213. Ibid., loc 1998

  214. McNellis, Let Her Be Taken, p. 51

  215. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 1975

  216. Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy, p. 163

  217. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 735

  218. Janina Ramirez, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages Through the Women Written Out of It, WH Allen, 2022, p. 188

  219. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 1758

  220. McNellis, Let Her Be Taken, p. 57

  221. Nicole Rice, ‘“Temples to Christ’s Indwelling”: Forms of Chastity in a Barking Abbey Manuscript’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 115–32

  222. Christian D. Knudsen, Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks: Monastic Sexual Misconduct in Late Medieval England, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2012, p. 69

  223. Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001

  224. Giles Constable, ‘Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order’, Studies in Church History Subsidia, Vol. 1, 1978, pp. 205–26

  225. Catherine Tideswell, ‘How Far Did Medieval Society Recognise Lesbianism in this Period?’, medievalists.net (online)

  226. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 1272–3

  227. John Boswell, Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, Villard Books, 1994, p. 244

  228. Kittredge Cherry, ‘Hildegard of Bingen and Richardis: Medieval Mystic and the Woman She Loved’, Q Spirit, 17 September 2022

  229. Norma Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt (eds), The Lesbian Premodern, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 36

  230. St Paul, Romans 1:26–27, 1599 Geneva Bible, Bible Gateway

  231. Tideswell, ‘How Far Did Medieval Society Recognise Lesbianism in this Period?’

  232. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard and Sarah White, Songs of the Women Troubadours, Garland Publishing, 2000

  233. Angelica Rieger, ‘Was Bieiris de Romans Lesbian?’ in Walter D. Paden (ed) The Voice of the Trobairitz, University of Pennsylvania Publications, 1989

  234. Elizabeth Castelli, ‘“I Will Make Mary Male”: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity’, in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Bodyguards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Routledge, 1991, p. 30

  235. Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England, Routledge, 2012, p. 9

  236. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, 1990, loc 242 and 571

  237. Gowing, Gender Relations, p. 8

  238. Sara Middleton and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 19

  239. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe’, in Epstein and Straub (eds), Bodyguards, p. 81

  240. St Paul, Galatians 3:28, Authorised King James Bible

  241. Gospel of St Thomas Gospel, translated by Thomas O. Lambdin, v 114

  242. Deuteronomy 22:5, and see Debra Haffner, ‘Sexuality and Scripture: What Else Does the Bible Have to Say?’, Sex and the Church, Spring 2006

  243. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 313

  244. Ibid., loc 1954

  245. Michael Nolan, ‘The Myth of Soulless Women’, First Things (online), April 1997

  246. St Paul, 1 Corinthians 14:33–35, King James Bible

  247. Maayan Sudai, ‘Sex Ambiguity in Early Modern Common Law (1629–1787)’, Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 47, No. 2, 2022, pp. 478–513

  Part 2: 1348–1455 Women Rising

  1. Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, Bodley Head, 2008, loc 697

  2. Ibid.

  3. Kate Ravilious, ‘Europe’s Chill Linked to Disease’, BBC, 27 February 2006; William F. Ruddiman, ‘The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago’, Climatic Change, Vol. 61, No. 3, 2003, pp. 261–93

  4. Ralph of Shrewsbury, letter, January 1349, in John Simkin, Medieval Realms, Spartacus Educational, 1991, p. 52

  5. Christian D. Knudsen, Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks: Monastic Sexual Misconduct in Late Medieval England, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2012, p. 59

  6. C.M. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England 1200–1500, Yale University Press, 2016, loc 3861

  7. Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, loc 547

  8. Lucy Worsley, ‘The Survivor, the “Incurable” and the Scapegoat’, History Extra, 13 June 2022 (online)

  9. Helena Graham, ‘“A Woman’s Work . . .”: Labour and Gender in the Late Medieval Countryside’, in Women in Medieval English Society, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg, Sutton Publishing, 1992, p. 127

  10. Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: Social History of Women in England 450–1500, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013, loc 2615

  11. P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘For Better, For Worse: Marriage and Economic Opportunity for Women in Town and Country’, in Goldberg (ed.), Women in Medieval English Society, p. 112

  12. Ibid.

  13. Caroline Barron, ‘Post Pandemic: How the Years after the Black Death Briefly Became a “Golden Age” for Medieval Women’, History Extra, 6 July 2021 (online)

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England 1200–1500, loc 4902

  18. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 2817

  19. Extract from a deed by Joanna, daughter of Nicholas de Rudyngton and widow of Stephen de Boneye, 29 July 1380, Latin, translated by Kathryn Summerwill in ‘Property Ownership’, Wives, Widows and Wimples, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham, 2010

  20. Mavis E. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex 1350–1535, Boydell Press, 1998, p. 11

  21. Michelle M. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, Bloomsbury, 2015, loc 739/753

  22. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 2169

  23. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England 1200–1500, loc 5226

