Judith M. Bennett’s lifelong passion for the Middle Ages has served her well
in writing A Medieval Life, a speculative biography of a woman who
lived during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As a child, Bennett devoured
historical novels at a rate that worried her parents. At the age of fifteen, she
undertook her first independent research project, an inquiry into the real-life
character of Richard III of England, after reading a pair of novels that held
diametrically opposed views on the notoriously controversial king. Now, as a
professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bennett
devotes her academic career to her two primary areas of expertise, medieval history
and women’s history, and most of her output sits at the junction of these two
scholarly disciplines. In addition to A Medieval Life, Bennett has
written several books and articles on the experiences of women in the Middle Ages,
including Medieval Women in Modern Perspective (2000); Ale,
Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World
(1996); and Women in the Medieval English Countryside
(1987).
Whereas Bennett’s love of the Middle Ages dates back to her adolescence, her
intimate rapport with women’s history began in young adulthood. When Bennett was a
graduate student at the University of Toronto, she had to come to terms with the
discovery that she was homosexual, and she became politically active in the lively
lesbian community there. This experience sensitized her to women’s issues, and soon,
Bennett diversified her medieval studies to include women’s history. Thus, from a
relatively young age, Bennett has been concerned with the status, roles, and
representations of women throughout history, as well as the ways in which historians
have portrayed them. Not only does Bennett’s academic output reflect this concern,
but her commitment to teaching and public debate regarding gender, feminism, and
sexuality also demonstrate her advocacy of women’s issues in both an academic
context and a larger social one. As she once said in an interview, “women’s history . . . has
to have its own internal coherence and integrity.” As an historian,
Bennett has taken it upon herself to reveal the structural inequalities throughout
history that have left women at a disadvantage, in the hope of seeing her work lead
to widespread modern structural change that puts women on a more equal footing with
men.
Bennett used these feminist concerns as guiding principles when writing
A Medieval Life. Dissatisfied with the male-focused nature of
history, Bennett set out to write A Medieval Life with an aim to
reconceptualize the typical patriarchal view of society—that in which the central
figure is inherently male. The subject of her biography, Cecilia Penifader, had an
exceptionally well-documented life, and though she was by no means a perfectly
typical medieval peasant, her life was in many ways representative of medieval
society. Bennett’s biography of Cecilia gives form to the ways in which women fit
into medieval society, the types of challenges they faced, and the joys and everyday
activities they encountered. In addition, since Cecilia managed to prosper despite
never having married, A Medieval Life shuns the commonly held
notion that peasants, especially peasant women, had to marry in order to survive.
A Medieval Life is more than a feminist tract of medieval history.
While Bennett does explore the female story in human history, she refuses to burden
her objective historical analysis with a radical feminist viewpoint. Her evocation
of peasant life is both sober and well-balanced, and her speculation of what Cecilia
must have been thinking and feeling in reaction to certain historical and day-to-day
events is remarkably well-disciplined. Ultimately, Bennett’s book is not merely
about Cecilia but about medieval peasant life in general. After all, as Bennett
notes in the introduction to A Medieval Life, peasants comprised 90
percent of the medieval population, yet they are consistently underrepresented both
by historians and historical documents in favor of warring kings, crusading knights,
imposing bishops, and haggling merchants. In outlining Cecilia’s life and rigorously
describing the society around her, Bennett provides a case study from which we may
discern what a typical life was like in the Middle Ages.
