Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Studies from Western Europe and North Africa

This collection of essays examines the lives of women of all classes during the centuries during and after the 'fall of Rome' across the various 'Barbarian' kingdoms of the Western Mediterranean and Europe. In order to address an important gap in current scholarship on women and gender in the post-Roman Western kingdoms, these contributions were assembled based on a series of panels presented at the Leeds International Medieval Conference in 2022. The volume focuses particularly on a bottom-up perspective, to analyse the place, role, and experiences of women in the daily life of the period, and on how such an approach might alter our view of the social, cultural, and religious history of these kingdoms. Limited by our sources, however, we also investigate the absence of women and gender concerns in our texts, and look for alternative fonts of knowledge, such as material culture, archaeology, poetry and epigraphy. The collection enriches our knowledge of women and gender in early medieval Western Europe and North Africa, especially by paying close attention to the social and cultural realities of lower-class women during this period.