This book reveals the importance of personal letters in the history of European women between the year 1000 and the advent of the telephone. It explores the changing ways that women used correspondence for self-expression and political mobilization over this period, enabling them to navigate the myriad gendered restrictions that limited women’s engagement in the world. Whether written from the medieval cloister, or the renaissance court, or the artisan’s workshop, or the drawing room, letters crossed geographical and social distance and were mobile in ways that women themselves could not always be. Women wrote to govern, to argue, to plead, and to demand. They also wrote to express love and intimacy, and in so doing, to explain and to understand themselves. This book argues that the personal letter was a crucial place for European women’s self-fashioning, and that exploring the history of their letters offers a profound insight into their subjectivity and agency over time.

Constant J. Mews's groundbreaking work reveals the wide world of medieval letters. Looking beyond the cathedral and the cloister for his investigations, and taking a broad view of intellectual practice in the Middle Ages, Mews demands that we expand our horizons as we explore the history of ideas. Alongside his cutting-edge work on Abelard, he has been a leader in the study of medieval women writers, paying heed to Hildegard and Heloise in particular. Mews has also expanded our knowledge of medieval music, and its theoretical foundations. In Mews' Middle Ages, the world of ideas always belongs to a larger world: one that is cultural, gendered and politicized. The essays in this volume pay tribute to Constant, in spirit and in content, revealing a nuanced and integrated vision of the intellectual history of the medieval West.

This is a somewhat polemical, and very passionate, plea for more work not only about the house that scholasticism built, but those who were excluded from it.This book is the story of how scholastic theology defined this universal subject in terms of the reasonable white man and a catalogue of the exclusions which ensued. The categories of woman, Jew and heretic were core others against which ideal Christian subjectivity was implicitly defined, and this book shows just how constitutive these ‘others’ were for the production of orthodoxy in the Middle Ages.