The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France [Paperback]

Penny Schine Gold provides a bold analysis of key literary and artistic images of women in the Middle Ages and the relationship between these images and the actual experience of women. She argues that the complex interactions between men and women as expressed in both image and experience reflect a common pattern of ambivalence and contradiction. Thus, women are seen as both helpful and harmful, powerful and submissive, and the actuality of women's experience encompasses women in control and controlled, autonomous and dependent.

Vividly recreating the rich texture of medieval life, Gold effectively and eloquently goes beyond a simple equation of social context and representation. In the process. she challenges equally simple judgments of historical periods as being either good or bad for women.

[The Lady and the Virgin] presents its findings in a form that should attract students as well as their instructors. The careful and controlled use of so many different kinds of sources . . . offers us a valuable medieval case study in the inner-relationship between the segments of society and its ethos or value system. —Joel T. Rosenthal,The History Teacher

Something of a tour de force in an interdisciplinary approach to history. —Jo Ann McNamara,Speculum

[A] well-written, extremely well-researched book. . . .The Lady and the Virginis useful, readable, and well informed. —R. Howard Bloch,Modern Philology

Penny Schine Goldis associate professor of history at Knox College.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Secular Image: Women in Chanson de Geste and Romance
Literature and History: Some Methodological Concerns
Chanson de Geste
Romance
2. Religious Image: The Iconography of the Virgin Mary
The Romanesque Image: The Virgin and Child
The Early Gothic Image: TlS,