Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women's activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women's challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life.

These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.

In Volume 2 of Women's History in Global Perspective, Bonnie G. Smith curates more essays by pioneering thinkers on issues that have shaped the history of women, this time with a focus on particular places and particular eras. The collection examines women from prehistory to ancient civilizations in Egypt, Israel, India, and beyond; a survey of women history in China, Japan, and Korea; women and gender in South and South East Asia; medieval women; women and gender in Colonial Latin America; and the history of women in the United States to 1865. 

Inclusive and wide-ranging, Women's History in Global Perspective, Volume 2, offers an invaluable collection of feminist scholarship on overlooked and marginalized topics. 

Contributors: Judith M. Bennett, Kathleen Brown, Brady Hughes, Sarah Shaver Hughes, Susan Mann, Barbara N. Ramusack, and Ann Twinam.