  24. Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, W.W. Norton and Co, 2023, loc 1387

  25. Sylvia Federico, ‘The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, April 2001, pp. 150–83

  26. Sydney Armitage Smith, John of Gaunt, Archibald Constable & Co., 1904, p. 247

  27. Federico, ‘The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381’

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Cooper & Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, Vol. 1, Warwick & Co., 1842, p. 121

  31. Helen Lacey, ‘“Grace for the Rebels”: The Role of the Royal Pardon in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 34, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 36–63

  32. Melissa Hogenboom, ‘Peasants’ Revolt: The Time When Women Took Up Arms’, BBC News, 14 June 2012 (online)

  33. Federico, ‘The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381’

  34. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, Knopf, 1996, p. 473

  35. Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry VI, Vol. 5, HM Stationery Office, 1909, pp. 338–74

  36. Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers, Oxford University Press, 2002, loc 1149

  37. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death, p. 12

  38. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 2575

  39. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death, p. 12

  40. P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c.1300–1520, Oxford Academic, 1992, pp. 82–157

  41. Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Demographic Perspective’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, p. 48

  42. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England 1200–1500, loc 2928

  43. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy

  44. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 3188

  45. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 30

  46. Barron, ‘Post Pandemic’, History Extra

  47. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 2927

  48. Janina Ramirez, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages Through the Women Written Out of It, WH Allen, 2022, p. 320

  49. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 3185

  50. Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London, Oxford University Press, 2007, loc 2690

  51. Barron, ‘Post Pandemic’, History Extra

  52. Marty Williams and Anne Echols, Between Pit and Pedestal: Women in the Middle Ages, Markus Wiener, 1993, p. 54

  53. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, loc 141, 225 and 1601

  54. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England 1200–1500, loc 2446

  55. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550, loc 2370

  56. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620, pp. 38 and 95

  57. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 2386

  58. Williams and Echols, Between Pit and Pedestal, p. 229

  59. Ibid.,p. 229

  60. Michael Riordan, ‘Women at Queen’s before 1979’, Queen’s College, University of Oxford (online)

  61. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, loc 991, 1470, 581, 591, 684

  62. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620, p. 241

  63. Lucy Davidson, ‘What Did People Wear in Medieval England?’, History Hit, 26 February 2023 (online)

  64. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620, p. 241

  65. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, loc 2724

  66. Goldberg, ‘For Better, For Worse’, p. 112

  67. Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 151

  68. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, loc 2724

  69. Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘Wages of Women in England 1260–1850’, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, 127, March 2014, p. 16

  70. L.R. Poos, ‘Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1995, pp. 585–607

  71. Barron, ‘Post Pandemic’, History Extra

  72. Williams and Echols, Between Pit and Pedestal, p. 148

  73. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 25

  74. Rowena Archer, ‘How Ladies Who Live on Their Manors . . .’, Women in Medieval English Society, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg, Sutton Publishing, 1992, p. 154

  75. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, p. 201

  76. Richard Harvey, ‘The Work and Mentalité of Lower Orders Elizabethan Women’, Exemplaria, Vol. 5, Issue 2, 1993, pp. 409–33, p. 427

  77. Stéphanie Prevost, ‘For a Bunch of Blue Ribbons: Taking a Look at Wife-Selling in the Black Country and the West Midlands’, Blackcountryman Magazine, Vol. 49, Autumn 2016, pp. 51–7

  78. James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, Volume II, Oxford University Press, 1901, p. 820

  79. Simon Payling, ‘The Elusiveness of Divorce in Medieval England: The Marital Troubles of the Last Warenne Earl of Surrey (d.1347)’, The History of Parliament, 3 August 2021 (online)

  80. Ibid.

  81. Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England, Cambridge University Press, 2012, loc 137

  82. Graham, ‘A Woman’s Work . . .’, p. 127

  83. J.B. Post, ‘Sir Thomas West and the Statute of Rape 1382’, Institute of Historical Research, Vol. 53, Issue 127, May 1980, Wiley Online Library

  84. Helen Barker, Rape in Early Modern England: Law, History and Criticism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, loc 1857

  85. Ibid., loc 1623

  86. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 450

  87. Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England, loc 379

  88. Ibid., loc 231 and 2090

  89. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, loc 478

  90. Carissa Harris, ‘800 Years of Rape Culture’, Aeon, 24 May 2021 (online)

  91. Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, p. 2

  92. Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Sex and the Singlewoman’, in ibid., p. 134

