The Sunni and the Shiites (part 3)
One of the most important distinctions between Shiite and Sunni belief is the profound respect of the imams. Most Shiites believe that there were 12 legal successors to Muhammad as caliph, and that the...
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 1)
This paper deals with the way a male-dominated society understood women’s sexuality in the Middle Ages. It is likely that women of different social statuses entered into relationships differently....
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 2)
The urban regulation of prostitution supports both the idea of differing treatment of social groups and the idea of a universalizing discourse on feminine sexuality. The regulation affected poorer...
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 3)
Women who were actually what we would call prostitutes, engaged in sex for money (and this can often only be determined when they were working in the officially sanctioned brothels that existed in many...
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 4)
Female servants were generally considered sexually available to their employers even if the latter did not prostitute them to others. The records of ex officio prosecutions in any late medieval church...
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 5)
Most cases of rape by individuals (as opposed to gangs) in the Middle Ages seem not to have been deliberate attempts at social control or at the demonstration of masculine power over women, but rather...
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 6)
This assumption of privilege that makes the will or consent of the lower-status woman simply irrelevant is clearly reflected in descriptions of rape in literature, from Andreas Capellanus’s...
View ArticleThe Unrealized Importance of Women in the Middle Ages (part 7)
Prostitutes embodied the specifically lower-status version of the “woman as disorder” topos. They were accused of causing disorder in their neighborhoods, and the specifics of these accusations go...
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