded from professional activities, we might want to look instead at antiquity, at the so-called enlightenment and at the 19th Century.
Certainly, misogyny existed in the middle ages, but nowhere more so than in universities, especially after the 13th century. Academics were pretty much the only ones who excluded women from their spaces, and made the oft-quoted statements that women shouldn't do this or that. These quotes are often presented as rules about women were allowed to do, when they are just opinions: Paradoxically, their disapproval actually informs us about the fact that women
were doing those things!
JKP: There was not
one Jewish woman doctor in the middle ages, but a plethora of them, all over Europe. The idea that this "defied convention" couldn't be further from the truth, (see You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.) and stems from the same stereotypes I am lamenting in this post.
Perhaps you'll find the one you were looking for among the many medieval Jewish female doctors listed You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view..
The negative stereotypes about the middle ages are so prevalent, in my opinion, because this narrative allows us to reinforce other stereotypes (the church as oppressive and "anti-science"; the rural world as "backwards"; technological progress as a bearer of social progress, etc) and to congratulate ourselves over "how far we've come".
I'ill end this rant with a quote from one of my favorite historians of the medieval period, Jacques Le Goff (2000 interview):
"In the West, there have not been more women prime ministers than there were queens and regents governing in the Middle Ages."