  93. Katherine Harvey, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, 2021, loc 3529

  94. Ibid., loc 3472

  95. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 2802–5

  96. Harvey, The Fires of Lust, loc 3768

  97. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620, p. 76

  98. Harvey, The Fires of Lust, loc 3768

  99. Karras, ‘Sex and the Singlewoman’, p. 139

  100. Harvey, The Fires of Lust, loc 3729

  101. Judith M. Bennett, ‘Etchingham and Oxenbridge’, in Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer and Diane Watt (eds), The Lesbian Premodern, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 134

  102. The words of Cino da Pistoia quoted in Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 110 and 111

  103. Knighton’s Leicester Chronicle quoted in Thomas S. Henricks, Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991, p. 53

  104. Joanna Winfield, ‘Female Warriors in the Middle Ages’, 2011, Women’s History Month (online)

  105. Judith M. Bennett and Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Early, Erotic and Alien: Women Dressed as Men in Late Medieval London’, History Workshop Journal, Spring 2014, No. 77, pp. 1–25

  106. Ibid.

  107. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘General Prologue’, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, Houghton-Mifflin, 1988

  108. Ibid.

  109. Janega, The Once and Future Sex, loc 1871

  110. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’, The Canterbury Tales

  111. Ibid.

  112. Ramirez, Femina, p. 301

  113. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’, The Canterbury Tales

  114. Ibid.

  115. Ibid.

  116. Leyser, Medieval Women, loc 4434

  117. Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England, loc 137

  118. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death, p. 186

  119. King’s Bench 9/359 m. 67 (1 October 1481), National Archives, translated by Mark Thakkar, University of St Andrews, 2023

  Part 3: 1455–1485 Women at War

  1. Rowena Archer, ‘How Ladies Who Live on Their Manors . . .’, Women in Medieval English Society, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg, Sutton Publishing, 1992, p. 161

  2. Melissa Snell, ‘Life of Margaret Paston’, ThoughtCo., 1 March 2019 (online)

  3. Philip Payton, Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe (eds), The Maritime History of Cornwall, University of Exeter Press, 2014

  4. Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers, Oxford University Press, 2002, loc 239

  5. Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England, Cambridge University Press, 2012, loc 3040

  6. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550, loc 2592

  7. Ibid., loc 214

  8. Elizabeth Norton, The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women: A Social History, Pegasus Books, 2017, loc 1228

  9. Miss Evelyn Fox, ‘The Diary of an Elizabethan Gentlewoman’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 2, 1908, pp. 153–74

  10. Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, W.W. Norton and Co, 2023, loc 3047

  11. Caroline Barron, ‘Post Pandemic: How the Years after the Black Death Briefly Became a “Golden Age” for Medieval Women’, History Extra, 6 July 2021 (online)

  12. Jean Donnison, ‘A History of the Midwife Profession in the United Kingdom’, in Mayes’ Midwifery, 14th edn, Bailliere Tindall Elsevier, 2011, pp. 13–14

  13. Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law and Economy in Late Medieval London, Oxford University Press, 2007, loc 2418 and 2445

  14. Davies Gilbert, The Parochial History of Cornwall, founded on the manuscript of Histories of Mr Hals and Mr Tonkin, JB Nichols & Sons, 1838, Vol. 4, pp. 132–4

  15. Marty Williams and Anne Echols, Between Pit and Pedestal: Women in the Middle Ages, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1993, p. 51

  16. C.M. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England 1200–1500, Yale University Press, 2016, loc 1631

  17. L.R. Poos, ‘Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1995, pp. 585–607

  18. Max Adams, Unquiet Women, Head of Zeus, 2018, loc 2422

  19. Ibid., loc 2663

  20. Ibid., loc 2701

  21. Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England, loc 4019

  22. Katherine Harvey, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, 2021, loc 3487 and 3729

  23. Ibid., loc 3548, 3487, 3548, 3487, 3520

  Part 4: 1485–1660 Becoming a Weaker Vessel

  1. Christian D. Knudsen, Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks: Monastic Sexual Misconduct in Late Medieval England, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2012, p. 208

  2. Ibid., p. 99

  3. Ibid., p. 178, 177 and 118

  4. Ibid., p. 105

  5. Geoffrey Baskerville, ‘The Dispossessed Religious of Surrey’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, Vol. 47, 1941, pp. 12–28

  6. Knudsen, Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks, p. 223

  7. Stephanie A. Mann, ‘More on the Norwich Beguinage’, Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation, 1 June 2013 (online)

  8. Knudsen, Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks, pp. 223 and 224

  9. Ibid., p. 81

  10. Norma Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt (eds), The Lesbian Premodern, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 86

  11. Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England, Routledge, 2012, p. 52

  12. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, Knopf, 1996, p. 408

  13. Madeleine Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, London, 1915

  14. John Simkin, ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, Spartacus Educational, September 1997 (online)

  15. Elizabeth Norton, The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women: A Social History, Pegasus Books, 2017, pp. 202 and 206

  16. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors from ad 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, Camden Society, 1875, p. 64