Women in the Middle Ages aka My Paper Topic!

The status of women is an area of study that has gained great momentum in the past fifty years. This area of study is not just being applied to the present status of women or even the status of women in the twenty-first century. This study is reaching back far in to the depths of times, as far back as even the Middle Ages, when feminism was not word or notion that had been closed to formed yet. What is hard to understand about applying new age terms to the past is that they did not have the same opinions, values, and who is to say that these women really felt that way. That is why it is important to look at this time frame through an unbiased scope. The Middle Ages supplies literary individuals with numerous texts to help the reader better understand what life and status may have been at the time. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous collections from the Middle Ages that shows a great deal about the church, women, and the upper class but it is not the only insightful text from the Middle Ages. The collection Ashmole 61 that was believed to be compiled for a gentry family in England gives a wide array of family oriented literature that would have been in popular circulation at the time. Through this text the reader is not only able to learn about religion at the time, or knightly conquests, but also about the people of the Middle Ages and in particularly the women of the time.