The Medieval History Journal

The subject of this essay is the so-called Gerade, a term used in medieval and early modern Saxon law to designate those objects of personal and household use that were classified as the property of women and were inherited only by descendants of the female line. On the basis of a corpus of documents from the city of Leipzig related to succession wills, inventories, records of negotiation and arbitration of conflicts the meanings and usage of the Gerade within the household economy and the broader context of late medieval and early modern urban life have been brought out. An underlying principle of the Gerade was a gendered ordering of objects and proprietary rights, one which the emergence of a modern, uniform civil law no longer held to be compatible with Enlightenment notions of universality, equality and abstract ideals.

The letters of the apostle Paul to the Corinthian community were a keystone in the edifice of Christian thought during the Middle Ages, as far as evaluating the positions of men and women went. Particularly decisive in this regard was the section of the letters in which Paul explained why women were expected to wear the veil in church while men had to keep their heads uncovered. The history of the reception of this section of the Corinthian letters has till now not been traced. This history was an asymmetrical one: it hinged mainly on the references to women, occasionally on those to members of the clergy, but rarely did men of the laity figure in the discussion.

The cod-piece, an article of male fashion during the Renaissance, has been interpreted by scholarship in divergent ways. This article assesses these interpretations against the yardstick of contemporary sources, both textual and pictorial. The apparently paradoxical situation, wherein a number of voices during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries condemned the cod-piece as being a lewd object, while at the same time numerous contemporary portraits that represented their subjects with prominent cod-pieces were in no way perceived as offensive, can only be explained by moving away from the simplistic and unequivocal meanings that have till now been ascribed to this piece of men's clothing. The article argues for a closer contextual reading of the object whose multilayered significations are embedded within the alterity of another epoch. Finally, it raises the question as to whether this paradox could be a useful point of entry to assessing notions of shame and modesty during the Renaissance.

Few objects in pre-modern Arab Culture have generated stronger expressions of veneration than the book, sacred and profane. From the idea of the Book, the immaterial yet physical presence of the Qur'an, to its presence for the book culture—of commentary, of traditions and encyclopedias— and of Islamic universities and private libraries, the book played a significant role in the transmission and dissemination of knowledge. As an object in daily life it triggered a code of conduct vis-à-vis its special status. If the ‘aura’ around the manuscript book delayed the introduction of the printing press to early eighteenth century, the large number of books still written and copied defies the assumption of the printed book as the chief means of dissemination of knowledge. The moveable print set a caesura in the life of the book.

The article analyses the meanings associated with the couplet ‘women and books’ in the monthly newspaper, Pomona, published by Sophie de La Roche. At the moment of transition in European history in which the ideal of an emotional and sensitive woman came to replace that of an erudite one, La Roche sought to combine these attributes in a specific understanding of female education. Female education for her was important but different from male education. Through Pomona and the responses to it, the article looks at women's reworking of a hegemonic ideal of sensitivity.

This article aims at a critical assessment of Roman jewellery and its social function. The literary sources in general take a moralising stance towards jewellery and the external appearance of women, particularly of those from families of the nobility. An analysis of legal and pictorial evidence shows that the ornamenta uxoria had more than a decorative function. They clearly indicated wealth, rank and merit. Furthermore, a change of function from republican to imperial times can be detected: during the republic, a noblewoman's ornamenta were indicative of the status of her family (gens). Later, in imperial times, women were allowed ornamenta for individual merits (motherhood being first among them).

This article traces the trajectory of a commonplace object, the wine-cup in Mughal court culture, using painting as a source. Initially associated with hedonistic pleasure alone, the wine-cup came to be represented, in allegories of ‘wine and verse’, as a locus for the realisation of ‘divine reality’, having gnostic values. The imagery of mystical intoxication further imbued the object with a political meaning, in which the cup became a ‘world in miniature’ and the wine in it, the elixir of life, thereby legitimising the Mughal monarchy in a cosmological framework of universal and immortal rulership. However, the imagery came a full circle, when in the course of the eighteenth century, from its association with male rulership, it came to be exclusively associated with female eroticism and pure hedonism.

Alcohol appeared in several varieties in South Asia during the seventeenth century. This object lived different lives in that it was produced locally as well as brought from Europe, Africa and the Middle-east Asia, was exchanged in several networks within the subcontinent and consumed by a diversity of people. Alcohol was at once the agent of social interaction, and an object of exchange. It was perceived as being central to the constitution of authority. Hierarchies of class, caste, gender and community both participated and came to be represented around the object. In discourses on the body and health, alcohol became the metaphor for completely opposite qualities—birth and death, health and disease. Embedded in processes and representations of great diversity, alcohol can be considered as not just mute but as integral to the dynamics of pre-colonial India.

Among the Sunuwar, a tribal group of East Nepal, bamboo is omnipresent both as wild and cultivated plant as well as in material culture. The article tries to show that many aspects of human and social life, including gender, are potentially inscribed in the bamboo plant and are realised in bamboo objects. Culturally vitalised bamboo objects are the ideal medium for intercourse with ancestors, a practice essential for Sunuwar people to stabilise, restore and improve identity and conformity, prestige and authority as well as physical well-being. An important premise for the interpretation of bamboo objects as living is that the Sunuwar economy is mainly a gift economy. To understand how gender can be attributed to bamboo objects, the author assumes the existence of a third gender often ascribed to shamans and saints.

The numerous parallels that can be observed within a process of gendering objects in West African cultures prompt the question of the extent to which a universal character can be ascribed to anthropomorphic symbols. This article addresses this question through examining the significance of such symbolism in the context of neighbouring ethnic groups settled in the Inner Niger basin. It argues that only through an ethnological approach that uses contextual analysis can differences that exist among groups which otherwise possess closely related forms of socio-religious organisation be adequately explained. Such a frame of enquiry would also address the issue of technological transfers and cultural changes within anthropomorphic representations, as well as their ultimate disappearance, also a product of historical processes.