Fall 2015 Medieval and Early Modern Studies Lecture
Digital Humanities, Medieval Women, Sex, and Marriage
Location
University Center : 312
Date & Time
September 24, 2015, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Description
Dr. Shannon
McSheffrey (Ph. D, Toronto),
Professor, Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, will speak on
her research on women in late medieval London, including her work in digital humanities.
She manages a database relating to the late medieval London Consistory court at
http://digitalhistory.concordia.ca/consistory/index.php.
In her lecture she will focus on a case study: in the spring of 1488, Margaret
Heed, a young London woman about seventeen or eighteen years old, dithered
about whether she would marry the man her father chose for her or another man
whom she clearly preferred. Margaret’s dilemma highlighted a medieval paradox:
young unmarried women were amongst the most powerless persons in medieval
society, and yet at this one juncture in her life, as she was about to get
married, a young woman held a particularly powerful card, as her consent was
necessary for a marriage to be valid. Margaret’s story is a medieval one – but
it’s also a 21st-century digital humanities tale. We have more historical information than ever
thanks to the digital revolution, but to interpret Margaret’s story, we also
need the humanities, to teach us how to read the subtleties of the evidence,
and indeed to remind us about how much we still do not know.
Professor McSheffrey has published a number of scholarly articles and four books, Gender and
Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420-1530 (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London
(Medieval Institute Publications, 1995); Lollards of Coventry 1486-1522
(co-authored with Norman Tanner), Camden Fifth Series, vol. 23 (Cambridge
University Press, 2003);Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval
London (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). She
has won several awards for her research and teaching and was elected a fellow
of the Royal Historical Society of the U.K. in 2002.